“Very unfair to the President!” That’s the plaintive response of Mr. Trump to criticism. He considers himself a victim of mysterious “dark state” forces. These apparently at this writing consist of a combination of the Civil Service, most career government officials, all Democrats, moderate Republicans, Jeff Sessions, John McCain and Paul Ryan. Stephen Bannon has already been trundled away in the tumbril. Lately it is starting to look as though Mitch McConnell may have also made the cut. Can Jared and Ivanka be far behind? Stay tuned. All these people have in one way or another been unfair to our poor beleaguered president.

The question is, what would he consider, aside from an all-caps Tweet account, to be fair treatment? Presumably simply unquestioning loyalty to him and his family, regardless of whatever odd things he or they might say or do. Why? Because God gave him a “good brain” and he is so much smarter than the rest of us. Now that he has chosen to lead us we should just lie back (as was once recommended by certain alt-right types by way of advice to rape victims) and enjoy it. No discussion, no questions, no debate — in the words of the ubiquitous T-shirt, “Just Do It!” Life could be so easy if you would only stop thinking. If you don’t agree with that premise you are making Mr Trump a victim, and he will recruit to his army everyone else in the country who feels similarly victimized.

To me the surprising part of this situation is that instead of signaling for the men in white coats to come with the straight jacket and the gurney and take him away, according to polls a third of American voters seem so far to agree with him.

If you don’t understand how a billionaire can be a victim, think of all the other billionaires who also consider themselves unfairly treated by the taxes they are asked to pay, the restrictions on where their helicopters can land, the insistence of the FDA on knowing the ingredients in their snake oil bottles. It’s not only billionaires. Consider also the healthy people who don’t see why they should have to pay insurance premiums if they aren’t sick, the coal miners and the grazers and oil drillers who bitterly regard National Parks and Monuments as blocking their honest efforts to despoil the land in the name of shareholder profits, or the people who want the strawberries under their whipped cream untouched by rapist Mexican hands, or those who are convinced that desperate people trying to escape war or economic ruin by coming to this country to offer their help in continuing the world’s most successful experiment in government of, by, and for the people should be denied entrance. All these groups somehow believe that their footholds in the world’s wealthiest nation are tenuous. Victims, all. Winners and whiners, all. Deathly afraid of somehow being magically transformed into losers if sanity should reappear on the Washington scene.

What accounts for this irrational fear, this suspicion of nefarious plots by black and tan and red and yellow people against those with pink skin? Is any successful person transformed by some mysterious law of nature into a shivering bundle of fear that someone, somewhere, is plotting to take away his perks?

Maybe our fear is rooted in a guilty awareness that our success is mostly “legacy” success, due far more to the accident of privileged birth than to individual ability. The family farm, the family firm, the automatic admission to an Ivy League college (and Daddy’s ability to pay the bills), the internship at Uncle George’s office, the passed-down-for-three-generations job at the factory or the Post Office or on the Police Force or in the Department of Sanitation. The system protects its own. Upsetters of the applecart are not welcomed. There’s only so much room up here at the top, and there are already so many of us striving. No need for more.

And now we have found a leader who understands us. A leader who knows that venting will be the closest he will ever need to come to oratory, that blaming is far easier than thinking, that his motives are pure because our God has said so and the motives of any who disagree with him are obviously atheists or Communists or worse (Muslims or even Socialists?), and the shape of our pompadour and the length of our fingers and neckties is far more powerful on the TV than any weird ideas dreamed up by foreigners. Foreigners are just jealous of our success. But of course we won’t be really successful until we have built ourselves a wall to hide behind. You say no wall will protect us against a nuclear warhead? That Star Wars is a Reagan pulp-fiction dream? That’s what you say, but how do you know until it is given a chance to work? He had a nice smile. You are probably going to tell me next that carbon dioxide emissions are somehow going to make the ocean flood my basement and that driving my SUV to the store for another pack of cigarettes is some sort of sin against the planet. You’re picking on me just because I am successful. Get back into your hole and shut up.

But if the most successful people on the planet regard themselves as victims, what of the real victims? What of the refugees, starving and dying because of the oppression of religious fanatics like Boko Haram or diehard dictators like Assad or Kim Jong-un, those buried by mudslides on hillsides or by earthquakes that entombed their children in school buildings whose safety features had been ignored for kickbacks and payoffs? Those whose livelihoods have been taken away by inexorable technological innovation or the greed of the merger managers and hedge fund trolls? Do they, too regard themselves as victims?

The answer is of course yes. And when they look for someone to blame, it is likely to be the politicians, who are both their only possible potential saviors and the present profiteers of the status quo. Slow, painful, step-by-step reform is not going to save the little corner bodega whose landlord has just tripled the rent. The patrón will be totally, irretrievably ruined along with the futures of his dependent and possibly deportable parents and children.

So one third of Americans are united in a desire to throw them all out — the good with the bad, the babies with the bath — thinking that a new bunch can’t possibly be worse than the bunch we already have. Drain the swamp. Maybe the guy with the tangerine-colored comb-over will actually turn out to have some sensible ideas. No harm in giving him a chance. Besides, he puts on a good show. “Fire and Fury!” now there’s a slogan any gun-carrying skinhead citizen can be proud of. “Make America Number One Again!” I’m tired of being a victim.

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If that’s where we’re at, what’s the next step if you are a rational human being with a rational expectation that you were originally destined to have a chance live out your life span quietly in relative peace?

I fear the answer to that is that you need to become a loud-mouthed pain in the ass in every public context you find yourself in, from the next cocktail party to that next PTA meeting to the next sidewalk demonstration. You need to become as obnoxious as the self-anointed victims.

Scream at the KKK marchers as loudly than they scream at you. Yell at the cops when you see them beating up on some poor black boy who stole a ham sandwich. (You may get shot for it, but it’s worth a lot more in patriotism points than zapping a poor Afghan sheep herder with a drone. Dying for an ideal is still better than living as an Eichmann.) Run for your local school board and make every kid read the Constitution. Aloud. At the front of the class and later at home for his parents. Tell the job interviewer that threatening delinquent debtors by telephone is not on your list of things you can be hired to do. If your congressman is a crook, don’t give him your vote, no matter how much he promises to do. Make it a point to be out there jeering whenever Donald shows his face in public.

It ain’t a pretty prospect. But do you have a better idea?