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There are three ways for a level-headed citizen to respond to decisions by the nascent Trump administration. These should be applicable if you are a mortified liberal or even a “Yeah we voted for him, let’s see what he does” Trump supporter.

First: The “Smart Move” Alert. This label is reserved for outcomes that will be good and also will work. You might say, “Mitt Romney as Secretary of State, he’s a sane, reasonable institutionalist–smart move.” Or even, “Mattis as Secretary of Defense, he’s a reasonable hawk with a lot of institutional and military knowledge, who has already talked Trump out of torturing people–smart move.”

Second: The “Red Alert” Alert. This is for outcomes that will be bad and also will work. If you care about criminal justice reform, police departments’ excessive use of force against innocents, or drug laws, then Jeff Sessions running the Justice Department is a Red Alert. If you care about health for the uninsured and the stability of the insurance markets, then Tom Price as the Health and Human Services Secretary is a Red Alert. If you care about corporate Wall Street power over the average person, then Trump’s Treasury appointees are Red Alerts.

Depending on your politics, Red Alerts and Smart Moves are probably reversed.

The third approach, however, should be the same for all of us: I call it the “This ain’t gonna work” Alert. This is for sheer incompetence and mismanagement that, while they might muck up any intentional bad or good policies from being enacted, will open the flood gates to many unintended bad things. Hiring a National Security Advisor who was fired for creating a climate of back-biting in his department, and who requested that no one else be hired who outranked him–not gonna work. Hiring the guy who owns the Cubs to help run the Commerce Department because he won the World Series–not gonna work. An economic policy based on promising companies millions or billions of tax-payer money to keep hundreds of jobs in the US–not gonna work. A President who maintains his business ties with his properties–emblazoned with his name–all over the world… A President who doesn’t know that he can’t just accept a phone call from any country that rings Trump Tower to sing his praises, like Taiwan…

I am trying to be optimistic. I really am. But I can’t help but think that the Trump Administration just ain’t gonna work.

It’s been a tough week, but it is time to get back in the saddle.

Some principles as we go forward

1 of 3. Self-care: Plan time with family; plan a vacation; start up that hobby you’ve been putting off.

We’re looking forward to the holidays with family. I’ve already decorated a Christmas tree,  and bought a quart of egg nog, which I usually stave off till after Thanksgiving. We got airline tickets to Columbia and the British Virgin Islands. I’m doing a Roman study: reading a biography of Caesar, Cicero’s In Defense of the Republic, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall… I’m blogging about each episode of Star Trek The Original Series. This will keep me preoccupied well beyond Inauguration Day.

2 of 3. Plan your information pathways: buy a newspaper subscription

Considering the high stakes of the next few years, I’m feeling the need to keep even more informed than usual–and from diverse sources. In addition to my subscriptions to The New York Times and The Atlantic, I’m adding the following: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and National Review. I’ll be seeking out prominent black and Hispanic/Latino bloggers/writers as well. Any suggestions? It will do us all good to read serious reporting on the economy. And since conservatives are in charge of the government, and there is an open question as to how conservative their new leader actually is, it will be important to keep tabs on how the conservative intelligentsia and policy wonks respond to Trump’s presidency.

As for social media, it’s a question of how much you want to engage, and to what end. I don’t know… Don’t go down any rabbit holes that will waste your time or take your eye off the ball.

3 of 4. Keep an open mind–Talk to a Trump voter.

National elections in a country as big and diverse as ours are mysterious things. It’s almost as if a collective spirit sweeps across the land every four years. There can never be a simple, ironclad explanation for why the country picks one person over another. There’s a matrix of reasons all valid. If you really believe in democracy and the genius of our Constitutional pluralism, then you have to accept that the collective will of the voters always contains wisdom, that there are important lessons about the country that their decision is charging us to learn. If you believe that election outcomes contain wisdom only when your side wins, that’s your prerogative. But it’s better to hear the other side out, just as you’d hope they’d hear you out. This seesaw from one ideological view to the other is going to continue for the rest of our lives–as it was designed–so we better get used to it.

