OCTOBER 26, 2026 – Periodically, when the latest outrages emanating from the White House cast another pall over beloved land, my wife goes on yet another bender. She’ll say, “What are we doing to change things?” hastily adding, “We can’t just complain among people who share our disgust over what’s going on.”
I agree . . . and disagree. On the “agree” side, the single most important thing we can and must do beyond griping is vote against the nonsense. This means voting a straight Democratic ballot—not because Democrats have all the answers or any answers, for that matter, other than simply resisting and denying Trump and if necessary, Vance, at every turn between now and January 20, 2029.
In my earlier days, I wasn’t a conforming party voter. I voted for the candidate first and foremost. Party affiliation was a secondary consideration—though as I emerged from the cocoon of conservative influences and accommodated my experiences, observations and exposure to more liberal ideas, my voting shifted increasingly to the Democratic side. But ever since Trump hijacked the Republican Party, I’ve viewed every Republican officeholder and candidate as automatically suspect: If a politician is still under Trump’s spell, still seeking his endorsement, that person us enthralled by a cult leader whose character, words and actions are universally anathema to me. In my judgment, the person’s continued affiliation with the Republican Party disqualifies the person for public office. End of analysis.
Apart from this most critical responsibility of citizenship—voting responsibly—what else can we do? To my wife’s point: there’s much we can and should (but don’t) do. Participation in “No Kings!” rallies earns a participant a cup of diluted coffee but little else. Signing up as a campaign volunteer for Democratic candidates, by either knocking on doors or staffing the phone banks, is an effective contribution to the present cause of salvaging our democracy. Have I contributed any of this sweat equity to democracy? In past years, yes. In this most critical campaign ever? No. But then again, it was my wife, not I, who asked, “What are we doing to change things?”
I’ll conveniently side-step the question by stating my disagreement with the other half of my wife’s original declaration, to-wit: “We can’t just complain among people who share our disgust overs what’s going on.”
I say, “Yes we can . . . and should.”
If we don’t; if in a state of exhaustion, bewilderment, and discouragement we become so jaded, passive and detached, we allow the torrent of outrages to become normalized, accepted and irreversible . . . then we face a case of “game over.” To prevent wholesale degradation of our democracy, we need to keep our game on. This requires constant vigilance, keeping score of the nonsense, the outrages, the cruelties, the injustices, the boldfaced lies, the rank incompetence, the massive-scale corruption, the sycophantic loyalty to a man instead of the Constitution, the politicization of every agency of the executive branch. And we need to complain out loud—continually, first to ourselves, then among people who share our revulsion
By “singing to the choir,” we bolster our determination to be done with the Republican Party in every jurisdiction. By express joinder with like-minded people, we bolster our individual courage to resist and deny Republican Party nonsense—from distasteful ads run by Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio to a Wall Street Journal report that Trump is inclined to join Tsar Putin and Emperor Xi in supporting Viktor Orbán as the next Secretary General of the UN.
Just let that sink in: Orbán as the next Secretary General of the United Nations—supported by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. My Republican ancestors would be scandalized by such a departure from Republican orthodoxy.
Yet, with every such new shock, the previous outrages running all the way back to January 6, 2021 need to be remembered. How is this best achieved? By constant appeals to the choir, to our likeminded compatriots—as many as possible. In numbers occurs courage. In courage occurs righteous power. In righteous power occurs the end to the country’s nightmare.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
