Trump – and it isn't just him – is perhaps someone who ought to be ignored. Whatever he says is almost certainly false and while that is true about pretty much every politician, the thing that makes Trump's falsehoods particularly worth ignoring is their bellicosity and frequency. He bellows that Iran will be "decimated" today – then says negotiations are back on the next day. Only to resume the bombing the day or week after he said that.

Then he does it all over again.

He does it with everything he says and if you listen to it long enough, it begins to wear you out. We can't do much about what he says, of course. Nor about what they all say. Except for one very important thing. We can stop listening to what they say. Tune out their Tele-PrompTer'd "speeches" – which are nothing of the sort anyhow, as reading lines written by others isn't a speech. It is a recital. One not worth listening to. The time is better spent reading something worth reading or having a real conversation with a real person about something real.

Pathological narcissists crave an audience; a crowd gathered to listen to them read a TelePrompTer makes them feel important. We have the power to make Trump and all his ilk feel something else, by not showing up. Imagine Trump's mortification, staring at rows of empty seats (or empty grass) as he waddles out to the podium to read the TelePrompter. Imagine if we showed the same indifference to all of them, all of the time.

It is difficult for many of us to do this, of course – not because we're actually interested in listening to them read the TelePrompter, but because we understand these TelePrompter readers have the ability to make us suffer. Orwell explained this in 1984, his novel about Big Brother. The hero of the novel, Winston Smith, finds himself in the cellars of the Ministry of Truth where he undergoes physical and psychological torture at the hands of O'Brien who is a Party Intellectual. O'Brien explains the utility of instilling in the mind of a subject the knowledge that he is powerless in the face of power.

It is not that bad – yet – in what for a time was America. But it could and probably will be, if most of us continue to play along with the vile charade, hanging on every word emitted from the lips of people like Trump and on account of this, allow ourselves to be constantly distracted from reality, which includes our own real problems. Trump is not going to help and even if he wanted to, he can't. Politicians are magicians of a sort but it's the flim-flam fakery sort. They can make a coin "magically" appear behind your ear but not before they picked it out of someone else's pocket first. Whatever "help" they have to offer always and necessarily comes at some other person's expense. Via this method, they "help" – and hurt – and then "help" the hurt. It sets the "helped" against the hurt and vice-versa, in an ongoing cage match that these politicians watch from the grandstand, munching popcorn and smacking their thighs as they do.