Talk to a Trump voter. They’re everywhere! Even in New York and New Jersey. Trump won 85% of the country’s counties! Don’t debate, don’t interrogate, but interview them. Hear them out. They are not raving, ignorant, racist Troglodytes. I bet whomever you would find would be a normal person that does not harbor extreme views. They might just put you a little more at ease.

4 of 4. Keep your powder dry.

There will be–already is–a firehose of information to react to, to protest, to celebrate. Some things might make you angry or happy, and the compulsion to lash out or taunt will be strong. Hold your fire. We will not know what anything really means, or have a clear idea of what is about to happen until after Inauguration.

If you oppose Trump, protesting and raving now, when there is no specific issue to galvanize the country around, will look too much like sour grapes to those in the middle. We need to be careful about being painted as costal, liberal elites out of touch with the rest of the country, because we will be seen as unreasonable when we have real cause to fight next year. There is still the possibility that Trump will not be as bad as we fear. Hold.

If you support Trump, he and the media narrative is going to press you into service to respond to every attack and perceived slight. Whenever a person of color gets mouthy with the administration or newspapers report on Trump’s business conflicts of interest, be wary of lending your name to Trump’s defense. You don’t know how this is going to turn out either. Hold, hold.

Let’s not fight now over nonsense and innuendo, but instead wait until there is an actual bill or executive order and then try to persuade everybody (Democrat and Republican) to get behind it or fight against it.

It is in your political interest to vote for Hillary, and here’s why. During a Hillary presidency you can participate in activism that pushes her policies more to the left, and if she is still not to your liking in 2020 you can always primary her. You and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders will be on the march. It will be fun, and the most influential the left has been in many years.

If Trump wins, your issues and your passions will be overwhelmed and diluted by the tidal wave of opposition to Trump that will rise up from every group in the country. No one–not even you–will have time to worry about income inequality, college debt and health care when all our activism is focused on Trump’s walls, deportation forces and wars with whoever snubs him. If any one issue becomes prominent in activism it will be minority rights. Black Lives Matter will become the big player, and a Latino Lives Matter will form. And in 2020, the Democrat Party (its voters and its party apparatus mind you) will entertain a leftist candidate like Sanders. They will pick the most moderate, milquetoast, unoffensive candidate available. Because by then they will be facing a deeply unpopular Trump, and will pick the safest path to defeating him. Many in your own ranks will agree with this too. Passions on the left will be muted like they were in 2008. After Trump, there will be little appetite to fight with Democrats. And the leftist holdouts will walk into the voting booth and vote for Jill Stein, and no one will notice or care. The energy the left has generated in 2016 will not be replicated until 2024 or 2028. It does not have to be this way! Vote Hillary!

You should vote for Hillary, and here’s why. A single Trump term will coat your principles in so much horse shit that Republicans will be out of power until the 2030s at the earliest. I know, I know… that’s liberal claptrap, and Trump will make America great again. But you admit that he will be a chaos President. It’s what you are hoping for. Disrupt the system! But you know in your heart–conservative that you are–that disruption is no way to progress. You know that there are scores of ways for the federal government to make even small mistakes that cause grave damage to the country and the world. You know that order is a delicate thing that is maintained by steady, humble leadership. You know that one man in government cannot solve complex social problems, and if he tries, power corrupts and innovation is stifled. More than this, you should know what happened the last time a Republican president flamed out (see Iraq, and 2008 Great Recession). We got eight years of a Democrat in the White House. If Trump wins next week, you know–you know–he will flame out more spectacularly than George W. Bush ever could have. And then your ideas will be discredited. You will get eight or more years of a liberal president–maybe he will even be black, or, Heaven forbid, Latino; he will not be a woman since Democrats will have learned that lesson. Your cries about free markets, and business inovation, and job creation will be met from the vast majority of voters with a shrug. “But you were with Trump,” they will say, if they bother to say anything to you at all. Don’t do this to yourself: vote Hillary. And don’t take my word for it, here is an actual conservative: The Dangers of Donald Trump

To my leftist friends, as you are trying to get your policy shop in order for the next four years, you should seek out ideas in the ballot initiatives some states will vote on next week. Colorado has one for state-wide guaranteed universal health insurance. It is basically BernieCare for Coloradans.

