Says journalism: 

It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”

Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.

For shit’s sake. This editorial got approvingly passed around like a new baby on every social network to which I belong all weekend, and while it wasn’t the dumbest thing about my weekend it ranked right up there with a fourth glass of wine before 10 p.m.

You wanted the pivot. Everyone including the woman running against Trump told you there was no pivot, pivot wasn’t coming, pivot is a bullshit self-serving political journalist cowpie anyway, but oh, how you longed. You and yours wanted so badly for this all to be normal, and that wanting is as destructive as any of the falsehoods told by Trump himself.

His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.

In a campaign, unhinged shit is permissible, even admirably effective. As president, you just can’t do what you said you were gonna do! It’s unthinkable! A violation!

Although his policies are, for the most part, variations on classic Republican positions (many of which would have been undertaken by a President Ted Cruz or a President Marco Rubio), they become far more dangerous in the hands of this imprudent and erratic man.

Right. If he moved slowly and deliberately with regard to his racism and sexism and xenophobia we could justify it as just another point of view, the equal opposite of those filthy hippies who in similarly deranged fashion wish to teach people to read and cure diseases.

On Inauguration Day, we wrote on this page that it was not yet time to declare a state of “wholesale panic” or to call for blanket “non-cooperation” with the Trump administration. Despite plenty of dispiriting signals, that is still our view.

Signals. That’s what ICE raids on churches and two separate executive orders banning Muslim travelers are, to the LA Times. Signals. And not even very strong ones, such as would call for “blanket ‘non-cooperation’.” Maybe there are still some tax cuts for the rich at the expense of schoolteachers that the Times and Trump can get together on!

I mean, it’s not like there’s NO HOPE. America is resilient!

This nation survived Andrew Jackson […]

The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee nations, not so much.

and Richard Nixon.

Twenty-one thousand Americans in Vietnam would like a word.

It survived slavery.

To think all it took was a civil war that in about a third of the country is still going on. Man, do we bounce back or what?

It survived devastating wars. Most likely, it will survive again.

But if it is to do so, those who oppose the new president’s reckless and heartless agenda must make their voices heard. Protesters must raise their banners. Voters must turn out for elections.

THREE MILLION MORE OF US turned out for Hillary Clinton, and protestors have been “raising their banners” for months now. Don’t sit on your ass and lecture us.

Members of Congress — including and especially Republicans — must find the political courage to stand up to Trump.

The only reason I laugh is that screaming just makes the headaches worse.

State legislators must pass laws to protect their citizens and their policies from federal meddling.

State legislators can’t rename a post office without falling on their keys, but you keep hoping somebody will save you.

The United States is not a perfect country, and it has a great distance to go before it fully achieves its goals of liberty and equality. But preserving what works and defending the rules and values on which democracy depends are a shared responsibility. Everybody has a role to play in this drama.

It’s not a play, shitsacks. And correct me if I’m wrong but it ain’t the opposition to Trump has needed this kind of call to battle, so spare me AUX ARMES, AUX BARRICADES while young women, women of color, minorities everywhere have been organizing against this kind of thing for decades.

Everybody has a role to play in this drama. It’s fucking Act SIX, and you show up with your lines barely memorized and want to play Henry V? Get back in the chorus where you belong.

A.