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Think Trump's Tyranny Can't Be Opposed or Stopped? Think Again
The MAGA movement will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying.
Jan 29, 2025
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.
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Will US Troops Fight Trump’s War on Migrants?
Trump is counting on our armed forces being able to live with forcibly taking people from their homes and separating families right here in the United States, an experience that many of them are all too familiar with.
Jan 21, 2025
This country, once a haven for immigrants, is now on the verge of turning into a first-class nightmare for them. President Donald Trump often speaks of his plan to deport some 11.7 million undocumented immigrants from the United States as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Depending on how closely he follows the Project 2025 policy blueprint of his allies, his administration may also begin deporting the family members of migrants and asylum seekers in vast numbers.
Among the possible ways such planning may not work out, here’s one thing Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd don’t recognize: The troops they plan to rely on to carry out the deportations of potentially millions of people are, in their own way, also migrants. After all, on average, they move from place to place every two and a half years—more if you count the rapid post-9/11 deployments and the Global War on Terror that followed, often separating families multiple times during each soldier’s tour of duty.
Soldiers, sailors, and airmen know what it means to be out of place in a new community or in a country not their own. President Trump and his crew are counting on our armed forces being able to live with forcibly taking people from their homes and separating families right here in the United States, an experience that many of them are all too familiar with. As a military spouse myself, I wonder how amenable they will be to the kinds of orders many Americans can already see coming their way.
An Uncertain Future
Donald Trump’s goals have been outlined in countless campaign speeches, rallies, and press conferences, as well as in Project 2025. According to Tara Watson and Jonathon Zars of the Brookings Institution, his administration could, in fact, do a number of different things when it comes to immigrants. One possibility would be to launch a series of high-profile mass deportation events in which the military would collaborate with federal, state, and local law enforcement, instead of leaving such tasks to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agencies typically responsible for managing migration. To do so, the federal government would have to expand its powers over local and state jurisdictions, including by imposing stiff penalties on sanctuary cities, where local officials have been instructed not to inquire about people’s immigration status or implement federal deportation orders.
Watson and Zars assume that the policies of the second Trump administration will impact a number of other vulnerable groups as well. For example, about 4 to 5 million people with temporary parole status (TPS) or a notice to appear in immigration court are seeking asylum, having fled political persecution or humanitarian disasters in their home countries. Millions of them would (at least theoretically) have to return to the situations they fled because the new administration may not grant their petitions. It could even try to repeal TPS for the approximately 850,000 individuals who already have it.
As a military spouse and a private practice psychotherapist who treats U.S. troops, refugees, and migrants from our post-9/11 wars, I can also say that our servicemembers—all of them—are migrants of a very real sort.
It might also reinstitute the “remain in Mexico” policy last in place in 2019, which required Central and South Americans requesting asylum to wait on the Mexican side of our southern border—a measure the Biden administration repealed due to significant safety concerns. Also at risk would be the two-year grace period granted to approximately half a million people from war-torn or politically unstable countries like Haiti, Ukraine, and Venezuela, while new people would probably no longer be admitted under that program and asylum might be denied to those caught up in this country’s backlogged immigration courts.
Additionally, President Trump could try again to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a protected status that now covers more than half a million young people who came to this country as kids. His administration would also undoubtedly slow-walk legal paths to immigration, like the granting of student and work visas to people from China, and could institute policies that would make it ever more difficult for immigrants to access services like Medicaid and public education. His divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of this country,” has already created a climate of fear for many migrants.
A Merging of Powers
In the early 2000s, America’s post-9/11 War on Terror, the remnants of which are still underway in dozens of countries around the world, provided an impetus for the U.S. to consolidate its military, intelligence, and law enforcement entities under a behemoth new Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of government since World War II. As part of that reorganization, Customs and Border Patrol has become ever more involved in non-border-related functions like local law enforcement while benefitting from closer resource- and information-sharing relationships with federal agencies like the Pentagon.
CBP officers now use military hardware and training and work closely with Pentagon intelligence. To take just one high-profile example, consider the heroic intervention in May 2022 by both on- and off-duty federal Border Patrol agents, including several from a special search-and-rescue tactical unit, during the deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. While much has (justifiably) been made of the heroism of those individuals who stormed the building, relatively little has been said about the fact that CBP, state, and local law enforcement agents were all on the scene within minutes and that the presence of hundreds of Border Patrol officers may have actually contributed to the confusion and long period of inaction that day.
