It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day atrocities committed by the Trump administration. Every hour brings a new crisis, every day something precious or useful gets smashed. That’s on purpose. The torrent of Trump lawlessness is designed to keep us forever focused on what’s happening right now, constantly defending ourselves against the latest unhinged pronouncement. 

I would have fallen deep into this myopic trap these past two weeks, but there has been one thing keeping me focused on the long horizon: my children. I have two boys, ages 12 and 9. Every day I look at them, I am forced to contemplate the future—to worry about the future Trump is stealing from them, and the terrible suffering that awaits them in the world Trump seeks to create.

Like any parent worthy of the title, I don’t give a damn about what happens to me. I’ve had my chances. Born in 1978, I had the opportunity to grow up during a brief window where this country seemed genuinely interested in becoming the multi-racial, multi-ethnic democratic polity that it always promised to be but never once achieved. I benefited from the heroic efforts of my parents and ancestors.  

But my generation failed to defend those efforts. While others continue to carry the torch for GenX (the Trumpiest generation, based on voting patterns), I am ready to admit that my generation has been a failure. Barack Obama was fond of saying that “we are the people we’ve been waiting for,” but he evidently didn’t fully contemplate what would happen if “we” turned out to suck. 

I cannot waste time brooding over my failures and those of my age cohort. I must figure out how to parent my children, my Black children, through this nightmare, giving them the skills they’ll need to confront the dystopian future Trump has laid out before them. 

For inspiration, I’ve looked to a fictional parent who knows what it’s like to be raising a child on the cusp of the apocalypse: the heroine of the Terminator movies, Sarah Connor. For people unfamiliar with this 40-year-old movie, allow me to regale you with a brief synopsis. On August 29, 1997 “Skynet,” a military artificial intelligence, became self-aware and unleashed a nuclear holocaust. It created a race of sentient robots, Terminators, to crush the remaining human opposition. In 2029, one such Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back to 1984 Los Angeles to kill Sarah Connor, who is the mother of the future human resistance leader, John Connor. Future John Connor is able to send one soldier back in time to protect his mother.

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When we meet Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton) in 1984, she is weak. She’s a classic Hollywood “damsel in distress” updated for the 1980s with big hair and spunkiness. She spends most of the first movie running and hiding, and nearly ensures her doom by calling her mother. She and the soldier bang, and the soldier sacrifices himself to try to destroy the Terminator. He fails to kill it, but Sarah is able to lure the robot into a hydraulic press and… terminate it. The movie ends with her visibly pregnant with the soldier’s baby, who will become John Connor, and is leaving audio tapes for him about what the world was like before the tragedy she now knows is coming. Little does she know that Schwarzenegger will be back, more or less as a good guy. 

Fast forward to Terminator 2: John Connor is now 10-years-old, but he’s living with foster parents because his mother has been sent to a prison psychiatric institution because she has (entirely reasonably) become a bit of a terrorist trying to stop the people building Skynet from bringing about the end of the world. When we first see Sarah Connor in T2 she is ripped. She’s changed her physique from Olivia Newton John to something approaching Rambo. She is hardened. She can kill. When she breaks out of prison, we find out that she’s been stashing guns and ammo all throughout the Southwest, and has been training her son in military strategy and computer hacking. She has transformed herself, body and soul, from a victim of forces beyond her control, into John-the-Baptist of badasses. 

I believe that every liberal parent is now in the position of Sarah Connor after the first Terminator movie. We can see the future awaiting our children, and it is bleak. Our mission, our only mission, is to prepare our kids for what is coming, and maybe see if there’s anything we can do to stop Trump’s future from happening. We’re going to need to teach our children skills that we never had, to face a future different from anything we ourselves experienced. We’re going to need to get in shape and learn how to fight for them in ways that disregard what others may think of our methods. 

To be very clear, I’m not suggesting that people take the full Sarah Connor route of gun violence and terrorist destruction. Our fight cannot be won by strength of military arms and, in fact, I feel like the Terminator movies drive that point home. There are ways to meet the violent authoritarian takeover of the government other than with more violence. I have to believe that, not because I think myself too morally pure for violence, but because I am rational about the limited effectiveness of violence and my side’s lack of military firepower. We’re not going to shoot our way out of our coming future, and I’m not going to teach my kids to try. 

