Traditional resistance seems futile in the face of Trump Mark II. But a loose coalition within the US is beginning to gain traction – and a gauge of opposition will come on June 14.
Donald Trump’s second shot at governing the US – or third if you include his dominance of political discussion during the Biden interregnum – began with a blitzkrieg of authoritarian measures so scattershot and rapid fire that to list them all here would leave room for not much more than the picture credits.
The assault was notable not only for the belligerent force with which it was pursued, but also for the apparent lack of resistance, organised or otherwise, with which it was met. The victims of the assault seemed stunned into inaction. Where, the rest of the world wondered as it looked on in dismay, was the opposition as the president and his henchmen made a mockery of laws, logic and basic human decency?
But signs of opposition are growing, with a day of public protest on June 14 and authoritative bodies from the courts and universities to corporates lining up to resist the President’s agenda.
Joe Guinan, president of the Democracy Collaborative, “a think-do tank” focused on building “system change”, says the slow response to Trump is partly explained by the difference between his two administrations. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. In 2024, Kamala Harris did not. The latter result was democratically more acceptable, and “there’s a much more die-hard, determined and extreme agenda and collection of actors in the second Trump administration. Part of what they are relying on is a widespread climate of fear at the economic and political fusion of billionaire resources with the powers of the state.”
Trump’s first presidency indeed saw two “very large and explosive demonstrations: the Women’s March, directly after his initial inauguration, and then the George Floyd uprising in 2020”, says Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn: the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
But “for all of the importance that the Women’s March played back in 2017 for bringing together a movement of people opposed to Donald Trump, it certainly didn’t stop him from being president for four years and [later] winning another election.”
Trump is also helped, says Bevins, by the weakened state of civil society. “Effective resistance to abuses committed by a president like Trump is often grounded in solid, democratic organisations with the capacity to act truly collectively and to strategise for the short, medium and long term. [But] many of the people who are most affected live incredibly precarious lives, having to work far too much, to pay far too much in rent to be able to survive. So you have a very low participation in the kind of organisations that would have been seen as natural vehicles for transformative political projects in the 20th century, like unions, social movements, even community organisations.”
Where, then, is the mainstream institutional opposition to fill the gap? Why have the obvious defenders of national values given in or not even tried to do anything? In many cases, the administration has beaten them to the punch, working swiftly to stifle such opposition as exists and to discourage any that may be even thinking about it.
A blatant Trump strategy – not that there’s really any other kind – has been vindictive attacks on his critics. A distinguished roll call of organisations and individuals including media, law firms, judges, immigrants, scientists and bureaucrats have been singled out for retribution over perceived offences.
As an opinion piece in The New York Times noted, citizens in democracies do not normally have to worry about being punished for peacefully opposing those in power. “It has changed how Americans behave, forcing them to think twice about engaging in what should be constitutionally protected opposition. Consequently, many of the politicians and societal organisations that should serve as watchdogs and checks on the executive are silencing themselves or retreating to the sidelines.”
Says Bevins: “We have to ask which of the ‘elite’ institutions are really opposed to what Trump is doing. Institutions tend to be dominated by elites who are not concretely threatened. The reason they have not been effective forces of opposition is because too few of them concretely oppose what he’s doing, or at least find it in their interest to take such a confrontational position. This is what helps lead to Trumpism in the first place.”
“A president is not a king unless we bow.”
Still, one might have expected active opposition from other sources, such as the political party nominally opposed to the Republican president.
Forget about it, says David Cobb, 2004 Green Party presidential nominee, currently coordinator of the US Solidarity Economy network and self-described social change agent. “It gives me no pleasure to acknowledge and admit that the Democratic Party is a party of empire and capital and as such, they are not willing to do what is necessary to confront the horror of what Trump represents.”
Right now, the Democrats seem to be putting more energy into a spat about who knew what and when about the declining mental capacity of their man Joe Biden – which is not winning them a lot of friends.
“The Democrats are being held in contempt,” says Guinan. “It’s not just Republicans who are afraid to go back and do town hall meetings in their districts, with Democrats thinking that this is their moment. They are getting real heat from ordinary people for the lack of opposition they’ve been showing.”
