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solidarity
Lessons From Resisting Draft Registration That Can Help With the Fight Against Trump
Each of us has a responsibility to reach inside and find the courage to do what we can in our individual lives; where we work, study, pray, or recreate; and through coming together collectively.
Feb 11, 2025
Forty years ago I was sleeping on a mattress in the catwalk of an overcrowded cellblock in the old Public Safety Building in downtown Syracuse. I had just been sentenced to prison for my public refusal to register for the draft. On February 4, 1985, I walked into the Federal Courthouse in Syracuse. Having recently turned 24, I was a bit nervous about my future, but buoyed by the support of a broad community, including my family. Standing up for my deeply-held belief that war threatened the future of humanity eased my anxiety. Judge Howard Munson sent me to prison for six months, to be followed by 30 months of probation and a 30 month suspended sentence.
These days I’m reflecting on that chapter of my life, and the lessons that are useful as we face a White House seeking to undermine democracy and concentrate power in the hands of an autocrat. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration was engaged in its own deception, illegal activity, and attacks on working people. However, I believe that the current moment is, without a doubt, the most dangerous time for our nation during my lifetime. U.S. President Donald Trump’s nomination of highly-unqualified cabinet picks and efforts to dismantle the federal government seek an unprecedented level of executive power and blind obedience.
Without sustained, persistent, and bold grassroots organizing and resistance, they will be able to carry out many of their anti-democratic schemes.
Although I was sent to prison for refusing to sign a piece of paper (the draft registration form), the larger issue was my belief that war is an immoral and destructive way to solve problems. In court the month before, I argued, “I have an obligation to uphold international law based on the Nuremberg Accords, which were initiated by the United States following World War II. I have an obligation not to participate in, ‘Planning, preparation, initiation or, waging of war,’ even if in order to uphold those agreements, I need to break the laws of my own country.”
I stood alone before the judge and jury during the trial and the sentencing, but was joined by a courtroom packed with supporters and hundreds outside demonstrating their commitment to move our nation from a foreign policy based on war and bullying to one based on diplomacy and international cooperation.
Before my sentencing I read excerpts from a Solidarity Statement signed by over 2,600 people,
The case of the United States against Andy Mager is also the case of the United States against each of us and against many others who are not here today… We ask, if you convict Andy Mager, that you convict all of us, that you imprison all of us, or none of us.
The time in prison included some very challenging moments, but was a powerful learning experience. I saw firsthand what happens to so many millions of people caught up in our criminal legal system. As a white person from a privileged background, this glimpse into the lives of people who are marginalized and forgotten has continued to inform my organizing work.
From court, I was taken to the public safety building in Syracuse, where I was held for 10 days before transfer to the federal prison system. Within a couple of days, I was part of a hunger strike to demand better treatment and conditions. The strike was clearly inspired in part by my resistance and the publicity my fellow prisoners had seen it garner. Those involved crossed many of the boundaries which keep people divided in prison and throughout our society and included at least one person who told me he agreed with his father that “they should take people like me (anti-war protesters) out behind the barn and shoot them.”
I received support from people who fully supported my political perspective, and respect from others who disagreed with me on those issues but understood the importance of standing up publicly for one’s beliefs. When I left Lewisburg Federal Prison Camp, my resolve to continue organizing for peace and justice was firm.
The four decades since then have offered many lessons which are instructive in our current situation. We are just a few weeks into an administration which is seeking to sow chaos and division. The Trump regime hopes to overwhelm us with so many outrageous actions simultaneously. Their goal is to create fear and hopelessness, enabling them to greatly concentrate power and move forward with their authoritarian plans.
Without sustained, persistent, and bold grassroots organizing and resistance, they will be able to carry out many of their anti-democratic schemes. Each of us has a responsibility to reach inside and find the courage to do what we can in our individual lives; where we work, study, pray, or recreate; and through coming together collectively. Here’s my best thinking right now, based on over four decades of community organizing, including my refusal to cooperate with draft registration:
- Don’t act out of fear and panic—we need to be thoughtful and strategic, while also acting quickly to intervene. The impact of the organizing on my draft resistance case was much greater because of the planning over many months.
