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It really was a bad week, wasn’t it? Donald Trump dominated the news cycle the way a Harlem Globetrotters squad dominates a basketball court: hidden ball tricks, trash-talking, and ladder-under-the-basket jams. 

It’s a bit hard to tell, from the inundated zone, whether it was just a matter of quantity and degree or whether a dreaded corner has at last been turned.

First, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, we had rally-grade bragging, personal grievances, threatening, and trash-talking — including the immortal “I hate my opponents” riff — from the Greatest (Eulogizer) Of All Time. 

Then it was on to the “Just Tough It Out” press conference, spewing dangerously idiotic medical advice (without a license), confusing correlation with causality, “solving” the nonexistent autism “epidemic,” and scaring the shit out of millions of women who had been led to believe, by decades of serious scientific research, that Tylenol was safe.

Next, Trump graced the UN with a speech that made Muammar Gaddafi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rants of yore sound positively hinged, and made more than one stomach-clutching diplomat in attendance ask, “Where is Khrushchev when we need him? Someone please start banging your shoe!” 

I mean, the high points were climate change is a hoax, clean energy is a scam, the UN is useless, I deserve seven Nobel Prizes, all your countries are going to hell, and this edifice wouldn’t be the broken down old rattletrap that it is if you all had accepted the bid of “Donald J. Trump” to renovate it a few decades ago. 

To get all that (and so much more) in, the Leader of the Free World — sans teleprompter and still huffing and puffing from his one-flight walk up the “broken” escalator inadvertently safety-stopped by his own videographer — had to exceed his allotted 15 minutes by about 45 minutes (or 15 games of Wordle played simultaneously, by all those in attendance, in 120 languages). 

Which is like those Globetrotters ignoring the buzzer and continuing to double-dribble up and down the court while the eternally winless Washington Generals are showered, dressed, and out getting a bite. Sorry, I got carried away — but it really was the WOAT, a new low in international undiplomacy and national embarrassment.

And, amazingly enough, it was also the week our president ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to get a move on prosecuting his critics and opponents, and in which Bondi’s(?) DOJ snapped right to it, indicting former FBI Director James Comey for something or other. 

And, hard as this is to fathom, the Comey indictment might well be construed as cover for something even worse: Trump’s same-day executive order clearing the way for “domestic terrorists” — from philanthropist George Soros and the League of Women Voters to WhoWhatWhy and me and, well, who knows, maybe you — to be hit with the “full force” of the federal government for crossing some imaginary Sharpie-drawn line in their opposition to or criticism of Trump.

As long as we’re talking about “full force,” in breaking news, Trump is sending his troops into “war ravaged” Portland (Oregon) — troops explicitly authorized to use “full force.” And incidentally, in case anyone was wondering, “full force” includes “deadly force” — or, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth likes to call it, “lethality.”

Against whom, for what reason, seems hardly to matter; Portland, another “Democrat” city, is simply next on Trump’s list of America’s enemies.

It’s astounding how much damage you can cram into one week if you just keep at it and are an evil engine stuck in fifth gear.

Meanwhile, Hegseth has, in a disquieting move that has given rise to all manner of nervous speculation, ordered the nation’s generals and admirals (along with their staffs) to convene in one room this coming week in Quantico, VA, where Hegseth — having achieved the rank of major in the Army National Guard — will presumably impart to our military’s top brass pearls of wisdom on soldiering, or “warrior ethos” (this being the best-case scenario).

It’s astounding how much damage you can cram into one week if you just keep at it and are an evil engine stuck in fifth gear. And still have time to unveil that gleaming Bidenless Presidential Walk of Fame, to show the world that no second-grader can hope to outdo you when it comes to cracking tasteless jokes.

It truly is too much to take in. But that’s not really what I want to talk about today. 

When you’re the Washington Generals playing the Globetrotters, you learn to savor and celebrate every single basket. And this week we, the Generals, sank a Rainbow Three from midcourt, while being fouled by all five (or maybe six) Globetrotters at the same time. As legendary broadcaster Marv Albert would call it: “Yes! And it counts!”

What I’m referring to here is, of course, ABC/Disney’s restoration of Jimmy Kimmel to his late-night slot. 

Defiance with Class

Kimmel returned, to record ratings, with a monologue that was serious and funny, touching, pointed, and pungent in just the right proportions — a manifestly heartfelt TV moment, welcomed by more than 6 million ABC viewers, excluding those in the Sinclair and Nexstar entertainment deserts, who had to catch it on YouTube (Kimmel’s return show has racked up 22 million YouTube views). 

