Think Trump's Tyranny Can't Be Opposed or Stopped? Think Again

U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters now control the presidency; the Congress; the administrative agencies of the federal government; the Supreme Court; and the U.S. military, intelligence, and security apparatus. He will be able to call on support from a wide swath of the public and from a cadre of armed vigilantes and groups organized for violence and intimidation. He dominates much of the media and is in a position to intimidate much of the rest. He has the support of a large sector of corporations and the wealthy. He has a demonstrated willingness and ability to use not just the legal instruments of government but also violence and intimidation, criminal methods, and coups. The official opposition to him within the electoral arena is in many cases weak, feckless, and discredited. So how is it possible that his domination can ever be overcome?

There is a movement emerging in response to the MAGA threat. But is it even possible for this emerging movement to develop the power it will need to counter a Trump tyranny?

Gandhi once wrote, “Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.” A Trump tyranny will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying. It will only be able to pursue its destructive course if they enable or acquiesce in it. A movement can overcome the most powerful regime if it can withdraw that cooperation.

Social Self-Defense means defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from injustice and to defend our common interest as people—as members of society.

But how can that power be concretely realized? There are several ways that resistance to Trump’s MAGA regime can exercise significant power:

• Constituent power: the ability of a mobilized electorate to influence leaders whose own power depends on election.
• Protest power: the ability of masses of people to demonstrate the large numbers and willingness to act of those who share their views.
• Disruptive power: the ability to exact costs on powerful institutions by disrupting their functioning through civil disobedience, strikes, and other forms of direct action.
• People power: the mobilization of an entire society to withdraw support from a regime in order to bring it to an end through a nonviolent uprising or “social strike.”

There are no guarantees that such power can be mobilized in a way that will contain the Trumpian onslaught, let alone bring it to an end. Trump and his coterie appear to be committed to permanent rule by their followers and their ideology. To accomplish that they need to destroy all possible barriers to their domination. They must break down the institutions of democracy that might stand in their way, for example by restricting the right to vote. They need to eviscerate the institutions of law, medicine, civil service, journalism, and other relatively independent bases of potential opposition. They have to prevent economic actors, including corporations and unions, from pursuing their own self-interest rather than conforming to the regime’s demands. They need to intimidate and silence those who might expose their lies and abuses. They must demolish political obstacles, not only from the Democratic Party, but within the Republican Party as well. They need to paralyze the population with fear and entice it with the promise of a better life, or at least with bread and circuses.

While this program for MAGA domination promises enormous power, it also poses enormous vulnerabilities for its perpetrators. By making almost every individual and constituency a potential victim of its onslaught, it is also likely to generate a vast, diverse, and potentially unified opposition. Its program is an attack not just on one or another group, but on society as a whole—on the very practices and relationships that allow us to live together in a peaceful and constructive way. They are undermining the foundations of a free and ordered society. They are dismantling the basic practices that make life something other than a war of all against all. And they are hell-bent on destroying the natural conditions on which our life on Earth depends.

The MAGA regime threatens immigrants, African Americans, Muslims, workers, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people, all who depend on government for their health and well-being, and the environment on which we all depend for our very existence. Indeed, it threatens all that holds us together as a society. The resistance to that onslaught is therefore not just the defense of one or another group, but a defense of society, indeed of the very possibility of society. We the people—society—need to defend ourselves against this threat and bring it to an end. We need what resisters to authoritarian regimes elsewhere have called “Social Self-Defense.”

The term “Social Self-Defense” is borrowed from the struggle against the authoritarian regime in Poland 40 years ago. In the midst of harsh repression, Polish activists formed a loose network to provide financial, legal, medical, and other help to people who had been persecuted by the police or unjustly dismissed from their work. Calling themselves the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), they aimed to fight “political, religious, and ideological persecution”; to “oppose breaches of the law”; to “provide help for the persecuted”; to “safeguard civil liberties”; and to defend “human and civil rights.” KOR organized free trade unions to defend the rights of workers and citizens. Its members, who insisted on operating openly in public, were soon blacklisted, beaten, and imprisoned. They nonetheless persisted, and nurtured many of the networks, strategies, and ideas that came to fruition in the gigantic Solidarity union—and ultimately in the dissolution of repressive regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Social Self-Defense is the protection of that which makes our life together on Earth possible. It includes the protection of the human rights of all people; protection of the conditions of our Earth and its climate that make human life on Earth possible; the constitutional principle that government must be accountable to law; and global cooperation to provide a secure future for people and planet.

The individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as the targets that agenda threatens.

In the face of MAGA assault, protecting individuals, groups, and society as a whole go hand in hand. The attacks on individuals and groups are a threat not only to those directly targeted, but to our ability to live together in our communities, our country, and our world. It is a threat to all of us as members of society. Protecting those specific constituencies who are most threatened is essential for protecting our common interests as people. Social Self-Defense means defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from injustice and to defend our common interest as people—as members of society. Social Self-Defense means we’ve got each other’s backs.

Historians emphasize that there were great political divisions among the KOR activists who first developed the idea of Social Self-Defense. But they were able to act together around the agenda of resisting the Polish regime’s attacks on workers and society as a whole. The individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as the targets that agenda threatens. Trump and his supporters have the potential capacity to play them off against each other and to make deals with them one by one. There will be enormous pressures on advocacy organizations, movements, parties, and even activists themselves to sell each other out.

Social Self-Defense is a means to unify ourselves around mutual aid and around our common interests. It defines Trumpism not only as a series of separate threats to different sectors, constituencies, and policy agendas, but also as a unified—and therefore unifying—common threat. It allows us to use each action and campaign against one or another Trumpite abuse as a way to strike a blow against the MAGA project as a whole. Social Self-Defense does not annul but does transcend the rivalries of Democrats vs. Republicans and of Left vs. Right. It is a frame that can help unify those who should be acting in common to overcome the MAGA juggernaut.

This is the first of a series of Strike! Commentaries on social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut. It originally appeared on the Labor Network for Sustainability website on January 21, 2025.