Just read a piece in Fortune by my longtime friend Mathew Ingram about Kellyanne Conway and Trump's war against the media. Ingram makes it sound like a conundrum. If they don't give her airtime that will just fuel their argument that the press is at war with them. So -- confusion.

But if you actually look at it like a war, or a sport, which are all modeled after war -- like tennis or chess or canasta, play it out. Either way they're going to say the same thing. It doesn't matter what you do. Anything you do will provoke the same response.

Why do I see this so clearly? Because I once tried to appease a platform vendor who was committed to crushing my small startup. They kept giving us hoops to jump through, and we would jump through them. There was always another hoop. Eventually they won. But the truth was they had won the moment they started.

POTUS has power and tools you can only dream of, as with the platform vendor we had the hubris to challenge. If Trump goes to war with you, he wins. So you might as well accept that from the beginning, and change how you see yourself, and change your goals accordingly.

I suggest you think of yourself as one of your readers or listeners, one with an extra big megaphone. You have no more rights or privilege than we do. Now you can relax and be glad you get paid to do this. Eliminate any sense of power or right or privilege and you now are fighting a different battle, not one where you can bring down a corrupt leader, but one where you can help the people figure out what's going on, even a little. That's a different kind of achievable victory.

And for crying out loud don't go to the Nerd Prom this year. It will be totally humiliating, in ways you can't possibly imagine.