I clipped this cartoon from The New Yorker soon after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and it’s been on my refrigerator ever since.

The first week of this Administration seems practically quaint compared to what’s happening now. Those were the days of a flurry of executive orders loosening environmental protections and going after immigrants; lies about crowd size and voter fraud; Kellyanne Conway’s injecting “alternative facts” into the Trump Apologists’ Lexicon; and, most notoriously, the Muslim Ban.

It took three attempts to craft a travel ban that passed muster with a willfully obtuse U.S. Supreme Court. It’s a useful model for the trajectory of the last four years: Initial incompetence–along with intense resistance by an outraged opposition not yet exhausted by relentless provocations–contained the damage for awhile, until it didn’t.

But the only ways in which Donald Trump and his enablers have gained competence is to divide and better manipulate the considerable levers of power they control for corrupt, unlawful, and dangerously destructive ends. The takeover of the spineless Republican Party is complete. Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr, the Scylla and Charybdis of the whole treasonous enterprise, guard the rot with a competency and smooth veneer that will forever elude the obviously unfit Trump himself.

The resistance is still strong, but exhausted.

It is Labor Day, the traditional start of the home stretch of every presidential election. November 3, 2020–the day we have been waiting for since November 8, 2016–has taken forever to come but it’s almost here.

So imagine the word “term” instead of the word “week” in the cartoon above.

Summon everything you have in the next few weeks to make sure it doesn’t come to pass. Talk to similarly inclined people in your circle to make sure they are registered to vote, and that they do vote, either with enthusiasm or holding their noses. Sign up for phone banks, text banks, letter and post-card writing. Make donations if you can. There are a million opportunities available, and participating in them may save your mental health as well as the future of our country and planet.

This is it. Let’s do this thing.