I have a lot of respect for the leftists in Colorado because they are pushing a bold but detailed idea while also being honest about how it will be paid for: “a 10 percent payroll tax would be implemented, with employers paying 6.67 percent and employees paying 3.33 percent. Other non-payroll income would also be taxed at 10 percent.” If the left wants to ever be empowered to enact actual laws from their policy ideas, they need level with the voters about the costs and the benefits.

We are seeing why some prominent leaders on the left have been afraid to do just that. This ballot initiative has only 30% support in Colorado, and is not likely to pass. More than half of Democratic voters in Colorado oppose it. Food for thought as we wonder if the Democratic Party’s problem is that they nominated someone too conservative.

Colorado’s Amendment 69

It’s high time I start putting my thoughts down for posterity, in case I ever want to write an essay or (heaven forbid) a book about this crazy year. (On this point, there are two possibilities that the intelligentsia is lobbing around even now. One is that, yes, this is a true watershed moment that will be discussed and debated for decades because it will have  vast impact on politics and society for the rest of our lives. The other is that Trump is an a-historical anomaly, and once he loses on November 8 our politics will return to normal–this seems wishful thinking, mostly on the part of the GOP.)

So, the debate. I was predicting that Trump would have a full meltdown on national TV. All weekend since the Billy Bush tape was released an unprecedented number of Republican officeholders unendorsed him and called for him to resign. His running mate refused to publicly vouch for him. Many mainstream newscasters are accusing him of bragging about having sexually assaulted women. His loss of the first debate switched the polls from a dead heat to Hillary leading by 5-8 points. And an hour before the debate began, Trump invited the press into a room for a photo-op of his debate prep. This would have been a classic Trump thumb-in-the-eye since the media has been reporting on his advisors’ inability to even trick him into doing debate prep, but in fact is was a classic Trump fake out, followed by… well, I don’t know what to call it: when the press got in the room they saw Trump flanked by four women who accuse Bill Clinton of abusing or raping them. So, yes, I expected him become fully unhinged on stage.

And for the first half hour, he nearly did. Anderson Cooper asked if he understood that he was bragging about sexual assault. Trump said Cooper did not understand what locker room talk was, and then pivoted to the four Bill accusers, who were sitting in the audience on his invitation. He started to get testy about the 2-minute clock and being cut off. He complained the moderators were tag teaming with Hillary against him: “It’s three against one.” He sounded petulant and desperate. I looked to my viewing companions and predicted that he would not be able to last the full 90 minutes, that he would storm off the stage.

But in the last 60 minutes, he became steadier. He calmed down. He was able to convey the big themes of his campaign: the establishment has failed the country; protect the borders; bring back jobs, especially in the energy sector; extreme vetting of immigrants; a rigged tax system.

What he was not able to do was convey the impression that he has specific ideas and policies to implement these themes. His lack of knowledge about the issues has never been in such stark display. Or perhaps his ignorance has been on display all along, it’s just that by this second 90-minute debate it is impossible to pretend that he might actually have concrete ideas about how to do what he says he will do.

Just two examples that stuck out: taxes and Aleppo. An audience member asked what specific tax policy the candidates have that would help with income inequality. Trump’s only answer was that he would do away with carried interest, but he failed to explain what carried interest is or how that would help. Instead he quickly pivoted to attacking Hillary for not doing more when she was a senator. Martha Raddatz asked Trump what would happen if Aleppo fell. It is a very sharp question that forces him to respond with whatever granular knowledge he has of the Syrian civil war. He tried not to answer, but when she pressed him he responded wrongly that “Aleppo has already fallen” before pivoting to an attack on Hillary for the rise of ISIS.

Aleppo has not fallen. And I would expect that a man who claims to know the rigged tax system better than anybody should be able to explain in concrete terms what he would do to fix it.