Perhaps more to the point, few questioned why Border Patrol agents were better prepared to enter an elementary school than a local police force, or why it seemed like such an obvious thing for them to do in the first place.
Given all that, consider this a distinct irony: The flip side of CBP’s speed in arriving at Uvalde is how regularly it has failed to perform a range of functions it’s supposed to carry out at the border itself in a timely fashion (or at all), especially when such functions are not combative in nature. Take the standoff in early 2024 in Shelby Park, Texas, a 2.5-mile stretch of border along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general. There, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deployed state National Guard members to prevent CBP from actually processing arriving migrants, complaining that “the only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border.” Abbott’s planned standoff marked the first time a governor had deployed a state national guard against federal orders since 1957, when Gov. Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to keep Black children from attending an elementary school under federal orders.
The Strange Bedfellows Who Would Implement Trump’s Desires
Military troops who would no doubt have to step in to implement migrant deportation plans as massive as Trump’s would occupy a similarly complicated position, both as outsiders on the local scene and as those charged (nominally at least) with protecting innocent lives. Stranger yet, a small but significant slice of any set of troops asked to take part in such deportations would themselves be immigrants. Five percent, or 1 in 20 servicemembers in our military, were not born here. And there’s nothing new about that. Since the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of noncitizens have served in America’s wars. During times of hostility, which (officially speaking) include all the years since the War on Terror began in 2001, the federal government expedited the legal path of those immigrant troops to citizenship. It remains unclear how a military that has long been diverse will respond to orders to brutalize people, some of whom may come from their very own communities.
As a military spouse and a private practice psychotherapist who treats U.S. troops, refugees, and migrants from our post-9/11 wars, I can also say that our servicemembers—all of them—are migrants of a very real sort. Culturally, our troops understand both migration and multiculturalism because they have to adapt again and again to new towns or cities where residents don’t see them as real members of their communities, where it’s hard to find doctors and childcare within the military’s anemic infrastructure, and still harder to find these services in communities about which they lack knowledge and connections. In the most challenging of such cases, servicemembers and their families end up in countries where they don’t speak the language or know anyone, and where they may encounter justifiable hostility towards their presence.
Many of those involved in America’s post-9/11 wars have witnessed another’s suffering in an up-close-and-personal fashion, and the ongoing nightmare they face is the possibility of hurting yet more people in all of our names.
The experiences of the myriad groups I see in my practice and know in my broad military community overlap in often profound ways that bring images of immigrants to my mind. Many in such populations understand in their bones what it’s like to be the object of local attention, curiosity, even hostility when they venture out each day. They know what it means to constantly translate from your own language and world into that of a local one (or navigate life without knowledge of the native language at all). They also know what it’s like to have all too few resources to handle a medical emergency or an event like the illness or even the death of a loved one that neither the military nor local resources can help with.
I know one military family whose members struggled for two years in a foreign post because one of their children had a physical disability that neither the military nor the local educational system could accommodate, forcing the military spouse to homeschool. When that spouse came down with a severe case of Covid-19 during the pandemic, they searched long and hard for an appropriate doctor to provide outpatient care so that she didn’t have to leave her young children.
Their experiences mirror those of many I see within migrant communities of color here in the U.S., who come up short when they seek educational and health services for children with special needs, and who suffered more gravely during the Covid-19 pandemic due to overcrowded hospitals as well as social isolation and lack of enough connections to care for young family members when one got ill. It’s no wonder that two groups among us with some of the highest rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality are military families and immigrants from poor countries.
Violence Touches Us All
Broadly speaking, what those two distinctive groups have in common is that, in this century, they felt the most pressure when it came to dealing with this country’s global imperial desires, either by fighting our remarkably disastrous post-9/11 wars or by finding themselves forced to pick up and start over amid the never-ending destruction of those very wars. To end that cycle of migration-as-combat and combat-as-migration, a better world would not dream of kicking out the migrants in this country. Instead, it would be working to bring back the troops from all the places where they are currently still engaged, rather than preparing for conflicts that will only help to create more migrants.