- Learn from the development of fascism in other countries—Germany, Italy, Chile, Hungary, and elsewhere—and from the resistance movements.
- Join or initiate collective campaigns to stand up for democratic values; protect those most targeted; and work for equity, justice, and a sustainable future. The hunger strike described briefly above is an example of people with many differences coming together over shared concerns to take action.
- There are many specific issues under threat, from the human rights of immigrants to a quickly warming planet to efforts to repair the harm from centuries of racism. Focus your energy where you feel the most passion and believe you can best contribute. In the 1980s as someone directly affected by draft registration, I was highly motivated to work on that issue, and was effective because I could speak in the first person about my choices.
- Lend support—emotional, practical, and material to people in your community. Practice mutual aid. Listen to the pain of immigrants facing deportation or trans youth in fear, and offer assistance as you are able.
- Pressure public officials—demand that they protect their constituents and stand for justice, let them know when you’re upset by their actions and that you appreciate it when they do the right thing. Call them, write letters, send emails, visit their offices.
- Participate in demonstrations, marches, boycotts, and nonviolent direct action. Visible, public opposition is important, and gathering together in solidarity helps us maintain our spirit and commitment in difficult times. The support demonstrations at my trial and sentencing, including two small groups who engaged in nonviolent direct action after my sentencing, engaged many more people in the work, increased public attention, and strengthened my capacity to resist.
- Organize support for candidates in local races who will work with us to protect democracy and our communities.
- Speak up in solidarity when you hear attacks on other people or repetition of lies and disinformation.
The coming months and years will be difficult, and there will be continued, and in some cases escalating, suffering. As I learned 40 years ago, “Together We Are Strong.” We can’t stop all of it, but if we pull together and act out of love and compassion we can defend much of what is important and lay the foundation for more transformational change in the years and decades to come.
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Creating a Robust Ecology of Change to Resist Trump 2.0
Movements gain strength when they can find ways for many approaches to work together.
Feb 08, 2025
In the wake of the 2024 election and U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to power, we have heard many suggestions for how progressives should regroup and respond. Some activists have argued that we need to prepare for mass protest and civil disobedience against the horrific policies the administration is bound to implement, such as mass deportations and the rolling back of labor rights—with some organizers, following United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, going so far as to suggest that a general strike could congeal by the end of Trump’s term. Others, citing feelings of “protest fatigue,” are instead using the moment to build communities of care and mutual aid. A third group has pushed for a revival of base-building and community organizing. And still others have looked to electoral campaigns and legal action at the state and local level as a bulwark against federal hostility.
In early December, the Ayni Institute convened a summit in Boston where organizational leaders and veteran activists came together around a different proposition: namely, that none of these strategies, by itself, is sufficient. Rather, movements gain strength when they can find ways for many approaches to work together.
The fortunes of social movements depend on the dynamic relationships that exist within the ecosystem of groups pursuing political transformation.
At the gathering, some 70 participants representing movements around climate, criminal justice reform and prison abolition, immigrant rights, and economic justice, as well as leaders in philanthropy, engaged spirituality, and local government, shared learnings and strengthened ties as a community of practice dedicated to creating healthy social movement ecosystems. These practitioners held in common the belief that defeating the forces of white supremacy and creeping authoritarianism, while winning true economic justice and multiracial democracy, is not a matter of finding one “right” strategy for change. Rather, social movement success is predicated on appreciating the varied contributions of groups pursuing different theories of change and crafting complex collaborations between them.
By finding ways to manage the tensions that commonly arise, while rejecting the idea that diverse initiatives should be seen as being in competition with one another, movement organizations can emerge with greater strategic clarity and a stronger sense of common purpose. The discussions taking place at the summit offered some key insights into how.
