Here’s how to do the best you can during the Trump presidency.

“Do the best you can” is not exactly a call to arms — not likely what Ike said to the troops before D-Day.

Doing your best indicates limits. But it also suggests possibilities. Like warfare, doing our best requires new strategies, some novel forms of comradeship and some personal courage.

So what I am about to offer is a breath of optimism. Ok, maybe not a full breath, more like a gasp. But certainly not a death rattle because opportunities, not just to stem the tide but also to make things better, are alive and well.

There are very important, manageable things we can do to make our lives and the lives of others better despite gruesome and ominous national politics.

At least three things, to be precise: refocusing our attention away from the federal government as a source of largesse; increasing the kinds of community work that has been successful despite the gridlock, polarization and political shock-jock performances that have so dominated American politics during the last 20 years; and resisting your own fears.

The 2016 election was barely over when people here began to ask the question, “What will the Hawaii delegation be able to get for this state during the next four years?”

Fair question, but oh so pre-Trump.

The new Republican regime certainly wants to slash the welfare state. Progressives can fight back and try to stem the tide, but let’s face it. Who’s got the votes? Something else is also necessary.

That is precisely why we need to ask an additional question: “What do we — individuals and policymakers — need to do to overcome the problems that the Trump regime will create?”

Gov. David Ige and the Legislature need to ask how much of a burden they are willing to assume for picking up the slack for, say, people who lose federal health care benefits, schools that can no longer depend on as much federal aid or sustainability policies involving federal money.

Sometimes responses based on that question may take the form of resistance. Jerry Brown, the governor of California, has promised to continue to move forward on global warming issues regardless of what Washington does.

Brown stated that if the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are not interested in global warning, “California will launch its own damn (climate) satellites.”

In The Atlantic, James Fallows called Brown’s words a “genuine fighting speech, “resolute but positive, rather than resentful or doomed.”

A “fighting speech” is not exactly part of Ige’s tool kit, but “resolute” and “positive” should be.

Compared to California, though, Hawaii is too small a player to offer much of this kind of confrontation. Still, the politicians here cannot afford to rule out the possibility.

There are less-confrontational options as well, such as doing things that the feds can’t stop you from doing even if they don’t like it.

Sounds like a form of states’ rights, no? Not such a noble term, given its racist history. So just embrace the idea and change the name. Think of such strategies the way that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis used to describe them: the states as laboratories for change.

We saw some powerful examples of this during the Obama years, and progressives led the charge.

A number of progressive states, including Hawaii, adopted a minimum wage higher than Congress was willing to go. The considerable numbers of state marijuana legalization laws, even Hawaii’s very cautious one, are a challenge to federal anti-drug policy.

The hard reality is that Hawaii, along with every state, may lose some extraordinarily important revenue streams.

Again, how much of the burden are we willing to pick up? Answering that question needs to become part of the political consciousness and rhetoric around here, not just for politicians but all of us.

And that’s why James Fallows is, of all things, optimistic.

How can the same guy who recently said that Donald Trump’s election strikes the most serious blow to American ideals in our country’s history be so full of optimism?

As Fallows puts it, there is a huge and fortunate chasm between national politics and what goes on in our own communities. Despite all the despair and anger in national politics, the U.S. still believes in itself at the local level.

The theories that stress our anger and polarization “miss the optimism and determination that are intertwined with desolation and decay in the real ‘out there.’”

He bases his belief on what he saw during a four-year look at communities across the U.S.

Writing again about these communities after the election, Fallows pointed out that Erie, Pennsylvania, an economically depressed Rust Belt city that is a key part of Trump anger-and-despair support, has one of the most active civic renewal efforts in the U.S.

Leading this effort are people in their 20s and 30s who have been instrumental in bringing jobs back to the city.

As a result of this work, the city is not as well off as it was in the mid-’70s, but certainly better off than it was five years ago.

In Hawaii, the Trump/Republican era will make community work more crucial than ever.

We need to resist obsessing over Trump. Sure, keep up with the news, but put that into perspective.

Put it this way: do you really want to have your children listening to your family arguments and a repeated parade of complaints about how horrible Trump is?

Instead, teach them a lesson about what one has to do to live in an imperfect world and to make it better.

Why not begin to do this by getting more involved in civic life?