Stop Saying His Name

You can’t take down publicity monsters with more publicity

The Lesson That Hasn’t Been Learned

Among the many lessons the internet should have taught us by now, here’s one of the most important:

You can’t take down publicity monsters with more publicity.

Publicity monsters are like Hydras—trying to lop off a head only sprouts more heads, each one more hideous than the last.

For publicity monsters…

1. Every mention is a gift.

2. Every criticism is a tribute.

3. Every scandal is a coronation.

4. Every ounce of hate is a ton of cash.

And who’s the most massively voluminous, multitudinously snake-headed, radiatingly globe-spanning publicity Hydra terrorizing the world’s inhabitants right now: President 45-47.

He’s a supermax prison of cracked funhouse mirrors.

He’s a million-car pileup with 8 billion rubberneckers.

He’s a muddle, wrapped in a snarl, inside a bungle.

He’s a vapid vacuous void of vacantness in the universe.

He’s a bottomless enshittifying swamp of brain-slurping slop.

He’s an empty, garish, plastic Cup of Piss Christ on clearance everywhere.

He’s endless turtleheads turtleheading all the way down.

He is a vertiginously spiraling Hitchcockian Vertigo spiral.

He’s a colossal, mouth-breathing Humongous Fungus.

He’s a bloated, blubbery, babbling amoeboidal Blob.

He’s a zooming fractal Romanesco broccoli head.

President 45-47 is a lot of things.

But above all, he’s a tenacious, invasive, fast-spreading weed with an acquired resistance to traditional democratic herbicides. Spraying around more and more weed killer in the vain effort to stop the bewildering bloom only kills off everything else. The competition shrivels and dies; the mutant weed proliferates. Into every absence, his presence grows.

And what was once a lush, vibrant, fertile, life-giving pluralistic American democratic ecosystem is fast becoming a poisoned, dying monomaniacal crapland.

The only way to stop its spread is to blot out the sun that feeds it.

The Real Derangement

TDS is not real.

Our profoundly alarmed response is understandable, appropriate, spot-on, and unequivocally, urgently necessary.

The real derangement is all of us thinking that this one man—a single person on a planet teeming with 8 billion persons—is somehow doing all these thousands of things everyone’s telling us he’s doing, when in fact all he’s actually doing is yelling at people, lobbing out insults, ordering people around, watching television, accepting bribes, talking about himself unendingly, and gibbering nonstop nonsense.

It’s letting one shuffling, out-of-it, hunched-over 79-year-old blowhard browbeat, bully, bludgeon, and bulldoze an entire country into submission.

It’s tens of millions of intelligent, competent, passionate, hard-working people wasting millions upon millions of hours, and billions upon billions of dollars, during a time when we need every dollar we can get, repeating his name, amplifying his chintzy brand, implanting his bovine spongiform encephalopathic hormone into our skulls, and stoking the whole vulgar, insidious mess into a global conflagration of vanity without realizing he’s only doing what he’s doing because…the dude is seriously mentally ill.

It’s letting this loopy, loop-do-looping loophole in human psychology make us think we’re all living in the stark-raving madhouse of his sweaty delirium.

It’s thinking that he’s a pathogen, when he’s only its carrier.

It’s us giving him exactly what he wants, all day long, every day.

Consider this one set of data points:

Over the past several months, I picked five random days and counted the number of times President 45-47’s name and likeness appeared on the online homepage of the New York Times. I didn’t even click a link.

The results:

1. Day One: 15 mentions, three photos, including the large central photo at the top of the page.

2. Day Two: 18 mentions, three photos, including the large central photo at the top of the page.

3. Day Three: 20 mentions, two photos.

4. Day Four: 16 mentions, one large central photo at the top of the homepage.

5. Day Five: 26 mentions, one illustration.

And right now on the NYT homepage, as I live and breathe and type these words, there are 19 appearances of his name, one illustration of him (as, I kid you not, Julius Caesar), two photos (one of which is a giant banner of his face hanging from a building), one video on repeat with multiple clips (of him preening and ranting on the world stage), and an article-preview blurb of that propagandistic pseudo-documentary of his wife.

But wait, there’s more…

In the two videos, President 45-47’s name is verbally mentioned 6 six times; the autoplay captions translate those mentions into another 6 instances of his name appearing on the homepage (total = 25); two pictures of him appear in one video; and the other video features four clips of him speaking at the World Economic Forum.

That’s just six days snapshotted at one time in one publication among who knows how many thousands. And how many times has this single person been named and represented in the most influential, liberal-learning, all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print publication in the United States? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

And how many times is this happening every day across the planet? Billions? And how many people are hearing or seeing his name, and/or seeing one or more photos of him, and/or watching or more videos of him?

And what’s the total global production of articles, videos, photographs, interviews, commentary, conversations, prognostications, prayers, outbursts, and groveling genuflections, fealty-pledges, and kickbacks, payoffs, and payola fixated on and flowing into into the coffers and spreading corruption of this one man over the past decade alone?