Social Movements as Ecosystems
The Ayni Institute describes social movements as “multi-strategic.” As the organization explains in a video introducing the model of social movement ecology, “This means that they implement many different strategies towards creating social change simultaneously, whether they are conscious of it or not.” Varied theories of change are embodied by organizations in different parts of a movement ecosystem. In principle, these can be complementary. In the moments that movements are most successful, it is generally because groups with different organizing traditions and strategic approaches have been able to come together or play off of one another in constructive ways. Yet often these different approaches come into tension. Crucial to managing the conflicts that emerge is clarifying the divergent assumptions and organizational practices held in the distinct segments of the ecology.
We have worked with Carlos Saavedra at Ayni to develop a framework that classifies movement organizations based on their primary approach to making change, dividing them into five categories. The first category is perhaps the most mainstream and accepted within U.S. society: the inside game. Here, advocates lobby policymakers, enter into electoral contests, file lawsuits, or otherwise work within society’s existing dominant institutions.
Two other approaches also try to influence these dominant institutions, but do so by wielding power from the outside. Practitioners of structure-based organizing work to build durable membership organizations, such as unions and community groups, that can leverage the influence that comes from a unified base to extract concessions from corporations, landlords, politicians, bureaucrats, and other powerholders. A separate approach, mass protest, uses large-scale demonstrations and escalating campaigns of civil resistance to alter the limits of political debate. Such campaigns allow mobilized communities to create urgency around an issue and shift public opinion, “changing the weather” around their issues and producing more favorable conditions for all the other strategies. At its most potent, mass protest uses the disruptive power of widespread noncooperation to suspend the ordinary workings of mainstream institutions and thereby force concessions from those in power.
The two other approaches to change operate outside of dominant institutions. Activists constructing alternatives attempt to “prefigure” new possibilities for society by building models of social housing, community farms, credit unions, worker co-ops, countercultural arts spaces, and radical schools. These types of alternative institutions provide bottom-up methods for serving the needs of the community while also embodying a set of values distinct from mainstream capitalist accumulation and profit-seeking. Finally, organizations oriented toward personal transformation believe, in Ayni’s words, “that change happens when we better our lives and the lives of others through providing service, improving our health and well-being, or reaching higher levels of consciousness.” Society is transformed as the lives of individuals are improved through spiritual pursuit, education, therapy, or recovery practices, or other one-on-one development and support.
The fact that there can be invaluable work going on in each of the five segments highlights the idea that there is no single correct approach to creating change. Rather, the fortunes of social movements depend on the dynamic relationships that exist within the ecosystem of groups pursuing political transformation.
Mapping the Terrain of Movement Organizations
With regard to its most recent gathering, the purpose of Ayni’s summit was not to introduce movement ecology to new people. Rather, it was to bring together a community of practitioners who have already aimed to implement the framework into their organizing. Participants compared notes about how the tool has aided their work, as well as about how to confront challenges that have gained urgency in the current political moment. To this end, attendees wrestled with issues such as how to make political advances in populist times, how to defend movements against authoritarian repression, how to deal with periods of failure in organizations, how more-neglected segments of the ecology can be integrated, and how to construct more sophisticated collaborations.
In discussions with various organizers, several key reflections emerged about how thinking through the dynamics of movement ecosystems can foster strategic advances.
A first important use of movement ecology articulated by members of the community of practice was as a tool that could help them map the universe of organizations working on their issue areas or within their geographical regions. One participant who described using the framework in this way was Dawn Harrington, who both manages special projects for the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and serves as the executive director of Free Hearts, a Tennessee-based organization led by women directly affected by the prison system.
“These feelings of failure and tension can also birth experimentation—if you’re open to it.”
“We require people that are trying to join the leadership of our organization to do a course in social movement ecology,” she said. “Then during our leadership campaigns and policy meetings, we look all across the state and ask, ‘What are the different organizations and the different theories of change? And where are the gaps? Where do we need more of this or that?’”