The United States should stop organizing military “exercises” in places like Saudi Arabia and Somalia; stop training troops in countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uzbekistan; and cease drone and air strikes in Syria and Iraq, among other examples of our military involvement abroad. We should just get out. And we should start funneling some of the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve channeled annually into weapons production into our education system, healthcare, and green infrastructure here at home, so that there’s room for everyone, immigrants included, to be safe and cared for in the communities where they live.
Otherwise, if President Trump manages to realize even a modest part of the immigrant deportation goals he and his political allies have outlined, the bulk of the work of ejection will be done by those for whom it may be the most morally devastating. Many more of our troops than he could ever imagine will, I suspect, be unnerved by what they have in common with the people they’re charged with deporting from their adoptive homeland.
Yes, this may very well be wishful thinking on my part, but I do believe that, Donald Trump or not, our common humanity is likely to win out in the end. After years of studying America’s post-9/11 wars from a range of viewpoints (and listening to those deeply disturbed by their War on Terror experiences), the largest commonality I find among our troops is not a desire to take up arms or fight terrorists in distant lands, or even the experience of being personally victimized—hunted, shot, tortured, or maimed. Rather, it’s the trauma of hurting another human being. It’s wrought from looking a Taliban soldier in the eye at a checkpoint in Kabul and realizing he’s human just like you, or separating a suspected opposition fighter from his spouse and kids during an arrest. It’s the scream of a child whose parent you shot during a raid to prevent an attack on you.
In no small part, the stress of those experiences also came from having to leave your own children for months at a time, knowing that the youngest might not even remember you when you return, or telling your teenager that she has to abandon everything she knows—boyfriend, school, sports teams—to go to a new military town where no one will even know her name. Many of those involved in America’s post-9/11 wars have witnessed another’s suffering in an up-close-and-personal fashion, and the ongoing nightmare they face is the possibility of hurting yet more people in all of our names.
Thanks to Donald Trump, at least some of those troops will undoubtedly face the choice of having to do it all again, this time on our own soil. Unless they pause at the memory of what that may be like, Americans could find themselves in an unrecognizable land. It will be a nightmare if, his second time in the White House, Donald Trump launches a war on terror domestically against migrants, because that would be a war on America itself.
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Elections Are About People: Listen to Them
We can’t afford to continue to make these same mistakes. We must do what Americans seem so loathe to do—stop and reflect.
Dec 07, 2024
On the morning of November 6, many of us found ourselves facing the seemingly inconceivable fact that Donald Trump had become the next president of the United States of America—again. Not only had he won the electoral college, but he had won the popular vote as well. There were no stories we could tell ourselves this time to explain it away. It was a clear victory and a clear loss.
As the hours and then days passed, I sat with this truth, and as I did, I came to realize that this outcome had never been inconceivable. In fact, we should have expected nothing less. We had been heading down this path for too long, so blind to reality that we hadn’t even stopped to check the map before finding ourselves utterly lost.
We didn’t begin this journey when Biden agreed to exit the race. We didn’t begin it when it was clear Trump would run again. Not even after the first Trump win. No, we had been hurdling down this road toward a complete disconnect with large swaths of the American people for quite some time. Looking back, the clearest indication to me was the Wikileaks release of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails showing their bias toward Hillary Clinton. That moment should have forced a reckoning. But none of us stopped long enough to reflect on how broken our party had become. Instead, we blamed Russian interference for forcing us to hold up a mirror to our own issues.
We did fail. This is no one’s fault but our own. This is not Trump’s fault. This is not the fault of those who voted for Trump. This is our fault.
The Democratic party is the party of organized labor. The party supporting civil rights and protecting minorities. The party of the working class, immigrants, the disenfranchised. But over the past two years, as we watched how the party chose to run the Biden campaign and then the Harris campaign, it was hard to see that party.