The Democrats may win control of Congress in next year’s mid-term elections, but as Guinan says, “This administration is not necessarily going to obey Congress any more than it’s going to obey the courts, so some interesting challenges there.
“We’re going to see a level of money spent in the US mid-term elections the likes of which has never been seen before. The Democrats are going to be outspent by an absolute avalanche of cash.”
Accepting the abnormal
One powerful psychological factor in Trump’s favour has been the dystopian phenomenon of hypernormalisation, identified by Russian-born anthropologist Alexei Yurchak and neatly described by film-maker Adam Curtis, whose eponymous 2016 documentary can be found on YouTube: “In the 80s, everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.”
So far, so consistent, but there has been a growing and active opposition to Donald Trump and the gangsters supporting him. Traditional media’s apparent lack of interest in criticising the President, for reasons of self-preservation, has been widely noticed, but it may also explain why, as the online World Politics Review has noted, “the media has been slow to focus on the actions of ordinary citizens, [who have] been mobilising to resist the second Trump administration”.
And mobilising in sometimes surprising ways. The same website reports that a US government-produced World War II manual on strategies for resistance under possible Nazi occupation has been growing in popularity online since the election. That document suggests the likes of “[giving] lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned”, “[reporting] imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or public” and “[misunderstanding] all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation and traffic regulations”. No one seems to have noticed that those tactics have all been routinely used by Donald Trump himself with some success.
Whether the guide’s advice will be taken up more widely remains to be seen, but it is clear opposition to Trump is there if you know where to look. Much of it is at grassroots level or from sectors outside the mainstream, such as the progressive movements represented by the likes of Cobb and Guinan.
Day of protest
A gauge of how widespread the opposition is and how much traction it is building will come soon, on Flag Day – June 14, which also happens to be Trump’s birthday. While he marks the occasion with a military parade in Washington, millions across the US are expected to join demonstrations to show their opposition to his administration. The organisers, a coalition of pro-democracy groups, are calling it No Kings Day. The question is, What took them so long?
“On the ground,” says veteran Cobb, “we are seeing a level of organisation and the beginning of protest that is organic and not directed by the leadership of the Democratic Party. In addition to that, we are seeing groups like the National Lawyers Guild, Muslims for a Just Future, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Civil Liberties Defense Center, beginning to utilise the courts in a very aggressive way. There are a large number of people in the US who are, in fact, mobilising and engaging.”
Guinan: “There’s probably more determined and more widespread opposition [than in Trump’s first term], but it’s happening not from the leaders of institutions and of politics but from people on the front line – community groups, trade unions, organisations that are themselves under attack because they’re working with migrants and so on. There’s a much more decentralised movement.”
Cometh the hour, cometh the protest movement generated on social media. “A spontaneous movement erupted on Reddit that became quickly 50501 [fifty-fifty-one],” says Cobb. The suggestion, made in January, was for 50 protests in 50 state capitals on one day “and that literally came off a Reddit, of all places – just an ordinary person who said something must be done. You can’t recreate the magic of something going viral, but literally that erupted into protest in every state.”
The first 50501 protests took place on February 5 and continued in March and April. Its organisation depends on not being organised hierarchically, says Hunter Dunn, 50501’s national press co-ordinator. “People come together and say, ‘Hey, there’s this call for a protest on this day. Is anyone organising anything? No? Cool. I’ll do it.’ And then you find a group of people, and from there you form a little 50501 chapter, and if you’re trying to preserve the Constitution, if you’re against executive overreach and you’re nonviolent, you’re 50501 if you say you are. So you plan the protest or demonstration or mutual aid event. And then you reach out to other organisations offering to work with them. And that network slowly forms from there.”
The organisation is not a standard, structured non-profit group because “non-profits are a lot easier to track and shut down. There is major fear that a bunch of the progressive non-profits are going to be branded as terrorist organisations and have all their funding frozen. It’s a lot harder to do that to 5000-plus groups that just mutually recognise each other with no single authority.