Harrington emphasizes that the framework gives shared language to describe strategic differences, and is helpful in navigating conflicts among diverse groups. “We prioritize structure organizing as our core strategy, and so where there were groups doing personal transformation or straight up inside-game, we were having a lot of conflicts,” Harrington explained. “Before, we were thinking, ‘Okay, it’s just personal issues, or we just hate each other.’ But the movement ecology framework helped us to understand that it’s actually our theories of change that are in tension, and it helped us better appreciate the other areas of change.”
Not all experiments with the framework were successful. “When we first got trained in the model, the first thing we did was try to build a cross-theory-of-change coalition across our state,” Harrington said. “It started out really good,” she added, but resentment built when not all groups were equally committed to joint campaign work. Still, “it wasn’t a complete failure, because I think it got us to the point where we know what’s happening across the state with other organizations, and there is more communication.”
In moments when the Tennessee state government has locked in conservative rule and inside-game efforts have been stymied, movement ecology allowed organizers in the criminal justice space to identify opportunities to build power from the outside, Harrington said: “We can see the whole picture of how, even when politically things are getting worse, we’re still building a movement. All the pieces fit together.”
Filling Gaps, Navigating Tensions
James Hayes, co-director of Ohio Voice, an organization dedicated to doing ongoing civic engagement with underrepresented communities in order to win progressive governance, has seen benefits as the framework has gained a foothold among groups in his state. “Movement ecology has been part of our strategic plan since I joined the team in 2017, and we train a lot of people in our space in Ohio on it,” Hayes said. “In large part, it just helps us have shared language to talk about the things that we are seeing and experiencing. So if we have disagreements, we’re using similar terms and coming to a similar understanding of what we’re disagreeing about.”
At the Ayni conference, a variety of representatives from the foundation world who were present argued that movement ecology allows them to identify areas of need and to make a case for dedicating funding to underdeveloped areas. For Hayes’s organization, the framework serves a similar function, helping them to set priorities. “It’s been helpful in thinking about what type of work we really want to support at Ohio Voice—to ask ‘where do we want to focus our resources, our energy, our time?’” he explained. “Part of our analysis is seeing that we had a lot of mass protest energy erupt over the years, but there has been a loss of organizing capacity in that time for various reasons. We saw that we needed more groups doing base building and running issue campaigns at the local level.”
Furthering the point, Hayes argues that an examination of the ecology in a given region can reveal imbalances that are creating weaknesses for movements. “We’ve been able to talk about how people have gotten away from organizing and become reliant on inside-game strategies—and how that’s not working now because gerrymandering has made it very difficult to move anything,” he said.
Hayes also echoes Harrington’s belief that awareness of movement ecology allows groups to better navigate tensions. He mentioned Equality Ohio, which is one of the more powerful organizations working on LGBTQ issues in the state. “Historically, the relationships between more insider groups like Equality Ohio and more radical queer liberation groups have been frayed and tense,” Hayes explained. “The previous executive director a couple years ago told me how grateful she was for the movement ecology framework, because it gave her the tools to talk with her team and her board and also to talk with outside partners about how they can have better relationships.”
This has concrete effects on how campaigns played out, Hayes believes. “There was really powerful work that happened, where people engaging in the State House strategy were open to there being more outside game energy and to some of those types of pressure tactics,” he said. “In general, it just resulted in a growth of capacity, culminating in getting the governor to veto an anti-trans bill that had been passed.”
Among other takeaways from the Ayni conference, Hayes points to discussion of inside-outside strategies. “I think eight or 10 years ago, there would have been huge pushback on the idea that movements doing co-governance was even possible, let alone necessary,” he said. “I think now there’s a huge hunger for it. We’re bringing more people into a conversation about what type of power we need if we’re going to get what we want out of electoral politics.”
Allowing for Both Focus and flexibility
Juan Pablo Orjuela, a community organizer and longtime immigrant rights leader with groups including Movimiento Cosecha, spoke to how an ecological framework can help specific organizations focus on what they do best, while also allowing wider movements to make strategic pivots when circumstances warrant.
“First being introduced to movement ecology, it was like an ‘Aha’! Before, when I was coming into mass protests, it felt like a negation of structure-based organizing, which is the philosophy that I came from,” Orjuela said. “Movement ecology helped me reconcile that these two traditions can exist and work together in some way. And it helped me be less resentful when people didn’t understand where I was coming from.”
