As you virtually turn your back on Trump, you need not unplug from democracy itself. He is still the president. Ignoring his words is the same as ceding the debate. By all means, read the transcripts. Scrub his words for falsehoods, flip-flops, and feints. Challenge him at every turn.

But Trump will not be satisfied with merely being read. This is a man uniquely obsessed with being seen, especially on television. NBC’s Chuck Todd recently revealed on a Politico podcast that after Trump finishes an interview, he is so “attentive … to visuals” that “he wants to see what it all looked like.” So Trump routinely would remain in the NBC studio and play back “the whole thing on mute.” Todd also relayed an anecdote from Trump’s advertising consultant who shared that the president-elect was the “first candidate who didn’t care about the script as much he cared about the visuals.”

Trump intuitively grasps the change in our politics sparked by the invention of television: We tend to judge politicians based on personality more than policies. Political science professor Peter Woll, in his 1974 book Public Policy, observed, “The wide use of television in political campaigns emphasizes the need to project favorable images to voters, rather than appeal to them on a basis of a rational consideration of the issues. … It encourages politicians to become actors, their performance being based on what pleases the audience.” That was six years before America elected an actual movie actor to be president, and 42 years before an Electoral College majority picked a reality television show host.

What better way to combat a performer-politician than by diminishing his stage? The lower Trump’s ratings, the less inclined television producers will be to give him the free airtime that was the lifeblood of his presidential campaign. A presidential megaphone can never be totally silenced. But we can do our part to restrict his ability to blanket the airwaves for the next four years and become larger than life.