In these and many other questions, he wiggled out of giving specifics and returned to his big themes and attacks on Hillary. The question I have is how many Americans think this is sufficient? Because it is clear even to his supporters that he does not know much. He will have smart advisors and Congress for that, they argue. What they seem to be voting for is his instincts, his ideology, his themes, and they are voting against the “more of the same” establishment. This is not an unusual crouch for voters to be in: George W. Bush benefited from the same. But Bush campaigned on much more specific policy ideas than Trump is, and he was constrained by the normal rules of politics. And Bush lost the popular vote.

So how did Trump do? He won by not have the psychotic break I was predicting. He found his voice, and it is now abundantly clear to everyone what kind of President he will be. We can have no more Trump illusions. You either want a low-information President who will doggedly fall back on his hollow themes, and savage his opponents, or you don’t. Next week we will have a good sense of how many voters (who have been fleeing him for two weeks) the real Trump has persuaded to stick with him.

This morning, listening to WQXR New York’s classical music radio, the only part of the debate mentioned on the hourly newscast is that Trump promised to persecute and jail Hillary if he becomes President. Of all the crazy things said and done last night, it is probably correct that this is the most newsworthy. The second story was that at 5:59 AM Trump Tajma Hall in Atlantic City closed its doors for good.Three thousand workers lost their jobs.

Yes Omar Mateen was Muslim. Yes he was a terrorist who was radicalized. But was he part of an ideological cause that he was acting in support of by committing this massacre in Orlando? If he was indeed a “lone wolf” as Clinton and other law enforcement officers have called him, did he have a specific wolf pack that he had pledged allegiance to but was acting independently from? So far, evidence suggests that he was not. The evidence that does exist points only to confusion and mystery. Therefore the only official, historical explanation that his heinous act will receive will be the one give to it. We need to be very careful in crafting that explanation.

When I started teaching in 2005, my school had a few Bloods and maybe a Crip or two in the student body. The school and neighborhood had just come out of a negotiated gang truce that got the two sides to agree not to operate near the school. There was not that many actual gang members in the school, but many more students flashed gang signs, scrawled gang logos on their notebooks, and wore the colors. They were not in the gang, but they used the label as a means of bestowing authority on themselves. If some of these pseudo-factions of fifteen-year-old wannabe gang members started a brawl in the cafeteria, the last thing school administrators would want to do is declare that the Bloods and the Crips had a gang war during second lunch. First, it would be inaccurate. Second, it would make whoever started that fight appear more powerful than they actually were, which would entice other students to follow them or emulate them. It would bestow legitimacy to criminals and thugs who are hungry for it, and who need it to to fuel their propaganda.

Mateen was no more a member of ISIS than my students were members of a gang. Like them, he was a poser. And one who hadn’t even done his homework, apparently claiming allegiance at one point to Hezbollah, at another point to Al Qaeda, and finally to ISIS–all of which are mortal enemies of the other. Like most of his fellow Americans, he probably was not even that clear on the difference between Shia and Sunni. To grant him a posthumous battlefield commission to ISIS foot soldier is a) misleading and inaccurate, b) aiding and abetting actual ISIS foot soldiers and their followers, and c) more than that sick fucker deserves, almost like granting his last request.

It is also unclear how much religious ideology motivated Mateen to commit these murders. It seems just as likely he was driven by an unhinged, violent personality, or by extreme homophobia, or by the bipolar disorder his estranged wife claims he had, than by radical Islamic beliefs.

According to a survivor, Patience Carter, who was in the bathroom of Pulse with Mateen, he told them that he was doing this to stop the bombing of his country, and that he would not kill the remaining African Americans because they had suffered enough in their own history. What country was he talking about, since he was from Florida? The supposed ISIS Caliphate? Afghanistan, where is parents are from, but ISIS is not? And why did he think killing predominantly hispanic-American gays–and some African-Americans, until he decided not to–was the best way to stop said bombing?