Belief that change can be a result of multiple strategies does not mean that “anything goes,” or that all efforts are equally effective. Individual organizations must still make difficult choices about how to focus their work. And when they do choose to situate themselves within a given segment of an ecosystem, they should lean in to maximizing the role they have chosen. While doing this, they can also recognize that, as political circumstances shift, different parts of the movement may temporarily come to the fore while others recede in importance, only to become more significant later on.
We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0.
“I was recently hired to do a strategic retreat with an organization in Los Angeles that was feeling really stretched thin, and we used movement ecology to help them diagnose what they were doing,” Orjuela said. The group’s leaders began to see that they were being asked to operate in many different segments of the ecosystem simultaneously—building alternatives through a land trust, while also running a personal transformation program for tenants, and then still trying to do structure-based organizing with a fiscal sponsor. “They had never broken down their work like that,” Orjuela explained. “And I think it was really helpful for them to realize, ‘we’re stretched thin because we’re working on too many theories of change.’”
The next day they talked about what their priorities were. The conversation allowed the group to drill down into a core strategy that best made use of their capabilities.
In addition to helping leaders focus on the work that they do best, Orjuela has witnessed how movement ecology can allow for greater strategic flexibility at key moments. Previously, he was involved with a campaign in New Jersey to pass a law that allows undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. “This is really important for a lot of people,” he said, because it means that being stopped by police for a traffic violation “doesn’t have to turn into a deportation proceeding.”
Orjuela saw the New Jersey campaign go through several rounds of battle between 2013 and 2019, with activists dealing with feelings of failure and defeat when a given push did not yield success. The first efforts, based in community organizing and inside-game maneuvering, came tantalizingly close. But that made it all the more heartbreaking when they fell short. “In 2015, we had the votes to get it out of committee,” he explained. “But there was an external event—a terrorist attack in Europe—that made anti-immigrant sentiment go up.” In the new climate, the politicians decided to not move forward with the bill. “There was this sense of grief in the base, and a lot of resentment and distrust,” Orjuela said, with many organizers leaving the campaign.
Yet within a couple years, Orejuela found himself drawn back in. “There was a feeling of, ‘We don’t want to fail the same way again,’” he said. This resulted in a hunger for new tactics. And in this context, Orejuela identified mass protest as an organizing tradition that had not yet been significantly deployed. People said to Cosecha, “You need to come here and implement this. It was actually by popular demand. Like we almost felt like we had no choice,” he said and laughed. “We shifted more to getting in the face of politicians and making them answer for why this bill had failed so many times. Instead of lobbying, we would take the tone of demanding.”
The campaign also launched a 300-mile pilgrimage across the state. As Orjuela explained, “It showed the need for driver’s licenses, because to not break the law, we had to walk all the way to Trenton to advocate for ourselves.”
In December 2019, Gov. Phil Murphy finally signed the bill, making New Jersey the 14th state, including the District of Columbia, to expand access to driver’s licenses and state ID cards. The ACLU cited it as a landmark measure, noting that it allows more than 700,000 New Jersey residents to gain the documentation necessary to drive.
In a session at the Ayni summit devoted to how organizers can grapple with the feelings of failure that commonly emerge over the course of movement cycles, Orjuela offered a reflection from the New Jersey campaign: “With grief came a recognition that we needed to try something different,” he said. “These feelings of failure and tension can also birth experimentation—if you’re open to it.”
For Orejuela, the Ayni gathering overall was an opportunity to both share his experiences and build his comfort in working with more people on movement ecology, even if they have never heard of the concept. “I don’t approach it from an academic background. I’m a trial-by-fire kind of person, and sometimes that’s made me afraid to talk about the things that I’ve actually learned about, even if I have the language for it,” he said. “For me, the more I integrate the framework, the more confidence I gain. And it’s cool to talk about it with the level of proficiency that I know I do have.”