It is not Kimmel’s good fortune or consummate class I’m celebrating today, but rather the myriad individual acts of defiant line-drawing that enabled us to witness it, that enabled his temporarily censored voice to resume freely speaking.

It seems the poobahs at right-wing Sinclair and merger-bound Nexstar were duly impressed (by the audience numbers if not the sentiments expressed), as their Kimmel bans both went poof three days after ABC’s.

But it is not Kimmel’s good fortune or consummate class I’m celebrating today, but rather the myriad individual acts of defiant line-drawing that enabled us to witness it, that enabled his temporarily censored voice to resume freely speaking.

As readers who have followed my writing here at WhoWhatWhy may recall, I have on several occasions made the case for mass economic action in the face of the power grabs and lawless depredations of Trump and his regime.

Specifically, I have argued that mass demonstrations — while useful to remind each other that we are not alone and have the power of numbers — risk playing into Trump’s waiting hands by providing a physical target for his forces and potentially the provocation or pretext he needs to take his crackdowns to the next level. 

I have dubbed this feedback cycle the “dictator’s doom loop,” and shown how it is likely to lead to violent conflict, martial law, and ultimately Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act, as his will to unlimited power meets increasingly determined resistance.

Related: The Dictator’s Doom Loop Revisited: Trump Won’t Go Gentle

By themselves, moreover, even very massive protests — for all that they demonstrate the regime’s unpopularity — achieve little of practical import. 

We’ve seen how “No Kings Day” came and went, while Trump continued on his merry way. The next No Kings Day, scheduled in three weeks on October 18, will likely be even bigger, angrier. 

I will participate, but I’m not expecting it to alter Trump’s course — except, if violence should erupt, to accelerate his progress toward dictatorship.

Defiance with Clout

The instant, bottom-up, grassroots boycott of ABC/Disney, on the other hand, got quick results. 

The switchboards lit up; the cancellations of subscriptions to Disney products like Hulu poured in; advertisers were put on notice; Disney stock began dropping fast. The corporate poobahs took notice. 

Suddenly, currying favor with Trump by suspending Kimmel wasn’t a freebie, but came with a multibillion-dollar price tag. Maybe, thought the poobahs, our quick cave to Trump was a mistake?

The network suspension, initially characterized as “indefinite,” lasted less than a week. Nexstar and Sinclair, which had in effect instigated the suspension by telling ABC that their 60+ local affiliates would stop airing Kimmel’s show, also felt the heat — from both their local viewers and, importantly, from many others who threatened to boycott their advertisers — and quickly followed suit in restoring Kimmel.

Kimmel won. The First Amendment won. Americans who had had enough of Trump’s divisive trolling and bullying won. 

Trump can’t sic his goons or troops on Hulu watchers who cancel their subscriptions.

It was a moment — not unlike that famous scene in the 1983 film A Christmas Story where Ralphie finally unloads on his tormentor Scut Farkus — to get out of your seat and cheer. (Or perhaps cry, because this is not Hollywood and our script is and will be much grimmer.)

But, unlike in that rousing scene, crucially, no punches were thrown and no blood was shed. 

Trump can’t sic his goons or troops on Hulu watchers who cancel their subscriptions. Nor on consumers who stop, or slow down, their consuming. Nor on workers who stop, or slow down, their working. Nor on taxpayers who stop, or slow down, their tax paying.

The individual sacrifice entailed in participation grows from minimal for consumer actions (especially those involving luxury goods or entertainment) to substantial for a mass tax revolt, but in all cases falls short of the mortal risks involved in physical confrontation with fully authorized armed forces.

These are immensely powerful collective weapons, as shown by the Kimmel affair. They can sweep the legs out from under giants, both corporate and governmental/tyrannical, while offering no ready target for Trump’s “full force” retaliation.

So take some heart. Remember the Kimmel! Let No Kings Day and future demonstrations be a great show of numbers and of solidarity, but remember where our true power lies. 

Ironically, in an era of corporate greed and dominance — the very apotheosis of consumer capitalism — our power lies in money. Our income, to spend or not to spend; our labor, to work or not to work; our taxes, to pay or not to pay.

Be prepared, as Trump’s war on us and on America intensifies, to eschew the violence he so clearly wants and needs, and, instead, to find and use these bloodless, collective weapons. 

We put Kimmel back on the air. We can do so much more. We can put our democracy back on its feet and America back on its Constitution.