I truly wanted Harris to win, of course I did. She would have championed many of the issues I feel passionately about: job creation and economic growth; social and economic inequity; well-funded social services to protect the poor, the elderly, children, and other vulnerable populations; combatting threats to the civil rights of minorities, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community; affordable health care options; sensible gun legislation; women’s reproductive rights; and climate change. I disagreed with her refusal to speak out against the war in Gaza and for not insisting a Palestinian-American speak at the Democratic National Convention. But I knew how dangerous any alternative would be. And, not for nothing, I needed to see a woman become president.
Unfortunately, the DNC didn’t allow us to choose our candidate. In silencing our choice, many felt detached from the entire process. By skipping the Iowa caucuses, it was impossible for anyone to challenge Biden’s candidacy. When he left the race, the candidacy was simply given to Harris rather than allowing Democrats to feel like they had made her their choice. At that point it was too late for her to introduce herself to the American people, to make her case, to earn our trust and our vote.
Harris’s campaign spent nearly a billion dollars. Focusing on celebrity endorsements and concert rallies only served to prove Trump’s message that Democrats were the elite, out of touch with everyday Americans. In the final days of the campaign, Harris went on a “blue wall” tour with Liz Cheney to win undecided independents and moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, alienated voters in mining towns, inner cities, and immigrant communities across the country didn’t get such royal treatment. Their votes were assumed. They shouldn’t have been.
On election day, I knew I needed to find some way to occupy my time rather than checking CNN every few minutes and watching the minutes tick by until the polls closed. I was fortunate enough to be able to work the phones from 6:30 a.m.–8:00 p.m. with Drive Your Ballot, a volunteer-run organization in Philadelphia. For thirteen and a half hours I fielded 125 calls from people who needed a free ride to the polls, regardless of their circumstances or political affiliation. When I finally sat down to watch the results come in that night, I should have known what the next day would bring. I feel foolish now not to have known.
We can’t afford to continue to make these same mistakes. We must do what Americans seem so loathe to do—stop and reflect. I know there is an immediate battle ahead, but we must assess how we lost this one first. Because we did lose. We did fail. This is no one’s fault but our own. This is not Trump’s fault. This is not the fault of those who voted for Trump. This is our fault. We didn’t listen. We presumed we knew better.
I wrote a poem a couple days after Trump’s victory and Harris’s loss. In writing through my sorrow, anger, and pain, I was able to hear the voices of those my party is meant to represent, protect, and listen to. We must do better.
Election Day
I wake early, phone lines opening at 6:30.
140 miles north
cars idle on the streets of Philadelphia—ready.
If you want to vote today, we’ll get you there.
For twelve hours, call after call after call.
The sick, the elderly, the infirm.
Disabled, addicted, blind, homeless.
Some broken, some lonely.
Some desperate for an opportunity,
any opportunity.
A woman who speaks little English
knows two words very well
and repeats them emphatically:
“No Trump. No Trump. No Trump.”
A couple at a crappy motel outside the city,
snipe at each other as we talk.
They’ve been travelling too far, are too tired,
have been looking for a ride for too long.
“I think I got to get into this mess today.
Gotta jump into this voting thing,”
a blind man tells me.
“But can’t drive myself, now can I?”
A soft-spoken girl asks,
“Can my driver please be a woman?
I need it to be a woman.”
So, when the next young woman calls
I make sure to ask if she needs any
special accommodations,
“No,” she laughs embarrassed,
“I just don’t have no money.”
The moment I hang up,
the next call comes in.
One after another after another
after another after another
after another.
Until they stop.
The next morning the sun inexplicably rises,
shining down on a state awash in red—
the City of Brotherly Love,
a blue bruise in the corner.
We failed.
We failed Auntie Audrey, 102,
whose niece didn’t own a car.
She’d seen so much in her lifetime,
but not a president that looked like her.
We failed the homeless mother of two,
desperate to traverse the city from her shelter.
“The car needs to be big enough for all of us.
I need to bring my kids.”
We failed because someone forgot.
Forgot who we were fighting for.
Forgot who needed protecting.
Forgot our soul.
They forgot those five men
at the inpatient addiction facility
who needed a second chance.
They forgot that damn couple
in that crappy motel
who went from yelling at each other,
to yelling at me
because their ride hadn’t shown up.
They were hungry. They were done.
We all need to remember.
Because when we forgot,
we didn’t just fail Philadelphia.
We failed our entire country.
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