How To Talk To An Authoritarian

Think. Plan. Protect yourself. Then get the damn cheese out from under his trap and feed your kids.

We cannot afford to act submissively to Trump and help him run his administration. He is an authoritarian and for him, you are either below him or above him. He's now president. In his mind, nobody is above him. Therefore your role in the Trump psychodrama being played out it is one of office drone. You shut up and do your job, and maybe you get paid or maybe the boss lowers your hours and you no longer get benefits.

Too many people now think the Democratic party only talks about caring but doesn't actually improve people's lives. We saw that social advancement did not negate the lack of economic advancement, in fact, it inflamed it, because when the majority gets poorer, they blame the minority's social advancement instead of the elite's gaming of the system.

If liberals work with Trump, whether in reality or in appearance, they will lose a lot of women, minorities, gays, and immigrants. They will get no credit for cooperation. Republicans will accuse Democrats of obstruction whether they do it or not. Lying works.

Trump is already working with the Republicans. Is Trump the sort of person who wants to work with the complete and total losers who were rejected by the voters? Or would he give orders and expect the beta males and girls to do what he says? Would he reward them for their obedience or stiff them?

If you tell people that you are doing something wrong for their own good, they will not believe you unless they already want to. If you say that you are working with someone musing about concentration camps and planning to eliminate Medicare and Social Security, they will not think that you care.

If we refused to cooperate without gaining something tangible *in advance,* we will never get anything we want and will be destroyed in the process. The only the reason the right will keep the left around is to have someone to blame when everything goes wrong. Therefore we should demand what we want now, not later.

We had our chance during the last two primaries and liberals supported the party's choices, which included capitulation to the rich, which led to Trump.

Liberals either force Trump to capitulate or they become his bitch, because Trump isn't a deal-maker, he destroys everything he touches and sticks others with the clean-up and repairs. Letting the middle class get gutted by the rich led to Trump.

We are out of time. It's now or never. Incrementalism and working within the system doesn't work with an authoritarian. It got us here, to Trump.

ADDED: Heh. Charles P. Pierce:

If Trump hires Willard to work for him, it will be because he wants to tell people that Mitt Romney came to him begging for a job and that, He, Trump, nature's nobleman, was a big enough guy to give him one. He's going to mount Willard's head on the wall of his den, right above the Tiffany vase that holds Chris Christie's balls. By next March, he'll be sending Romney out for another bucket of KFC.