The incidence: uncountable.

The vastness: inconceivable.

The consequences: all too predictable.

President 45-47 is not an administration—he’s a man.

He’s not a movement—he’s unimpeded inertia.

He’s not powerful—he’s the cancerous outgrowth of the voluntary mass concession of our collective power.

I’m not immune to the derangement. I’ve been addled by it. I’ve been complicit. Look: I’m writing these words right now.

But lately I can’t stop facepalming when I look around at all this face-planting.

President 45-47 is not only the Most Photographed Barn in America, he’s almost certainly the most named and recognized person in all of human history.

And if this insanity doesn’t end, if we don’t somehow figure out how to end it, it could be the end.

What We Can Do

We’ve already let the barbarian through the gates. I suggest we begin by limiting the rampage in progress.

President 45-47 has only four talents: (1) self-glorification through free-publicity generation, (2) the raw autonomic animalistic instincts of a natural-born bully, (3) absolute superhuman shamelessness, and (4) a world-historical case of malignant narcissistic personality disorder. If we don’t stop amplifying #1, he’ll only escalate #2, because of #3, and we’ll all drown in the tsunami of #4.

I don’t know everything that can be done—no one does. I don’t expect progressives to marshal the collective will and defenses they could—and still can—marshal. I don’t think gelatinized conservatives will voluntarily self-reinstall their spines. I certainly don’t think most people out there will do any of these things I’m proposing.

But I’m going to say them anyway.

The Proposal

There are millions of options, many of them unexploited, for neutralizing this guy (and I will be proposing as many as I can). The problem is not insufficient options—it’s our manifold insufficiencies in enacting them.

We should be trying and iterating them all, but we need to pick a few (not 100,000) that work most effectively at scale, and then we to nationally mobilize around those strategies—and we need to do it right now as quickly as we can, all at once and all together, or we will lose the future.

If it takes a lot of courage to stand up and do something now, in February 2026, it will take tens times more a year from now. And ten times more than that the following year. And a hundred times more if he’s still America’s Kim Jong Un come January 2029.

And do not be deceived—he just might be.

Here’s a suggested strategy: Doing something that requires courage is always hard, particularly in times of turbulence, instability, threat, and fear—but not doing something is usually easier.

So let’s all not do something together.

The proposal:

1. Blot out the sun. If you are the owner or leader of a media organization, outlet, or operation, this is the most important strategy on the list: In every source of media you control, completely eliminate every reference and representation of the man. A total occlusion. A full blackout. A zero-mention policy. More feasibly: Because hardly anyone in our sprawling media empire is likely to willingly do this, please at least try to cut it down by 90 percent or more. Accept that you have been part of the problem, that you birthed the monster from your many wombs, that you have fueled his ascendancy (at no cost to him, and great cost to us), and that you, above all others, have the power to blot out the sun upon which he feasts. Do it everywhere and anywhere you can, as often and consistently as you can. Do it as an act of patriotism. As your civic duty as an American. As a grandparent, as a father, as a mother, as a fellow human. But above all, do it right now. Hit delete, delete, delete, delete, delete and don’t stop. I beg you. We all beg you. Swallow your pride, humble yourselves, and do the hard thing that needs to be done.
   
   *This actually happened: A few days after this article was posted, the NYT published this article. One wonders how the owners, editors, and journalists can read this report in their own paper, even laced as it is with downplaying euphemism and politeness, but somehow not see their own amplifying complicity in the global inundation of his megalomania.
   

2. Have a strategy. This is the second most important strategy on the list: The New York Times may be biased, but Fox News and its spawn are rabidly, mouth-foamingly prejudiced. While the NYT is still trying to operate in accordance with longstanding ethical journalistic principles and demonstrate its supposed neutrality and objectivity (all commendable practices in times of stability and peace), Fox News and its brethren are echoing every talking point from on high, platforming chauvinists and extremists, luxuriating in the most obvious lies, calling for homeless American citizens to be mass-euthanized, and vilifying and dehumanizing every progressive individual, group, or organization that achieves any level of sufficient visibility, influence, or power anywhere in America. Progressives like to parade their principles—conservatives form up into military parades. Progressives want to maintain civility—today’s conservatives want to unleash civil war. And neither side seems capable of stopping. If progressives keep parading around their principles without a strategy, conservatives will goose-step our asses into the ground. We need every ethical independent American journalistic operation to start operating strategically right now, or the state of ethical independent American journalism could soon look like the state of ethical independent journalism in Hungary. If you are a media owner, editorial leader, news reporter, or member of the commentariat, and you somehow don’t know yet that these people are coming for you, your business, your livelihoods, and perhaps even your freedom—because people like these always, without fail, come for the media—at least try to operate more strategically. Get together, come up with a plan, and execute it with discipline, ideally as a coordinated, industry-wide power block. Again, I beg you.

