Gopnik explains how history teaches us we can never play nice with someone like Donald Trump:

The best way to be sure that 2017 is not 1934 is to act as though it were. We must learn and relearn that age’s necessary lessons: that meek submission is the most short-sighted of policies; that waiting for the other, more vulnerable group to protest first will only increase the isolation of us all. We must refuse to think that if we play nice and don’t make trouble, our group won’t be harmed.

Calm but consistent opposition shared by a broad front of committed and constitutionally-minded protesters—it’s easy to say, fiendishly hard to do, and necessary to accomplish if we are to save the beautiful music of American democracy.

Donald Trump reminds me of the "foehn" Santa Ana Winds -- distinctly persistent and malevolent. Joan Didion described them in detail in Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

...a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression."

In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn.

...Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

Donald Trump will bring the Santa Ana Winds to all of America. He represents the worst of American values, the worst of our traditions, and the crassest form of human nature. We can protest, boycott, hide under the covers or tune out the media. It really doesn't matter. But what we cannot do is accept him as our legitimate leader. His road to the Oval Office was an anomaly, a most unfortunate confluence of negative forces that most likely will never again be repeated in history. In my personal view, he's a national embarrassment.

I'm tuning him out and I hope you'll join me.