As the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for Donald Trump come to terms with having elected a shameless bigot and liar as our next president, there’s been quite a bit of pontificating about how best to make progress under his administration. Do we pay attention to tweets or cabinet appointments? Focus on making sure the white supremacists celebrating Trump’s win aren’t normalized in the media? Take on fake news?

Unfortunately, progressives and those who care about our country’s future will have to do it all. But what we don’t need to – and shouldn’t – do is heed the wide calls for everyone to embrace “unity” moving forward. Trump’s campaign was built on a foundation of racism and misogyny; to ask marginalized people to woo those who think we’re worthless is a waste of precious time better spent on more urgent issues. Especially now that so many Americans’ rights are at risk.

As Kara Brown at Jezebel smartly wrote, the love and kindness tactic “suggests blindness, endless patience and a great deal of emotional labor on the part of people who are already exhausted”.



Instead, let’s do something both effective and enjoyable: become big, sharp, nasty thorns in Trump’s side. Get under his skin and reside there for four years.

Lucky for us, irritating a narcissistic wannabe-despot doesn’t take much effort. It’s especially easy for women. Our president-elect says he “goes through the roof” when he comes home and dinner isn’t ready. (So please, ladies, step away from the oven for a while and cook up some plans on how to defend Planned Parenthood instead.) Trump has also said that “putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing”, he has bemoaned women who “shout” at or criticize him, and he has expressed disgust with any sort of female body function, from breastfeeding to urinating. It turns out all women have to do to be “nasty” in Trump’s eyes is exist.

But anyone, regardless of gender, can get on Trump’s bad side; all you have to do to infuriate the thin-skinned reality star is disagree with him. Indiana union leader Chuck Jones, for example, is the latest target of Trump’s ire. Twenty minutes after Jones corrected Trump’s numbers about jobs saved on the Carrier deal, our soon-to-be commander-in-chief tweeted an insult about Jones that resulted in scores of threats against him.

In this sort of political climate, where the president-elect targets individual citizens and hate crimes have skyrocketed across the country, calls for reconciliation feel more like a demand for acquiescence: unify, or else. But people can’t be expected to be gracious losers when what we’re losing is our healthcare, safety, families and rights. In a time like this, being disagreeable is necessary.

It’s also strategic. Vann Newkirk II pointed out in the Atlantic, in a piece about the expectation that people of color reach out to bigots with empathy, that “abandoning civility” has its upsides: “The labels of racism and bigotry can impose a social cost on bigoted actions, policy preferences, or speech, regardless of whether hearts or minds are changed. Stigma can be useful.”

Now is the not the time to grovel for hard-won rights or to appeal to the better angels of people who have shown themselves to be horrific, over and over again. Now is the time to fight, and to be as nasty as we can.