Learning Through Practice
The intent of the Ayni summit was not to launch a formal coalition, or even to create full alignment around strategy on how to build opposition to the Trump administration. Instead, by bringing people together who are incorporating an ecological framework into their organizing and who are coming from different segments of the social movement ecosystem, the gathering showed how a model that might otherwise be just a theoretical construct is being made real through practice and refinement.
Far too often, Ayni argues, “social change gets boxed into narrow choices: advocacy, elections, or service work,” when the real change comes just as much from “building alternatives, organizing mass civil resistance, and leading transformative community organizing.” Having a community that has been willing to bring foundational theories of change together, engage with friction and difference, and process the tensions that arise gives hope that the problems that have hobbled movements in the past may have a less pernicious hold.
In this respect, the gathering offered a vital lesson: We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0. But if we foster a robust ecology of change, we may yet see the movement resurgence that we need.
Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.
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As Trump and Musk Flood the Zone, Solidarity Is Our Life Raft
When they manufacture chaos to divide us, we must recognize it as a desperate attempt to prevent us from building the collective power they fear.
Feb 07, 2025
These first 100 days in any presidency is a statement. A statement made for one's supporters who then cheer in response. U.S. President Donald Trump made a clear statement when he pardoned everyone involved in the assault on the capitol on January 6, 2021. Many have become concerned the message is that political violence on behalf of Trump will be forgiven, condoned, and even encouraged. No doubt his most fervent supporters are receiving the message and have already vowed revenge.
During these first 100 days the messages are also for those who did not vote for the president. Past administrations have often gone to extremes to find a way to include someone in their cabinet from the opposite party, an expression of a political olive branch, a promise to work together, across differences in priorities and ideologies. Here, Trump is sending the message that anyone who has ever even as much as thought in ways that were not in favor of him are in danger, in danger of losing their jobs, and even in physical danger as he prioritized removing security clearances from Gen. Mark Milley and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
We are receiving statements, and many of us are left with a set of chaotic destructions to try to untangle and make sense of. The shock and awe, the flooding of the zone that Steve Bannon and others have articulated is playing out. We know their playbook, yet we find our emotions played with regardless. As an already exhausted Stephen Colbert noted on his show on January 30, this isn't our first rodeo. We know how they will push us around with the 24-hour disorienting news cycle, yet somehow we're still receiving a concussion. Even when we can anticipate trauma, it doesn't negate the impact on our bodies—individual and collective.
Trump's entertaining charades, his absurdly chaotic and nonsensical yet mesmerizing performance, leaves us breathless and tells us a lie about our neighbors being our enemies rather than our greatest assets.
On January 29, we saw 67 bodies, 67 lives become extinguished in a tragic crash where an army helicopter crashed into plane landing from Wichita, Kansas in D.C. The country grieved the unimaginable. The first major airline incident since 2009. I know most of us held each other extra close at the news, and our hearts broke for all those whose future would never be the same, who are enduring the unimaginable grief of losing someone who is everything to them.
Yet before families could even begin to process their losses, with a racist and ableist fervor, Trump seized this tragedy as another opportunity to divide us. Without evidence, he blamed diversity initiatives and disabled people—a claim that is unabashedly in opposition of reality. The New York Times reported that staffing shortages are the more pressing concern, with federal agencies struggling for years to fill key positions at the Federal Aviation Administration. The type of staffing that had one air traffic control worker managing both helicopters and planes is reportedly not uncommon, pointing to systemic issues rather than Trump's manufactured and dangerous crisis about diversity in the workplace.
This administration's strategy is clear: Create chaos, place blame on marginalized communities, and hope we're too exhausted to see through the smoke and mirrors. Meanwhile, federal workers are being pressured—by Elon Musk's DOGE initiative no less—to accept questionable "Fork in the Road" resignation offers, further destabilizing our institutions and the people who keep them running. Ironically these resignations are being forced as a way to save money while Elon Musk's company Tesla paid $0 in taxes in 2024.
