A lot of your anxiety, Ben, is related to the fact that the question is what can you do, not what are you supposed to do. For God? For Country? For your clique? For randos on Reddit? What audience are you serving here? Because "supposed to" speaks to an authority or audience whose expectations you are attempting to meet. Who, exactly, is judging you here?

From my perspective, you are a medically-compromised young man without the temperament for public office or the resources to affect policy. You're supposed to do fuckall, dude. You're supposed to breathe deeply, count to ten and recite the Serenity Prayer. I'm not going to tell you to like it but I am going to tell you that railing against your own helplessness prolly ain't great for your blood pressure. I would imagine it makes you harder to live with, too.

I can tell you what a buddy did. He flew out to protest the inauguration. Sent lotsa photos. Plenty of pissed off people in the streets, marching around with witty signs. I hope it made him feel better; nobody doing the shit we don't like gives the first fuck, though. We all know this entire movement is fueled by liberal tears. They moved the ceremony indoors so that nobody could gauge crowd sizes; they all know they aren't popular. My buddy? He had him a week-long vacation ostensibly to express his rights as a citizen. He also went to the Smithsonian, as one does. I think it helped him. I don't think it moved the needle, though.

I can tell you what I did. I re-upped my ACLU membership at twice the price and reported every fucking textbeggar who asked me for more money. I did this shit with Kerry; we did exactly what you fuckers asked and you absolutely ate shit and now you can leave me alone. You conclusively verified that there is no link between my money and your ability to perform so go fucking starve, dipshits.

Yeah, this isn't the question you're asking, not really. I get that. I figured I'd start with the question that would do you more good, and then move on to your actual question, which is "what can be done." And it depends.

Sucks, but there it is.

Ross Douthat said one competent thing in his entire life, and that is that government is far more norm than law and that Trump gives no fux about norms. In IT terms, what you're seeing is called "pentesting." Part of that pentesting is "what can we do" and part of it is "how hard is it." Elon Musk sent out a "quit and we'll give you lots of money" email to see if anybody quits; that's a low-cost, high-reward pentest. Actually laying people off? Actually violating due process? That's much higher-cost, lower-reward because the goal isn't to actually change anything, it's to own the libs and get praise from the base.

Samantha Bee referred to Elon Musk as "the world's first Billionaire edgelord" and that's the man in a nutshell. I don't know about you but if I owned a car company more valuable than all others combined and had basically become the predominant vendor of space launch I'd maybe focus on the important shit. I wouldn't be posting on Twitter 70 times a day. But that's where he gets the juice. "Let that sink in."

Trump? Trump definitely wanted Musk to run rampant over the weekend (no idea if he was even consulted) because he probably had some warnings that the markets wouldn't respond well to tariffs.

I honestly think he cares more about crypto taking it in the nuts harder than FTX than he does about the Dow; crypto are his peeps and any shitcoin with "trump" attached to it ate unholy shit (DOGE gave up nearly all of its gains since the election). Right now? Right now Trump looks like Mexico's bitch because within an hour of the market opening, Sheinbaum said "yeah he's pushing off our tariffs for a month" which means there won't be any. Even a couple Democrats got in some hits; Chris Murphy pointing out that Trump, who ran on lowering groceries, was raising the costs of avocados and Corona just in time for the Super Bowl is the sort of thing that's gonna land. Meanwhile Elon Musk going after Lutherans is just fuckin' weird shit, man, real 4 Seasons Total Landscaping errata.

I think you have to accept, Ockham's Razor style, that the people who are in government are in government because they benefit from being in government. Be that financially, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, the guys who show up to work every day - even Samuel Alito - know they function within a framework. The Supreme Court going "actually, the President does whatever he wants" says two things: (1) they're spineless fucktards (2) they give no shit about precedent. "Oh, but they set a precedent!" Tell me the Warren Court would have ruled the same in 2000 if Gore was ahead, I dare you. A lot of people insist that the Supreme Court has been about "Trump does what he wants" but it's not - it's about "we want a Republican government at any cost." Republican. Government. This is the sort of shit that makes even Dick Cheney find his conscience.

So it comes down to "it depends." How badly will Trump let Elon break the government? It depends. How badly will the government let Trump break the government? It depends. I will point out that Trump has mostly reversed things that can be reversed immediately and that the first thing Biden did when he came to office was reverse all of Trump's reversals.

What are we supposed to do? I'm focusing on what I can do, which is extremely limited. What can be done?

We're about to find out.