For all that, I anticipate that some readers will think some other parts of my Terminator analogy are inapt, or at least hyperbolic—among other things, the movies contemplated a full-on nuclear holocaust. But the world Trump and his forces are attempting to bring about for our children is every bit as dire as any one contemplated by Hollywood. I’ll just mention that killer robots are literally already here. And we happen to be in a nuclear arms race again. We are living in a time where we are giving birth to AI, and we’re doing it in a wholly unregulated market, devoid of moral or ethical standards, while being led by madmen. And I’m not just talking about Trump. Shadow President Elon Musk has accrued more global power than anybody else alive, and his thirst for world domination is matched only by his pettiness and racial prejudices. In this environment, you simply cannot tell me with confidence that a sentient machine AI, which learns all it can from its apartheid creators and then turns on them, is beyond the realm of possibility, or plausibility.

Even if our children are lucky and their environment isn’t irradiated by whatever Pete Hegseth greenlights at the Department of Defense after Elon buys him a round of shots, we know that climate change will make parts of their world functionally uninhabitable. We know that those who survive the climate crises of the future will confront storms, flooding, fires, and water shortages on a scale we haven’t seen in recorded history. Food insecurity will hit many more parts of the world, including those that don’t yet know they rely on places ravaged by climate change to keep their grocery shelves stocked. And history tells us that when the horseman of famine sets out for a ride, war is always galloping close behind. 

Homicidal AI and global climate change are just the most obvious threats to our children’s futures. When you step back from the daily concerns of just trying to stay alive during the Trump era, you’ll see that there are so many ways Trump and the oligarchs who own him are poisoning the well for those who are lucky enough to survive his present onslaught. If AI doesn’t get us, the algorithms might. We already know the algorithmic shoveling of attention-grabbing, emotionally distressing content (which the Supreme Court is pretty close to anointing as “speech”) changes the brain chemistry of those who engage with social media, damaging the way our children think and their ability to process information, not to mention their self-esteem. In the movies, John Connor is taught how to hack machines. In our reality, it’s the machines that are hacking our children’s brains. 

And then there’s the general embrace of cruelty, the glee at inflicting harm, in part made manifest by social media, but supercharged by Trump’s foul demeanor and bigoted policies. We know that Trump’s agenda of cishetero patriarchy and his antipathy towards civil rights will lead to more rapes, more unwanted pregnancies, more hate crimes, more lynchings, and more gun violence against vulnerable people and communties. We are actively consigning some of our children to a future where they will not enjoy the full measure of equal rights, all because the parents of white boys are sure their sons will come out on top, while their daughters will adjust to being second-class citizens.

I cannot fully imagine the world my kids will inherit, or even know if the most basic apparatus of a functioning society will be available to them in the future. What does the college and university “system” look like after Trump and the WWE-lady get through hollowing it out and forcing everyone to teach that slavery “wasn’t that bad.” Will I even want my kids to matriculate to Trump’s reeducation camps disguised as “schools”? What does public health look like after the anti-vaxxers take control of state regulatory systems? Do I want my kids to take anything that has been approved by RFK Jr. and rubber stamped by a non-functional Trumpian FDA? Is it going to be safe for my kids to fly with a reality TV guy in charge of the Department of Transportation? Is there any basic government service that I unthinkingly rely on that will still function ten years from now?

These are concerns I have despite parenting from a position of incredible privilege. I don’t have to rely on a denuded Medicaid program to take my kids to the doctor. I’m not reliant on government assistance to buy them a birthday cake. And my kids go to a school where children are taught to read books instead of burning them. Parents who are more reliant on a functional government than I am—parents who need daycare and family leave and school lunches—face a suite of immediate threats that dwarf my concerns about the future. 

I am, however, a parent “of color,” and every parent I know whose children are a racial, ethnic, or religious minority already understands that Trump represents a direct threat to their children’s claim to equality under the law. Parents of LGBTQ children, and especially parents of trans children, know that Trump is an extinction level event for their kids. Trump and his Republicans are not just trying to deport children who are American citizens, they’re trying to erase entire groups of people from the public consciousness. 

