This is what we must do for Trump to be defeated

Yesterday I heard from an old friend who urged me to slow down.

“You’re overdoing it, Bob,” he said. “A new book. Movie. Substack. Videos. You’re pushing 80, for crying out loud. What are you trying to prove?”

I told him I’m not trying to prove anything.

He warned me I was going to harm my health.

Rubbish.

I’m not going to play golf or lie in a hammock and sip mint juleps. That’s not me.

Besides, there’s no way I’ll retire as long as a raving sociopath sits in the Oval Office and destroys everything I believe in.

Trump is 10 days older than I am. If he can cause as much mayhem as he does every day, the least I can do is make a bit of good trouble every day.

We’re in a national emergency. I want you to have the facts, arguments, and analyses you need to take an active role against the Trump regime.

Your active role can be no more than sharing my posts with your friends and colleagues — so they have the facts, arguments, and analyses they need to effectively resist.

Or inviting your conservative Uncle Bob to see the film The Last Class, about my final semester of teaching my large undergraduate “Wealth & Poverty” course at UC Berkeley. Or sending him a copy of my memoir, Coming Up Short.

I want you and everyone else to know that it’s impossible to appease a tyrant like Trump — because tyrants always see appeasement as a sign of weakness and will demand even more.

That taking over American cities with federal troops for no reason threatens the very foundations of our free society.

That abducting people — off the street or from their places of work or courthouses or even their homes, without giving them any reasons or an opportunity to object — violates the basic tenets of America.

That Trump’s vision of civil rights and rejection of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is nothing more than white rights and white supremacy.

I want you to see the larger pattern here — how all these connect to Trump’s white Christian male nationalism.

But there’s more. I also want to give you the strength and reassurance to get through this nightmare without drowning in denial or despair.

In other words: I write and post every day, and have written a new book and been the subject of a movie, because the stakes are so damn high.

F––– retirement. I do all this because I believe in you. I believe in your values. In your thoughtfulness. In your determination to leave this nation and this world a better place than they were before Trump.

I believe that together we will get through this and we will prevail.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/