3. Exert pressure on the media. If you don’t work in the media, but you’re a subscriber to a newspaper, magazine, podcast, or anything similar, forward them this article. Take anything that’s useful and put it into your own words. Write to the editors, journalists, and podcasters and tell them to stop feeding the monster with your money. Beseech them on your bent and swollen knees to stop talking about President 45-47. Recruit as many readers, watchers, and listeners as you can, and tell them to do the exact same thing. If they won’t listen or change, if they sing you the same old song, consider unsubscribing—but tell them exactly why you’re doing it. Tell them to write or talk about everything else, anything else, including all the harm being caused and all the havoc being wreaked, but stop talking about him. We all need to be supporting ethical independent commentary and reporting to the fullest extent we can in this hour of national emergency. But most podcasters, particularly the most influential ones, aren’t going to stop casting unless people stop subscribing—and tell them exactly why they’re doing so. Leverage audience capture against them. The same goes for news outlets. Right now, they will not stop donating billions of dollars worth of free publicity to this guy. Unless the outcry reverberates to the heavens and the money spigots are squeezed off, they may never wake up. They think they are on the side of angels (and they often are). They think they are crusaders for truth and justice (and they often are). They think we need them (and we absolutely do). But they’re also doing the same things over and over in the same ways that newspapers and journalists have done them for the past 100 years. Point your eyeballs somewhere else and walk away with your money, or your voice will not be heard.

4. Practice near-total abstinence. Do not say his name. Do not talk about him. Refuse to engage in a conversation about him. Erase him from your browser. Do not think about him to the fullest extent you are able. Reclaim your life, energy, motivation, hope, and brainspace. You’ve already seen and heard enough of him to last a millennium, and he’s only going to continue to do the same old shit in slightly different ways. You’ve already surpassed all you need to know about him years ago, and every second spent on him is another second that’s bankrolling his run on the bank.

5. Erect no monuments. The thing President 45-47 wants above all is his name and likeness in polished gold on every single last thing on planet Earth that he can manage to slap them on. This is a man whose likeness is literally being sculpted into graven gilded idols worshiped by Christians in direct contravention of Biblical edict. And yet this is a typical progressive response (which is totally nutso and backasswards, in my opinion). Putting his name and face on everything has not only not worked so far, but it’s propelled his rise to power every step of the way. Why does anyone think putting his name and face on more and more stuff will somehow wake people up and neutralize his power? All the evidence suggests otherwise. Why does anyone think that continually broadcasting his name across the planet, and calling for statues of him to be even bigger, will work when probably every dictator since the beginning of recorded human history has erected the biggest possible monuments to their self-perceived glory and scrawled their names on anything that will take a scrawl? Why the hell would continuing to give him exactly what he wants somehow magically deny him what he wants? In the internet age, publicity is the monument builder. President 45-47 is a steroidal Mr. Beast, and if we don’t stop, we’ll all end up his Feastables.

6. Stop the metonymy and never personify. Never, for any reason, say or write: “The Tr___ administration,” “Tr___ White House,” “Tr____ foreign policy,” or any of their related permutations. Ascribing personal ownership and control of the mechanisms of American government and policy, or of conservative thinking and operating, or anything else, to this one man hides the fact that (a) he’s just spouting whatever nonsense happens to burp up from his befouled soul, which only matters because (b) armies of disciples, sycophants, and worshipers take it seriously as a call to action, which only matters because (c) millions of people are rolling over and letting him do it. President 45-47 does almost nothing. He just rants and bullshits. Instead, talk about what’s actually happening and the people doing that stuff.

7. Shine the spotlight on the servants. Which brings us to the third most important strategy on this list, which could quite possibly be one of the detonations that could bring the building down. People are always going on about President 45-47’s unpredictability. What? He’s the most predictable human being I have ever observed. And here’s one of his most predictable, reliable, non-eradicable behaviors: he will turn on anyone, at any moment, instantly, for any act of disloyalty, real or perceived, or when he believes they are outshining their master. He’s never not done it. He can’t stop. It’s an obsessive compulsion. It’s as formulaic as a fill-out form. As predictable as dawn. As inevitable as the grave. If you want to drive him berserk, sow unstoppable dissension in the ranks, watch the nest of vipers to eat their own, topple the house of cards, and line the road back to democracy with his toppled underlings, say over and over, in every way you can: the President is a just limp puppet—the real muscle and brains behind the operation are this guy, this evil creeper, this gal, this guy, this worm, this guy, this plastic-looking person, and all the other minions he perceives to be the biological manifestation of his will. One by one, over and over again, ignore the don and turn the spotlight on the henchmen.

Unless strategically indicated, I’ll be taking my own advice after I hit publish on this thing.

~SEA

Last revised: 2.26.26