Your parents and/or your grandparents lived through The Great Depression.

We are now living in “The Great Aggression,” an unprecedented assault on our democratic republic by Donald Trump and his army of thugs, enablers, sycophants, Christian Nationalists, and neo-Nazis.

It seems obvious that these people do not believe in democracy. Full stop.

Unfortunately, at this point, it’s an open question as to whether “The Great Aggression” will do more lasting damage than The Great Depression did.

The Great Depression began on October 28th and 29th, 1929 (“Black Monday” and “Black Tuesday,”) when the New York Stock Exchange fell by 13% and then another 12%, eventually losing the 2026 equivalent of $350 billion, destroying the lives of millions of Americans, and triggering a world-wide depression that lasted for years. In time, the Dow Jones average fell an astonishing 90%.

But problems had been festering for years, with rampant speculation, wildly overvalued stocks, and a growing income gap between the super rich and the rest of America.

“The Great Aggression” began in earnest after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated for the second time on January 20, 2025. However, one could argue that it actually began on January 6, 2021, when Trump urged his followers to overthrow an election he had lost and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

At this moment, the most visible evidence of “The Great Aggression” is the physically aggressive behavior of thousands of ICE agents, masked, armed, and seemingly eager to engage anyone within reach. ICE and the Border Patrol have more than 3,000 agents in Minneapolis alone, a city whose police force numbers only 600. American citizens have died, including two who, the videos indicate, were murdered. What’s more, thousands of American citizens.have been attacked, arrested, detained, and deported.

But any list of aggressive attacks on accepted standards of decent behavior by Trump and his followers and enablers must also include:

Gutting FEMA, the Consumer Protection Bureau, and the Forest Service;

Breaking up families of those seeking asylum;

Ordering National Guard troops into Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, and elsewhere;

Shutting down USAID, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Radio Free Europe;

“Clawing back” or refusing to distribute money authorized by Congress to support state and local organizations, including public schools;

Renaming the Kennedy Center after himself;

Summarily dismissing most Inspectors General, whose responsibility it is/was to maintain the integrity of federal agencies;

Firing hundreds in the FBI and IRS;

Flouting judicial orders;

Attempting to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve, and bringing charges against Fed Chief Jerome Powell;

Weaponizing the US Justice Department and the FBI with transparently specious judicial actions against New York State’s Attorney General, Letisha James, and former FBI Director James Comey;

Slow-walking of the Congressionally-mandated release of the Epstein Files.

You undoubtedly have your own list.

(And here is more: Brooks/Friedman,

We survived the Great Depression largely because of federal jobs programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and other national efforts that created work opportunities for millions. In other words, the federal government saved us. (World War II also played a part in the economic recovery.)

This time, however, the federal government IS the aggressor. Because it is the source of the problem, help must come from elsewhere.

Help will not be coming from the United States Congress, because it has neutered itself.

Nor is it likely that help will be coming from federal Courts. Even though a huge majority of US District Court judges have ruled against Trump, “his” Supreme Court justices almost always do what he expects them to do.

No, help must come from within, from our own resolve to save our democratic republic from the fascists, the Christian nationalists, the white supremacists, and the just plain greedy bastards who are driving “The Great Aggression.”

Those who lived through the Depression had no way of knowing when or how it would end, but most kept the faith.

Like them, we have no way of knowing where we are in the timeline, or how this will end.

However, we do know several things for certain:

1) If we despair, we lose.

2) If we succumb to “Outrage Fatigue,” we lose.

3) If we dismiss this as a kerfuffle because, after all, our investments are doing well, we lose.

4) If we think that winning the November elections will solve the problem, we are deluding ourselves, because many of Trump’s people are determined to prevent us from voting. As Robert Kagan, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said on a New Yorker podcast recently, “There is no chance in the world that Donald Trump is gonna allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections, because that will be the end of his ability to wield total power in the United States.”

So HOW do we end “The Great Aggression” and save our country?

1. Support each other;
2. Give generously to the ACLU;
3. Donate to organizations that are working to protect voter rights, such as The League of Women Voters, the Legal Defense Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice, and organizations in your own state (do a Google search) ;
4. Let leaders like Senator Chris Murphy and Representative Jamie Raskin know that you have their backs;
5. Write letters, make phone calls, march, and speak out.

Despair, complacency, and silence cannot be options, not if we want to live in a free society.