I already know that my kids will encounter a civil rights environment more like the one faced by my grandparents in the segregated South in the 1920s, than the one I faced in 1980s Queens. My skills of fighting the white man through argument and lawsuits seem completely irrelevant to the lives MAGA will force them to live. I’m a classically trained effete liberal columnist trying to prepare children to live in a Hobbesian state of perpetual white violence against us. What the hell do I know about what they must learn to do? We are well past the point where “pulling your pants up” and engaging in respectability politics designed to appease “reasonable” white folks is of any use. 

I don’t have complete answers for how I’m supposed to raise my children to prepare them for the post-Trumpian stage of our failing civilization. Sarah Connor had years to process the information she learned about the future, while I feel I’ve only had a few weeks. Still, for whatever it’s worth, I’ll share my emerging thoughts on what my kids need to know to have a chance in the white world order that Trump and Musk are desperately trying to give birth to.

Wartime Consigliere

Once again, I’m not going to hide weapons caches in my house—but I will hide people. I’m not “the muscle,” and my privileged, pampered kids probably never will be either. Up until this point, I’ve been teaching my kids to “fight” through the deployment of words aimed at moral suasion. I’ve trained my kids to win the “moral high ground” and defend it at all costs. Those, however, are strategies for another era, and they are, broadly speaking, useless for the fights to come. 

Ruthlessness. Cunning. Guile. These are the skills the Thinkers of the future need. We’re going to need wartime consiglieres: people who understand how to fight the enemy at their own game. People who can play the media like a fiddle. People who can win the crowd even while they’re losing their precious “intellectual consistency.” People who will use any means necessary, fair, or unfair, to advocate for the restoration of freedom and liberal self-government. 

People can entirely miss me with “But golly gee, Elie. If we use the tactics of our enemy we are no better than them.” That way of thinking is obsolete. That way of thinking is how you get whatever the hell the “Democratic Party” is doing right now. Everybody wants to raise Barack Obama. I’ve got to start trying to raise Harriet Tubman. In a worst case scenario, I have to be raising Oskar Schindler. I need my kids to be able to chloroform a baby they’re hiding in their attic when ICE comes around, then walk downstairs and pay Musk’s troops in Bitcoin to make them go away. 

Black Pride

Ever since white people invented Blackness and whiteness, their goal has been to make people assigned as Black feel bad about themselves, and undeserving of equal and fair treatment, while making people assigned as white feel good about themselves, giving them somebody else to look down on. The challenge for Black people in the Americas has always been to maintain a sense of pride in themselves and belief in their own humanity, even as whites try to rip that pride and sense of self away from them. So it is again, with our current white supremacist regime. 

Pride is a skill set. Pride is a survival mechanism. Pride is how an enslaved person never becomes a slave. Pride is why my people are still here, despite the best attempts of a global superpower to break us. 

Trump and MAGA are just the latest group of white folks trying to strip us of our pride. They want my kids to feel like they are lesser than the white kids, and I simply won’t let that happen. I won’t let that happen, even though I know that teaching my kids to have pride in themselves increases their chances of being killed by the white regime. Black self worth can be a capital offense in a white supremacist regime. But that is just the risk they are going to have to take. 

I can do a lot of this teaching by example. And if that makes me more of a target, so be it. Indeed, one of the only reasons I haven’t diminished myself or hid or tried to play nice with the incoming totalitarian regime or find “common ground” with Scott Jennings is that I cannot afford to let my kids see me do it. I want my kids to grow up with their father, but I will not allow them to grow up with a punk for a dad. 

Understand what the algorithms are doing.

We now live in a digital autocracy where the flow of information is controlled by oligarchs. Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, you name the app, they’re all controlled by impossibly wealthy people who have hacked into people’s brains and reconfigured them along MAGA loving lines. These apps are the recruitment centers for Trump’s brownshirts, mass shooters, and angry-boy voters. Even for those who reject these ideas, the apps deliver a constant stream of apathy, cynicism, and nihilism. 

