Asking if Donald Trump is a feminist is like asking if Piers Morgan is a journalist: unnecessary and embarrassing, given the evidence before us. The ratings for the “show” in which the pair met on Sunday were indeed sad; less than for a poor night of Casualty. Obviously, I watched it on one of my three televisions, in bed, while checking Twitter. I saw that George Osborne – another achitect of misery who masquerades as a journalist – was congratulating Morgan on Twitter. It almost put me off my cheeseburger.

What was to be gleaned from this gibber? Nada. Zilch. It has got to stop. By which I mean we have to stop what we have been doing for a year.

Like everyone else, I have been hooked to a narrative focused on Trump’s black hole of a personality. He is a narcissistic idiot savant who may have dementia/be Putin’s lapdog/be fatter than he says. He is a lazy, venal liar with no impulse control. Every so often, I will tweet him a word meaning idiot. It is random and, for a millisecond, it makes me feel better. But it is a performance of resistance, not an act of it.

Every day some terrible fact is exposed and social media rouses itself and ... nothing much happens. We are caught in a cycle of ineffectual reaction. Can this man really be in charge of pushing the nuclear button, we ask, every single time he pushes our buttons? Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury was going to bring it all tumbling down. It is a belting read, in a-bucket-of-KFC way; greasy and ultimately unsatisfying. Hillary Clinton reading bits of it out at the Grammys is surely the ultimate signifier of impotence. Let’s all laugh at him, us who are so much better.

As a collective strategy, this is proving as futile as my pathetic tweets. The Republican party keeps him in power. The Democrats still appear to be in a state of post traumatic stress disorder, stuck in the loss, unable to put it in the past. Trump has delivered to the right, to the Tea Party element, to the so-called “nativists” (also known as racists). He has cut taxes in ways Mitt Romney lost the nomination for talking about. The liberal revulsion to his misogyny and racism has been mistaken for opposition. It is not enough.

Gary Younge’s recent reporting from Muncie, Indiana, where he also spent a month before Trump’s election, revealed that most Trump voters think he is doing OK (and these people are not even his core supporters). Tax cuts, deregulation and a conservative in the supreme court are all cited as achievements. The underlying forces that propelled people to vote for Trump – a belief he would smash up the system and, yes, racism, are still there. The narrative of a maverick who works against the mainstream media operates successfully in a huge country where news remains suprisingly local.

The focus on his ludicrous ego and ignorance may make us feel superior. But that is all it appears to be doing. He will not be toppled by us jeering at a picture of his enormous arse or reports of his word salad on climate change, his links to Russia and his comments about pussy-grabbing. Not as long as he is supported by racists, the far right, Christian fundamentalists, the global business elite and his own party. And he is. It is time to get serious about what drives this presidency. At the moment, the joke is on us.

Let’s give up on our love of Ikea

My life can be measured in trips to Ikea. At first, the place was exotic to me. A Norwegian friend used to take me and say: look at how we Scandinavians are so civilised and family friendly. Within half an hour, she would be muttering about how they are all fascists and that is why she had to leave. At that stage, I could not afford any furniture beyond the obligatory bookcase, so I amassed cheap egg cups. Mainly, I saw it as a creche; I would shove my toddler into that hell-hole ball park and hope for the best.

It emerged that its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who has just died, was indeed a fascist in his youth, with strong links to the Nazi party. Kamprad also revolutionised design and brought a bit of modernism to the masses. The outsourcing of labour to the consumers was a masterstroke; a visit to Ikea is more labour intensive than many jobs.

Indeed, one day when I was there, wheeling about a wardrobe, the Ikea computer system broke down and no one could pay. People were crying in the aisles and no one could leave the car park. I decided that whatever money I might save by going to Ikea (which, of course, no one does, because they can’t resist the bleeding egg cups and odd shaped pillows they don’t really need) was not worth the psychic damage of a trip there.

The last Ikea I saw was in Beijing and flat pack globalism became real to me. Once, I thought that everything in my life would be better if only I could find the right “storage solution”, but I never have. As Chuck Palahniuk wrote in Fight Club: “The people who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their Ikea furniture catalogue”.

Give it up. You have nothing to lose but your allen keys.

Hashtag humblebrag

Every week lately I am asked to go on some radio/TV show to talk about sexual harassment/#MeToo/abuse. I then ask who else will be involved in the idiotic “let’s have a heated debate” format. This decrees that there has to be to an opposing argument – “feminism has gone too far. What’s wrong with a touch on the knee? Toughen up girlies” – which is often made by a member of the Spiked crew.

If you don’t know what Spiked is and you read that it is a website written by libertarians who came out of Living Marxism and the Revolutionary Communist party, you might think it sounds leftwing. You would be wrong. They now operate as handmaidens of the alt-right. Don’t give them the time of day.