There will not be answers to these questions. So why should authorities categorically label his motivations–which in this case are probably unknowable–as one thing or the other? To drape his body in the shroud of radical Islam elevates his act to something that it may not have been; gives a battlefield ‘win’ to actual terrorists even though the massacre had nothing to do with their fight; and throws free propaganda into the social media cesspool from which unhinged people like Mateen draw so much rage and hate.

This massacre, like most  recent massacres–be they “mass shootings” or “radical Islamic terrorism” or “extreme Christian Nationalist terrorism”–does not have a simple, clear explanation. Even when more facts become known, the crime is not likely to make much sense, mainly because the killer did not make much sense. It is understandable to want to grab for an explanation that will help make sense of it, but sometimes that comfort is illusory.

People who argue that we should more widely apply the label of radical Islam to people and groups presumably believe that doing so will help us fight terrorism more effectively. Without getting into that general debate, what would labeling Mateen an Islamic fundamentalist help us accomplish? Would it adjust our potential-terrorist profile to catch future versions of him? He was already profiled and investigated extensively by the FBI. If it turns out that law enforcement missed something because they were not looking for some special Islamic fundamentalist sign–whatever those could be–then it may make sense to use the term more. We’ll see.

Whatever the benefits, they need to be balanced against costs of doing so: elevating incoherent ravings to a coherent ideology; helping to make him a martyr to a cause that he was not actually part of; giving credence to opportunistic terrorists’ claims of credit for the attack; providing a powerful propaganda tool to terrorists. Those costs do not even broach the wider costs of taking the argument one step further, as Trump has done: making not just other terrorists complicit in this attack–which they are not–but all Muslims; driving a wedge between local American Muslim communities and law enforcement; fueling the false equivalency between the West and the “civilization” of the terrorists. What would doing that accomplish that would actually be effective against the real terrorist threat?

Over at The New York Times, my favorite conservative columnist is beginning to build the case that the Republican Party should prepare to steal the nomination from Trump if he goes into the convention with the most delegates.

He writes that one of the roadblocks to this unprecedented move will be “from the officially neutral press, where there will be much brow-furrowed concern over the perils of party resistance to Trump’s progress, the ‘bad optics’ of denying him the nomination if he arrives at the convention with the most delegates, the backlash sure to come if his uprising is somehow, well, trumped by the party apparatus.”

He does not mention that the Democrats will no doubt make much hay out of the fact that the replacement nominee–be it Cruz, or Paul Ryan, or Mitt Romney–is not the legitimate heir of the party’s nomination process. It’s easy to imagine Democrats going so far as to argue that they should *almost* win the presidency by default.

The principled response is for the Democrats to say openly: Trump is so extreme, we officially support the GOP’s maneuvers to remove him, like a boil, from the body politic.

The thing is, from the standpoint of a political tactic, Democrats don’t need say anything more. It will be painfully obvious that the GOP will not enter the November election as a united front. The Cruz/Ryan/Romney nominee won’t need to hear from Democrats that he is illegitimate; he will hear it from Trump himself, who will hardly crawl under a rock, but fight this out on cable TV to the bitter end like only he knows how to do. And that’s if he doesn’t run as a third party candidate.

This is going to be a hard-to-resist temptation for the Democrats. Conservative radio host Micahel Medved recently wrote: “Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.” By which he probably means: racist, sexist pig who is giving shrieking voice to the final throes of white male political and cultural dominance. Or as Thomas Friedman calls it: the #middleagewhitemalesmatter movement. For your opposing political party to nominate your own caricature of them to the highest position of their party leadership is the definition of winning. The possibility of this big win must be blinding to some Democrats, even though a Trump nomination would be bad for the country, especially for communities of color.

The Dems need to be on the right side of history, not the right side of the political argument. They need to say to the GOP: we are going to beat you fair and square in November, but until then we are united with you against all that Trump represents. Do what you have to do, and we won’t attack you for it. It would be a sign that our leaders are ready to work together, that we are ready to try to bring the country together. We’ve seen the alternative… and it cannot stand: