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trump resistance
Where Are the Mass Rallies Coast-to-Coast Opposing Trump's Authoritarian Takeover?
We need, and can have, a giant rally—or several giant rallies, it’s a big country!—where speakers loudly and passionately make the case about the Trump administration attacking U.S. democracy and selling out regular working people to the whims of the rich.
Feb 16, 2025
Given everything that the Trump administration is doing right now, this country needs massive rallies opposing his actions and his authoritarianism.
Ezra Klein recently wrote in The New York Times that Donald Trump was actually rather weak. He is overreaching, doing decrees because he can’t make them law, and that we must simply “not believe” that he is the omnipotent power he now proclaims himself to be. Believing this, as so many clearly do, is disempowering, as the natural response then is to hide instead of act.
I sympathize with the argument. The all-out attack on our system may represent overreach. Not everything that Trump has ordered will come to pass. But it’s vitally important that people not calm down too much out of faith that the democratic system will somehow defend itself.
I am familiar with right-wing authoritarian power grabs in Eastern Europe. I wrote a book anticipating the triumph of the radical right in Poland soon before it actually happened. What Jarosław Kaczyński did in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary took longer to do than what Trump (and Musk and others) are trying to do right now.
In 2017 I attended a panel at the national political science conference where a group of constitutional scholars all agreed that a U.S. president can basically do whatever he wants—far more quickly than a European prime minister can do—and that judicial checks on such behavior, if they come at all, come far later, sometimes too late even to matter. Add to this the fact that Trump, via Vice President J.D. Vance, has all but said he won’t abide by court decisions he doesn’t like. (We should expect the response to any judicial pushback will be classic Trump: he’ll first say the decision is ridiculous and radical and he won’t abide by it, then to get the pro-Trump moderates to calm down he’ll promise to follow the law, and finally, in practice, he’ll ignore the courts.)
The only way to stop this – at least the only way to begin to stop this – is mass protest.
I was in Poland in the months after the Law and Justice party, led by Kaczyński, came to power in 2015 and started on the same new authoritarian path that Orban in Hungary and now Trump is following in the United States. Within weeks citizens organized massive demonstrations in Warsaw and elsewhere. A group called The Committee to Defend Democracy organized them, and sympathetic press publicized them.
I was at these demos. The Poles who attended were being beside themselves when they discovered just how many people had also shown up! No, it did not change any policy, at the moment. But it served the vital purpose of keeping up resistance, which has begun to pay off. The anti-Kaczyński opposition won parliamentary elections a year ago.
It’s now February. The Democrats are doing what they’re doing in Congress and some statehouses. Some protests have taken place outside the Labor Department and in support of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But there haven’t been mass protests. These need to start happening by April or May. At that point even elected Democrats will come (they must not be the organizers!). Such demos will matter—as much if not more than anything matters at this moment. It will be one thing ordinary people can do. The problem right now is that ordinary people are incredibly angry and frustrated, and are being led to believe they can’t do anything, except perhaps to follow the depressing news.
The importance of fighting against helplessness is one of the great lessons from the Polish democratic opposition of the early 1970s. This was a particularly depressing time for the Left in Poland. The official Communist Party authorities had just led the country through their own right-wing national-populist phase. They’d just conducted a massive campaign against Left student radicals as well as Party-affiliated liberals and progressives. And they’d delivered this package with a dose of anti-Semitism, since Jews historically had been the villains for Poland’s radical right (like people of color have been the villains for America’s radical right). They knew that this anti-Semitic campaign would win them strong support from “regular people” always ready to accept some easy answer for their problems and also drive out the liberals still influential in the Party, which would make their populist Right even stronger.
The result was that in the early 1970s, leftists and liberals alike thought the situation was hopeless. And the first thing smart new oppositionists said? When there’s nothing to do, you do something anyway. When the situation seems hopeless, you have to maintain some kind of hope through some kind of action. That’s how the great Solidarity movement, based on the sudden emergence of the new Solidarity trade union, came about in 1980.
Later, when leftists and liberals felt authoritarianism rising after 2015, they marshaled that sentiment once again, and did something. They organized the mass demonstrations that gave people hope by proving to them that millions thought the same way as they did, even if their elected leaders were not yet with them.
Let’s do the same now. We need, and can have, a giant rally—or several giant rallies, it’s a big country!—where speakers loudly and passionately make the case about the Trump administration attacking U.S. democracy and selling out regular working people to the whims of the rich. People will come! And they will learn that there are millions who are as angry as them, and ready to do something about it.
When should these happen? Personally, I think it best to wait a few weeks, since otherwise too many people might accept the Trumpers’ favorite refrain that opposition comes only from those who simply hate him and always want to oppose him. But we can’t wait long. We need giant mass rallies in defense of democracy by spring at the latest.
Who will organize this? Who has access to skilled and well-connected organizers? I don’t. But you’re out there. Let’s get this going!
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Why Resistance Alone Will Fail
Without organizing the working class under a shared vision and demand for a more fair and just society, we will remain largely powerless to stop the Trump-led takeover by the billionaire oligarchy.
Feb 13, 2025
Trump and Musk are stirring up a resistance movement among liberals and the left. The protests are a righteous struggle against the authoritarian usurpation of lawful power, the reckless, illegal attacks on government agencies, the stripping of DEI programs and language, and the trampling over the rights of immigrants and transgender people.
But what are the goals of this resistance? And do voters outside the liberal bubble support them?
It's time to face up to the harsh reality: Trump’s flurry of activity, at least so far, has made him more popular, not less so, with the American public. Here’s the latest CBS poll:
- How would you describe Trump? 69 percent said “tough,” 63 percent said “energetic,” 60 percent said “focused,” and 58 percent said “effective.”
- Is Trump living up to his campaign promises? 70 percent said “yes.”
- Trump’s overall job rating is 53 percent. At this point in his first term it was only 40 percent.
- A hefty 59 percent approve of his program to “deport immigrants illegally in the U.S,” while 64 percent approve of sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. A smaller majority, 52 percent, oppose setting up large detention centers.
- How about Gaza? 54 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the conflict, though only 13 percent think it would be a good idea to for the U.S. to take over Gaza.
- Trump’s major vulnerability seems to be inflation. Two-thirds believe he is not focusing enough on lowering prices.
Progressives emphatically believe that Trump is destroying democracy, but doesn’t democracy have something to do with the will of the people? And what does it mean for democracy if Trump’s actions are broadening his base even beyond those who voted for him? It likely means that a majority of the public does not view Trump as the destroyer of democracy.
Rather than simply coming to the defense of USAID, progressives should organize protests aimed at stopping pharmaceutical price gouging and for promoting price controls on the food cartels.
Trump is broadening his base by doing what he said he would do and thinks he was elected to do. His support is growing because there is a hunger for action that is, at least symbolically, in the people’s interest. Will Trump’s approach improve the outcomes for the working class? That’s doubtful, but there is a desire for defiant action, and they are getting it.
Breaking Out of the Bubble
There’s a lesson there. Broadening the base is precisely what progressives must do.
That starts with a recognition that protests alone don’t signal action on behalf of working people. And such displays may be helping Trump increase, not undermine, his support. He may even want to provoke them, because he understands what liberals don’t—that most of the protests will be seen as resistance to change, as support for established elite institutions, and as obstacles to creating a better life for voters.
Think for a second about USAID. Most Americans are not strong supporters of spending billions to aid other countries while needs at home go unmet. As David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief advisor, put it:
“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’ When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: ‘Cut foreign aid.’”
What then are the tests to evaluate resistance tactics?
- Do protests and resistance expand the progressive base?
- Do they engage with working people who have drifted away from the Democratic Party over the last generation?
- Do they win over those who support Trump’s efforts to dramatically change the federal government?
So far, probably not. That’s because progressive protests mostly, if not entirely, involve mobilizing and appealing to those who already agree with liberal positions. There are plenty of people who support these efforts, but not enough.
It will take real effort and imagination to figure out how to promote dialogue that expands the progressive base.
This is not to say that protests to protect the vulnerable are not important. Saving an immigrant child from being ripped out of the classroom and deported is both courageous and humanitarian. But by themselves, most protests only give Trump more ways expand his base.
Mobilizing for 2026?
If progressives want to halt Trump’s authoritarian actions, they will want the Democrats recapture at least one of the Congressional chambers. To do that the progressive base must expand in swing districts.
How should those battles be waged?
We know from the polling done by the Center for Working Class Politics that a strong populist economic message is far more effective than attacking Trump on democracy issues. We also know from the CBS poll that Trump is vulnerable on the high cost of living.
Saving an immigrant child from being ripped out of the classroom and deported is both courageous and humanitarian. But by themselves, most protests only give Trump more ways expand his base.
Rather than simply coming to the defense of USAID, progressives should organize protests aimed at stopping pharmaceutical price gouging and for promoting price controls on the food cartels. As I recently wrote, the Democrats also could put Trump on the defensive by demanding he implement an executive order that prevents government contractors (like Musk) from laying off workers involuntarily.
Progressive activists have the creativity to mobilize protests around price hikes and needless layoffs. But the move from defense to offense will only be possible if they are engaged in dialogue with Trump supporters about an economic platform that protects the livelihoods and economic well-being of working people.
In a fragmented society, this is a heavy lift. More affluent progressives and Trump working-class supporters do not often live in the same areas or share the same spaces. Inflation and job insecurity may not feel as pressing to them as they do to working people. It will take real effort and imagination to figure out how to promote dialogue that expands the progressive base.
The move from defense to offense will only be possible if they are engaged in dialogue with Trump supporters about an economic platform that protects the livelihoods and economic well-being of working people.
In our own small way, the Labor Institute has figured out how to build educational bridges between MAGA workers and others in our Reversing Runaway Inequality training for union members. The participants bring with them a wide range of political preferences, but after an 8-hour workshop they come together to design a common vision for what a society without runaway inequality should look like. It turns out workers from all across the red-blue spectrum have similar ideas about the key elements of a fair and just society.
Then what? That openness won’t translate into Democratic votes unless candidates are willing to put forth a powerful populist economic message that supports workers’ jobs and wages.
It turns out workers from all across the red-blue spectrum have similar ideas about the key elements of a fair and just society.
And there’s the rub: those candidates not only have to mouth the words, but also, they need to believe in the message. To build a bigger base, they must be willing to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class instead of trying to raise money from them.
The alternative? More marches, more chanting, and... more defeats.
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Fighting Strongman Trump With Our Vision for a More Beautiful Nation
Do we want to let Donald Trump rob us of our capacity for happiness for the next four years?
Dec 05, 2024
Count on one thing: the next four years are going to be tough. If you can muster the energy for political action while Donald Trump and his minions rule Washington, it will have to be channeled in two ways: first, resisting the worst excesses of him (and his party of billionaires); and second, keeping up the effort to make life truly better for everyone, especially the most vulnerable among us.
Or wait. Should it be the other way around? Could a good offense be the best defense?
At the moment, it’s a question that’s not getting much attention. It may seem all too obvious right now that resistance has to be the top priority. Who could have been surprised by the impassioned pleas to resist when Trump won?
That reflex couldn’t be more natural. No matter how old you are, for as long as you can remember, every president’s critics have focused on resisting the dangers they saw in him, while his supporters hailed him as strong enough to resist the dangers they saw threatening the nation.
Such strength was apparently just what voters wanted in 2024, too. As a New York Timesheadline summed up the outcome right after Election Day: “America Hires a Strongman.”
Why?
As former President Bill Clinton once explained, “When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made the point in a more colorful fashion: “When Americans are scared,” she wrote, they want their president to be “the strong father who protects the home from invaders.”
What dangers? What invaders? Every winning candidate for president gets to fill in those blanks in whatever way he (and yes, it always has been a he) thinks will get him the most votes, any connection with reality being purely optional. So, while Kamala Harris offered quite realistic warnings about threats to democracy, Trump traded on fictional images of “illegal” immigrant murderers and rapists, “big bad” transgender girls threatening oh-so-pure “real” girls, and the “Marxists” heading up the Democratic Party. And, of course, we know who won.
Many voters were clearly scared and insecure. In a recent survey, roughly 80% of Harris’s supporters chose “we must find a way to embrace each other” as their highest priority, while about 70% of Trump’s chose “to protect ourselves.” As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom put it, Trump voters have “a deep wellspring of anxiety about their ability to predict their security into the near and distant future. Trump has given [them] a way to direct that anger and that anxiety… in a toxic direction.”
As political scientist Bruce Cain noted, “In the choice between safety and every other policy goal, safety usually wins. In the choice between hope and fear, fear has proven to be more powerful even when the basis for it is grossly exaggerated.” Many reports showed that Trump voters were indeed angry, but after talking to hundreds of people in focus groups, the New York Times’s Patrick Healy concluded that anger and anxiety “were one and the same” emotion.
So, as usual, many fearful voters chose the candidate they saw as strong enough to protect them. Reporter David Corn heard one message over and over from crowds at Trump rallies: “The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.” And Corn sensed what increasingly fearful Americans want: a version of “strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior.” Trump typically claimed that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” When he listed the ways he would change America in his speeches, making it “strong” and/or “safe” usually came before “great again.”
But it wasn’t just the policies he proposed like “peace through strength” or even the words he used that his voters cared most about. (Trump consistently outperformed Republicans running for Congress who took similar positions and used similar language.) It was the way he projected a mean and nasty personality. When he first ran for president, Trump said, “Every time things get worse, I do better. Because people want strength. We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty.” And that was indeed the image his campaign projected in its advertising. Since the hunger for a strongman only grows in wartime, the Trump campaign happily made the election look like a war, while he even posted a prayer and picture on social media identifying himself with St. Michael battling the demons.
Pundit William Galston notes that the Trump campaign was “convinced that Trump’s intense personal bond with his supporters would do most of the mobilizing work.” GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini thinks that he forged that bond not with his policies but through “his unique style, his unique aesthetic.” (Yes, ugly can be an aesthetic.)
Of course, gender played a role, too. Every dictionary includes the word strongman, but when was the last time you saw strongwoman? And that tells you so much. One study showed that a belief in “hegemonic masculinity” — the idea that men are stronger than women and so should dominate — was the most accurate predictor of who would vote for Trump.
From FDR to Trump
Trump is perhaps the ultimate American politician who has traded on fear and insecurity to look strong and get votes. But the sad fact is that American presidents have been teaching the public to feel threatened and insecure for a long time — at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 and made it a command center for resisting catastrophe in the midst of the Great Depression.
FDR admitted privately that his New Deal aimed to protect the capitalist system by resisting the threat of socialism, but he couldn’t say that out loud. He felt he could win the public’s confidence by staving off immediate disaster (as he indeed did). In the 1930s, that meant keeping as many Americans as possible out of dire poverty. Two prominent historians have labeled his approach “crisis management,” though he favored the word “security,” which is why the checks we retired folks now get from the government are called “Social Security.”
Once Hitler’s armies had conquered most of Europe, FDR announced that the great threat to national security was no longer the Depression at home but the enemy abroad, though he faced a public reluctant to get involved in war until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Throughout World War II, he would be seen as the strong father protecting the home from invaders.
Ever since, presidents have tried to take on that role. Lyndon Johnson warned that if we didn’t fight the communists in South Vietnam, we’d end up fighting North Vietnamese invaders in San Francisco. George W. Bush warned that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear arsenal that, if we didn’t take out Iraq first, could someday be used on American homes.
Almost every president since FDR has made the mantra of “national security” the nation’s highest value and insisted that staving off the threat of evildoers was the path to such “security,” no matter the price.
In 2016, Donald Trump paved his way to victory with similar language. His innovation (and it was a big one) was to refocus on the “enemy from within” — the immigrants, the transgendered, and above all, the liberals.
When Kamala Harris began her abbreviated campaign, it looked like she might break out of that mold. Her “politics of joy” seemed like a politics of confidence. She spoke and looked like a woman who was afraid of nothing, certainly not Donald Trump.
Yet in the last weeks of the campaign, as hers seemed to be stalling, she turned to the same old story: there’s a danger out there named Donald Trump and you’d better vote for me to protect yourself. Harris was, of course, correct, but the election results tell us that Trump did a better job of convincing voters that he was the one who could best protect our homes from invaders.
If Harris had focused more on bringing positive improvements to the lives of all Americans… who knows?
The Perils of Resistance
On Election Night, as the depressing results rolled in, the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart cautioned that those of us who see Trump as a great danger should move beyond resistance: “We have to continue to fight and work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible.” That’s good advice for a lot of reasons.
It may be that simply resisting the world of Donald Trump and trying to prevent the very worst will indeed seem like a full-time job over the next four years, but do we really want to exhaust ourselves that way? Worse yet, the message resisters send is ultimately a negative one: Whatever we may be, we are not that. So, in the years to come, a politics of resistance runs the same risk that befell the Harris campaign. As Harvard pollster John Della Volpe put it: “’Not being Trump’ was never going to be enough.”
What’s more, resistance is all about stopping change. Yes, sometimes change is dangerous and needs to be stopped, but that still makes such resistance inherently conservative. A devotion to preventing the worst will allow the other side to look like the force for change and so define the terms of debate.
Yet, by definition, liberals and progressives are supposed to be that force. Do we really want to cede that to — yes! — Donald Trump?
For now, at least, the lesson of Election Day 2024 is that, in a contest over which party can best protect Americans, the current version of the Republican Party is likely the winner. We’ve learned in the hardest way possible that the Democrats can’t “out-Republican the Republicans,” as Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put it.
A politics of resistance could end up merely reinforcing the fear driving MAGA-ism’s longing for a strongman. It’s simply not the right message to send to Trump voters if you wish even a small slice of them to change their minds two to four years from now.
It may feel good to focus on Trump’s evils and exclaim, as poet Walt Whitman did about President Franklin Pierce: “Such a rascal and thief in the presidency. This poor scum — the shit-ass! God damn him! — eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on the states.” But to focus solely, or even primarily, on such anger means making Trump the center of our attention. (Exactly what he wants, of course!) Hasn’t he gotten enough attention already?
And do we want to carry all the anger that full-time resistance is likely to breed? Do we want to let Donald Trump rob us of our capacity for happiness for the next four years? We could at least balance our outrage with the sentiment Whitman expressed about President Benjamin Harrison: “I think him mainly a gas bag, the smallest potato in the heap. As long as he remains in office, the aura of the presidency will give him prominence — but after that — oh! what will be his oblivion — utter!”
As the Italian revolutionary philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously put it, in the years to come we could use more “pessimism of the mind and optimism of the will.”
Alternative Vision and Action
Of course, we need to keep up some significant degree of resistance. (I’m definitely not among the astounding 28% of Democratic voters who claimed, in a post-election poll, that they would “support” Trump’s presidency.) But we should heed the words of Barack Obama’s former speechwriter Ben Rhodes: “Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on what we stand for. We need to articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next.”
Even the New York Timeseditorial board, hardly the most progressive group around, got the point: “A threat to democracy does not exempt leaders from giving voters a plan for the future that reflects the America they want to live in.”
And we can do more than envision a better future and plan for it during the next four years. Though things may be dreadful in Washington, state and local governments still have significant power to pursue policies to make life better. In my Colorado town, for example, there’s a strong effort to push the city council to raise the minimum wage, a measure our county commissioners, under public pressure, already endorsed. Denver is not only preparing to resist the deportation of undocumented residents but offering them access to city services, modeling what a humane government, one that cares about all its people, actually looks like. And even when politicians won’t act, many states allow citizen-initiated referenda like the ones that secured abortion rights in my state and many others.
Then there’s an endless list of things we can do as individuals. Think of it as “prefigurative politics.” As Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day put it, the energy we would burn up trying to tear down an oppressive government can be better used by ignoring that government and building “a new civilization within the shell of the old” — new institutions that genuinely serve people.
It also means building new feelings and attitudes. As we face a nightmarish four years of a federal government built on fear and intent on keeping all Americans (other than billionaires) afraid, anything we do to bring more confidence and happiness into our lives is a step in a better direction — for ourselves and the country.
To repeat: Resistance to Trump will certainly be necessary, especially to protect the most vulnerable among us. But any way we can look to a better future and turn that into a present reality is, in a sense, an act of resistance not only to Trump and the Republicans but to the strongman model of politics that led to his recent victory.
Making beautiful art and music, making delicious meals, making friends, making love — those are all ways to preserve the energy we’ll need for political action. They are also ways to show not just the world but ourselves that, whatever the evils from Washington in the next four years, we can continue building the more humane and happier world we want for everyone.
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