The cruel irony is that diversity actually strengthens teams and improves performance—this isn't just rhetoric, it's backed by extensive research. Recent McKinsey studies show companies committed to diversity demonstrate a 39% increased likelihood of outperformance. Diverse teams bring unique perspectives that unlock innovation, enhance problem-solving, and create environments where everyone feels empowered to contribute their full expertise. When we artificially limit who can participate, we all lose.
But this administration isn't interested in evidence-based policy. If they were, we would see very different approaches across the board. Take trans healthcare, for example. The American Medical Association has explicitly stated that gender-affirming care is medically necessary, warning that "forgoing gender-affirming care can have tragic consequences." They've urged governors to oppose legislation prohibiting such care for minor patients, calling it "a dangerous intrusion into the practice of medicine." Yet instead of following medical expertise, we see continued demonization of trans youth and their families. This assault on evidence extends further—a harrowing war on science has been unleashed, with Trump officials now targeting even basic terms like "gender" and "disability" through the National Science Foundation.
As this administration wages war on scientific language and evidence-based policy, there is much chaos to weed through, and it is hard to know what to pay attention to. So much of these performances are really designed to exhaust us. To leave us feeling defeated. There are lots of questions about what resistance looks like at a time like this. Even questions as to whether resistance is possible.
My answer to these questions is: Of course there is resistance. In fact, there is what indigenous scholar Gerald Vizenor termed survivance. Right now, surviving IS resistance. When so many of our neighbors are directly threatened, their joy and their existence IS resistance.
These tactics from Trump and Musk are pointing toward how we need to strategize as a response. We need a politics of solidarity. Solidarity means seeing that for most of us who hold complex identities, we are seeing our rights be whittled away. This administration is deploying transparent strategies to turn us against one another even as we see the way elite billionaires—the same ones standing behind him during the inauguration, obstructing the view of his future cabinet—are the only ones likely to thrive. The price of eggs is not going down. Tariffs on our closest neighbors, and our greatest allies, have been put on a pause after another frantic performance that ate up airwaves, yet they loom—leaving the possibility of, in the near future, increasing prices on basic necessities in the United States due to these tariffs. Most of us who are not elite billionaires are unlikely to see our quality of life improve.
Yet, Trump's entertaining charades, his absurdly chaotic and nonsensical yet mesmerizing performance, leaves us breathless and tells us a lie about our neighbors being our enemies rather than our greatest assets. He wants us to forget that we need each other—that our strength lies in our connections, our differences, our willingness to stand together.
There is a lesson here, an insight into what we need to survive, what we need to ensure everyone in our community is safe, and also an insight into what one strategy of dehumanization is for this administration. When they blame disabled people for an awful tragedy like the plane crash on January 29, we must recognize disabled people as vital assets to our communities. When they deny healthcare to trans youth, we must loudly and actively speak out in support of our trans friends, neighbors, and family members. When they vilify immigrants, we must remember that we are—as the poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote—each other's harvest.
But let's be clear: The road ahead will be brutal. As more of us face direct threats to our lives and livelihoods, things will likely get worse before they get even worse. Many of us—disabled people, trans youth, people of color, immigrants, women, educators, dedicated federal workers, and others targeted by this administration—are not safe, and that's not hyperbole. That's precisely why solidarity isn't just a nice ideal—it's a survival strategy. When they manufacture chaos to divide us, we must recognize it as a desperate attempt to prevent us from building the collective power they fear. When they try to exhaust us, we must lean on each other. When they push policies that threaten our very existence, we must hold onto each other tighter.
Our solidarity is not based on naive optimism but on the clear-eyed understanding that we cannot survive alone. In these dangerous times, coming together isn't just an option—it's our only path forward. They want us isolated, exhausted, and afraid. Instead, we choose each other. We choose to recognize that our disabled neighbors make our communities stronger. We choose to stand with trans youth and their families. We choose to see immigrants as vital to our collective future. This is not the easy path—it's the necessary one. And while solidarity alone cannot guarantee our safety, it remains our best defense against those who would rather see us divided and conquered.
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