On Sunday mornings of the weekends when Bea drives up from Nahant, if the weather is warm and pleasant, we put the top down on the roadster, assure Kiki we won’t be gone long, and tool leisurely downstream along the Winooski River to Middlesex for coffee and a pastry at Red Hen Bakery. It’s a clean, well-lighted place, usually pretty busy on Sunday mornings with a mixture of locals, tourists and transplants like me. The signs on the chalkboards and over the doors and windows, as well as the posted instructions for proper disposal of cups, dishes, and trash, signal clearly that if the bakery were larger and better known, it would be a prime target for the Trump administration. It pretty much defines “woke.”

If I’m sitting facing the entrance, I can see the road. I like to imagine the scene if the chatty serenity of the place were suddenly interrupted by the arrival out front of a line of black SUVs, the debarking of a face familiar from newscasts — say JD Vance, recklessly reprising his last visit to the Green Mountain State — and the entrance of the somber entourage. What would be the reaction of the patrons of the bakery? Pregnant silence? Undertones of disapproval? A cheerful greeting? All kinds of fantasies run through the mind at the prospect of such a scenario.

Even though I realize that the personal security of important citizens is paramount in the minds of those charged with ensuring their safety, I get a bit cheesed off at the entourage of black, gas-guzzling SUVs deployed redundantly to accompany them. The implication is obvious: We don’t trust you, and will react swiftly and severely to any threat we perceive you to be. Lately, this has come to mean you’re likely to wake up tomorrow in El Salvador without a return ticket. So in a way the protection itself creates at least an edgy, grumpy atmosphere. At least one Vermonter went so far as to suggest, during Vance’s last foray into the state, that the vice-president stoops so low as to wash his cast-iron frying pan in the dishwasher. The threat of all those men in suits and sunglasses edging alertly into the Red Hen would, if I may venture a guess, play hell with a lovely Sunday morning.

We tend, both individually and in groups, to respond as we are treated. This was conveyed most clearly to me by an experience we had during the early days of the former Outward Bound program at Dartmouth. In order to give the students an idea of life without freedom, we arranged to spend a day and night in a jail in Haddam, Conn., that was used for training corrections officers. We arrived there after days of winter camping, and were locked up. We marched to supper.

After supper we were put back into our cells, and the lights went out. It was very quiet. The somebody on the block started making pig noises. Somebody else responded with cow sounds. After the whole barnyard had joined in, the guard on duty started hollering about turning off the heat or spraying us with the hose. I’ll give you a guess how much good that did. The more he threatened, the worse it got. Eventually, like children — the way were being treated — we got sick of it ourselves, and went off to sleep.

Donald Trump apparently has a long list of people and places he despises, and is doing all he can with whatever power he can muster to satisfy his need to put them in their places. So far, Harvard has resisted quite admirably. I suspect the university has better (and more zealous) lawyers than the president can muster anymore. For some reason, he and his erstwhile sidekick, Elon Musk, consider foreign aid programs hotbeds of fraud, deceit and corruption. (remember my constant refrain in interpreting everything he says and does: Accusation is Confession,) So thousands of children in Africa are now being born without medicine to eliminate their AIDS, and thousands more are starving, while medicine and food lie spoiling in warehouses. My friend Bea’s research programs through USAID are suddenly extinct, her decades of trying to alleviate human suffering trashed by the stroke of a pen.

When I first heard him speak, years ago, I pegged him for a phony. I was a contractor, and over time developed a pretty good nose for character. He’s an open book. At the moment he’s making a case for domestic insurrection (the irony of it!) so that he can declare a national emergency and suspend other powers of government. California is one of his administration’s favorite targets: liberal, elitist, crawling with illegal immigrants. He’s sent the National Guard to restore order, in spite of being told none too subtly it’s not wanted.

But there’s hope. He forgot to send cots, or food, for the troops. Vehicles, too; they’re reserved for his birthday parade. You can’t make this stuff up.