Now, the government many Americans find morally abhorrent is our own, due to the (un)election of Donald Trump. Her description of Trump is what kept me reading -- she captures his depravity in one succinct paragraph:

With the election of Donald Trump—a candidate who has lied his way into power, openly embraced racist discourse and violence, toyed with the idea of jailing his opponents, boasted of his assaults on women and his avoidance of taxes, and denigrated the traditional checks and balances of government—this question has confronted us as urgently as ever.

In attempting to answer the question, she ponders whether, since Trump is so disengaged and uninterested in the mechanics of daily governance, by compromising with him, some workers, like those in the State Department who are tasked with promoting human rights, might not be able to get some things done under the radar and thereby preserve some of our Democratic values.

Perhaps Trump and his family will be too busy pillaging the country to pay attention to the national bureaucracy.

In the end, she decides not, and sticks to her previously expressed views of "no compromise" with a morally objectionable leader such as Trump.

She returns to the example of the Judenrat, and writes:

As in other ghettos, the Judenrat was ultimately given the task of compiling the lists of Jews to be “liquidated.” The Bialystok Judenrat accepted the job, and there is every indication that my great-grandfather took part in the process. The arguments in defense of producing the list, in Bialystok and elsewhere, were pragmatic: the killing was going to occur anyway; by cooperating, the Judenrat could try to reduce the number of people the Nazis were planning to kill (in Bialystok, this worked, though in the end the ghetto, like all other ghettos, was “liquidated”); by compiling the lists, the Judenrat could prevent random killing, instead choosing to sacrifice those who were already near death from disease or starvation. These were strong arguments. There is always a strong argument.

But what if the Jews had refused to cooperate? Was [Hannah] Arendt right that fewer people might have died? Was Trunk right that Judenrat activities had no effect on the final outcome? Or would mass murder of Jews have occurred earlier if Jews had refused to manage their own existence in the ghetto? We cannot know for certain, any more than we can know now whether a scorched-earth strategy or the strategy of compromise would more effectively mitigate Trumpism. But that does not mean that a choice—the right choice—is impossible. It only means that we are asking the wrong question.

She then gets into a discussion of realists vs. idealists which is mostly above my head, but I understood this:

Realism is predicated on predictability: it assumes that parties have clear interests and will act rationally to achieve them. This is rarely true anywhere, and it is patently untrue in the case of Trump. He ran a campaign unlike any in memory, has won an election unlike any in memory, and has so far appointed a cabinet unlike any in memory: racists, Islamophobes, and homophobes, many of whom have no experience relevant to their new jobs. Patterns of behavior characteristic of former presidents will not help predict Trump’s behavior. As for his own patterns, inconsistency and unreliability are among his chief characteristics.

She says it's impossible to tell if there is a strategy that will defeat Trumpism.

Perhaps, if hundreds of federal employees stand firm and do their jobs exactly as they should be done in the face of breaking norms—and assuming they don’t get fired—Trumpism will fail. Or perhaps it will fail if they refuse to do their jobs. We cannot know.

But she says we do know one thing:right from wrong.

We cannot know what political strategy, if any, can be effective in containing, rather than abetting, the threat that a Trump administration now poses to some of our most fundamental democratic principles. But we can know what is right. What separates Americans in 2016 from Europeans in the 1940s and 1950s is a little bit of historical time but a whole lot of historical knowledge. We know what my great-grandfather did not know: that the people who wanted to keep the people fed ended up compiling lists of their neighbors to be killed. That they had a rationale for doing so. And also, that one of the greatest thinkers of their age judged their actions as harshly as they could be judged.

I don't agree with her labeling Trump's appointees as "racists, Islamophobes, and homophobes" as a shortcut way of describing their long-held views, because I oppose name-calling. Since she's in Moscow, she has little to fear from a libel suit. I would describe his appointees as holding and promoting unacceptable views and policies on race, Islam and Muslims, and gay/transgender rights, (and added a few more, like their views and policies on immigrants and women's rights with respect to their own bodies, Medicare and Social Security, criminal justice and so on.)

I think her point is not that Trump is creating a Nazi regime in America (so please don't accuse it of that in comments, name-calling and potentially libelous comments are not allowed here and will be deleted) but that cooperating with Trump is such a slippery a slope, it's a path better avoided.