I finally put up my Christmas lights on Saturday, in a T-shirt with no jacket on a warm December afternoon — a fitting finale to Earth’s hottest year on record. Meanwhile, the world’s life-or-death climate summit is presided over by an oil dictator who insists there is “no science” to support phasing out fossil fuels. For those who wonder if humankind is taking global warming seriously, the joke of holding COP28 in the United Arab Emirates is your answer.

Nearly seven years later, it’s easy to forget how remarkablethe first Women’s March that occurred on Jan. 21, 2017, truly was. The most incredible thing was the size of the protest that occurred on the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s believed that at least 470,000 people attended the main event in Washington, D.C., but satellite protests across the United States and globally drew an estimated 5 million, likely the largest one-day event in American history.

That success resonated for the next four years, as thousands went back to their hometowns and organized political groups that loosely were hailed as “the Trump resistance” — not only staging local protest events but ultimately knocking on doors and sending out postcards by the millions as Democrats reclaimed the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020.

But there’s also something else worth remembering about that initial Woman’s March and the early days of those resisters. Their movement was born in the early morning darkness and frustration of Nov. 9, 2016, amid the shock realization that a dangerous demagogue had somehow been elected the 45th president of the United States. The rage that flowered on a chilly January day in a field of pink “(p-word) hats” was in part regret that more had not been done to stop Trump before the election.

Today, Trump is back, and no one calls him a demagogue anymore — because that’s too polite. The 47th presidency he envisions is tyrannical, even dictatorial — siccing zealous MAGA prosecutors on his political enemies and the media, pardoning 2021′s insurrectionists, mass detention camps for deporting migrants, and calling out troops to put down protests, perhaps as early as his Inauguration Day. And yet he is all but guaranteed the GOP nomination, and an even-money bet against President Joe Biden next fall. Even a normally cautious mainstream media is starting to get it.

“Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” blared Monday’s headline across the New York Times homepage, describing how Team Trump has learned from the failures of its leader’s more outlandish ideas in 2017-21. A super-long Washington Post essay from neocon scholar Robert Kagan — “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” — was that paper’s most-read article. Not to be outdone, The Atlantic dropped a........

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