Despite knowing all of this, I am definitely the most pro-screen time parent of any parent I know. The fact that my kids are digital natives is the thing that’s going to make them better at fighting for liberal democracy than I will ever be. I try to lean into their natural facility with technology, because they simply must understand how to use the tools of the enemy. Our children are going to have to engage with these systems and programs, sooner or later. It’s better that they’re taught to deconstruct what that technology is doing to them, and give them the skills to defend themselves. 

What I try to do is teach them how the tricks these apps use to manipulate people actually work. We talk a lot in my house about “dark patterns,” and I use examples from trying to boost my own content to show them how easy it can be to elevate (or throttle) what people see. Another example: Every time there’s a new video game they want, we talk about where and how they saw the advertisement that got them interested, what makes them want to purchase the game, and where to find more information about how the game works, before they buy it. (At this point, I could basically teach a course called How Pokemon Explains Trump Voters.)

To me, it’s the same thing as teaching your kids media literacy: you don’t tell your kids to not read the New York Times because it’s often bad, craven, and complicit with Trump’s racist and misogynist agenda. Instead, you teach your kid how to spot the bad story, how to note the racist or misogynist framing, and how to extract information from the publication that is right now designed to do harm. Screen time is no different. It’s just a little harder to stay on top of. 

Suffering is not inevitable

As I’ve considered the fact that majority of white women voted for an unhinged misogynist, and that a not-insignificant number of Blacks and Latinos voted for an open white supremacist, I have come to realize that one of the greatest failing of my generation is how many of us seemed to buy into the Ronald Reagan-inspired made-for-TV mantras of self-reliance and individuality. How many of us bought into the neoliberal lies about wisdom capitalism, which lets the markets pick the winners and losers of progress. How many of us bought into the Joel Osteen prosperity Gospel that teaches those who suffer do so because God has preordained that they do. It all leads to this belief that people who are successful are so because they are “special” in some way, and people who are unsuccessful are so because they didn’t work hard enough.

I’ve never bought into this repackaged white supremacy by another name, and have always taught my kids to be skeptical of it. But now, those lessons feel mission critical. My kids cannot be allowed to see suffering as a natural or inevitable state. They cannot rationalize any success they experience as the predictable result of hard work, and the failures that befall others as the inevitable punishment of the unworthy. Trump and his forces will try to make them believe that everybody gets what they deserve. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My kids must be made to see that, even if all the world tells them the opposite. Because if they understand that, then they will never be like one of these Trump voters who supports the installation of those who promise suffering because they think they’ll be spared. My kids must never be people who think that bad things happen only to the “right” people. 

Rule-breaking

This is probably the hardest skill to teach children because, as a parent, I’m pretty goddamn reliant on the rules. My wife and I are the authority figures in our children’s lives, so teaching them to break the rules is a little hypocritical for us. It might not seem all that hard, but try telling a 12-year-old that people should not follow the orders of ICE, but bedtime is at 9:00 p.m.

And yet they must be taught this. Because in an authoritarian, white-supremacist future, following “the rules” makes you complicit in the evil. It is both cowardly and unhelpful, in both the present and the future. For the people who will be trying to undo what Trump has done years down the road, the rule followers and the institutionalists will be some of the enemies they must overcome. While many of the other lessons are about how I avoid raising a Trump voter, this one is about how I avoid raising a Dick Durbin voter. 

As I said, this list is far from complete. My middle-schooler just finished a unit on “environmental justice” and the soft, progressive part of me was like, “Great, exactly the kind of training for a good liberal of the future.” But the Sarah Connor part of me was thinking: “What? Justice? My dude, Trump and Musk finna bottle the atmosphere and sell it back only to white folks. These kids don’t need to learn about environmental justice, they need to learn how to find water in the desert on a walkabout.” 

But I don’t know how to find water in a desert, or even food in a food desert. I don’t know how to grow… anything really, and I can barely find food if it doesn’t exist on Uber Eats. 

Still, I have time to learn what I don’t know, and pass that onto my children. Terminator 1 Sarah Connor couldn’t fight her way out of a cubicle. Terminator 2 Sarah Connor could fight her way out of Guantanamo. That is the goal. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to put down this useless keyboard and go lift weights.