Just Sayin'

You have to admit, the first 66 days of Trump’s presidency have been a rodeo. I’d like to feel everything is fine, but don’t. I’m not alone.

I. Maria Ressa’s book, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator,” recounts her dogged and personally dangerous commitment to standing up for fact-based journalism in the Philippines during Duterte’s devastation of that country’s democracy (2016-22). In a February interview with NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz, the Nobel Peace Prize winner admits that what’s transpiring in the United States now is something of a déjà vu. According to Ressa, it took Trump only two months to do what took Duterte six. She refers to what she calls “the dictatorship playbook,” which, she says, has been used time and again to destroy democracies and replace them with autocracies:

Get elected

Crush systems of checks and balances

Replace them with a “broligarchy,” which Ressa defines as political patronage

Filipinos are the most online population in the world, according to Ressa. In her reporting, she learned that the population was used to test mass manipulation of information, the results exported to the United States and put to good use in Trump’s campaigns. Included in those results: If you repeat a lie a million times, it is perceived as fact. Says Ressa, “Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these, we have no shared reality… And in a system like that, only a dictatorship wins.”

II. In her March 23 column for the Los Angeles Times, Robin Abcarian states: “It’s not just Kamala Harris voters who are riled up by President Trump’s assault on our country’s institutions. So are many voters who helped put Trump back in office…” What to do?

Abcarian says, according to Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, over time nonviolent protests are far more successful than violent ones. Chenoweth’s research showed that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent civil resistance was twice as successful as violent campaigns. She also determined that no government can withstand a challenge from 3.5% of its population. That would be 11 million Americans. Abcarian feels we’re getting close. She cites “Hands Off,” a nationwide protest scheduled for Saturday, April 5. Abcarian urges that we must be willing to show up “before it’s too late (and it’s getting perilously late).”

III. “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” was a question posed by the London Daily. Here are excerpts from Nate White’s Feb. 28 response:

“Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults — he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.”

“And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff — the Queensberry rules of basic decency — and he breaks them all. He punches downwards — which a gentleman should, would, could never do — and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless — and he kicks them when they are down.”

“He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: Even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.”

IV. On Feb. 23, Jane Fonda was awarded the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. In her acceptance speech, the 87-year-old actress and activist harkened back to the first film she’d appeared in, in 1958. It was, she explained, the end of McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, which, for a decade, politically repressed and, with insufficient evidence, persecuted left-wing individuals as part of an exaggerated campaign to spread fear of Soviet espionage in the United States. And now, she warned, referring to the threat of deportations, “A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt…. Even if they’re of a different political persuasion, we need to… listen from our hearts.”

In her call to open arms, she called upon our empathy to welcome one and all in resisting what is coming at us. “We must not isolate.” Fonda urged those in attendance to recall what she termed “documentary moments” in American history that strengthened our democracy, such as the 1963 March on Washington for racial equity or the 1969 Stonewall riots in support of gay rights. She concluded with an impassioned appeal to recognize this time in history for what it is: our documentary moment, our invitation to show up. See you April 5?

This article appears in The Source Weekly March 27, 2025.