“There’s probably over 1000 groups already that call themselves 50501.”
If you want to restore order, you need a sovereign – a king, a CEO, someone who actually owns the country and is responsible for it.
The new opposition is about more than demonstrations. It’s also about alternatives, such as the mutual aid events mentioned by Dunn – which, he explains, is “a way of providing resources to groups of people without using traditional hierarchical structures, like a government … You can just decide to have a community potluck and feed everyone who comes, and no one can stop you.”
Mutual aid can have far-reaching consequences. “If you know your neighbours, if you know that when ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency charged with repatriating immigrants] comes in a black van and knocks on your door, 200 people can show up and surround the vehicle and film and make sure that the government can’t do anything harmful to you without it being broadcast through the entire world, that freaks governments out.”
Heading to court
There are signs that even the elites have their limits. Many of Trump’s fiats are being challenged – so far, with mixed success – in the courts. National Public Radio (NPR), for instance, is going to court to claim cuts to its federal funding are unconstitutional. That would be the same constitution Trump has so far shown little interest in respecting.
At the big law firms, many of whom have lost government business in retaliation for acting against Trump in the past, there is also movement, although there could be more. Liberal Currents online magazine co-founder Adam Gurri describes a last resort: “State bar associations have the power to say [to lawyers], ‘As part of your oath that you took to pass the bar, upholding the constitution was part of it. We are now taking the stance that if you simply go along with these executive orders, you are not fulfilling your oath, and we will disbar you.’” He doesn’t really think that would happen, but he does think the very logic of the prospect could be a potent reminder to lawyers of duties they are currently neglecting.
Another surprising source of opposition might be one of the most conservative of all – the insurance industry. Says Joe Guinan: “Environmental degradation and the feedback loops from climate change that will lead to failed harvests and extreme weather events and conflicts over natural resources feed into geopolitical instability … Allianz, the big German insurance company, warned that the course we’re on is going to end insurance. There is no way they can do what they do and have the actuarial risk spread in such a way that insurance is possible.
Without insurance, you start to get collapses in the housing market, financial regulation and so on. There are forces that we’ve unleashed that could create tipping points that will go way beyond our ability to control them.”
Trump may be able to ride roughshod over the courts but has he ever tried to argue with an insurance company?
Unlikely opposition is breaking out all over. The Greyhound Bus line, whose vehicles may be carrying undocumented immigrants that Trump’s forces would like to kick out of the country, has instituted a “no warrant, no boarding” policy – ICE agents will be allowed on to their vehicles to check passengers’ paperwork only if they have the correct paperwork of their own. If the budget bus company can stand up to administration bullying, surely others can follow suit.
The force be with you?
The armed forces are another group that take their duties seriously and don’t like being pushed around. Trump could hope that they would take his side against an insurrectionist public, but it’s not likely, according to 50501’s Dunn: “The military is standing by and watching, and we’re working with veterans’ groups right now, and I can tell you, the average rank and file person, the average officer – they’re not fascist.”
Vincent Bevins says the military is one of the most important institutions in the US. “I hope that they would not be called upon to try to put down some kind of insurgency. But in the final instance, if a street movement gets so large as to actually threaten the stability of a given state, that is the ultimate tool available.” Could it be provoked to the point it directly refuses the instructions of its commander-in-chief? “That is, of course, always a possibility.”
For now, the best hope for strong, lawful and active opposition remains with the courts, even if their resolve is far from certain. “The Supreme Court is wobbling all over the place at the moment,” says Guinan. “But it does seem to be willing to draw some lines in terms of the unacceptable executive overreach of deportations and the assault on habeas corpus and the rule of law and basic civil rights.”
For now, in the courts, it’s a case of one day tit, the next day tat. On May 28, the US Court of International Trade declared Trump’s wide-ranging international trade tariffs illegal. On May 29, a federal court stayed that decision.
Guinan: “If we are seeing a lot of rulings against Trump, that has some potential to hold the line and give breathing space to people who might otherwise fear going up against what is essentially a Mafia crime family, in the way this government is operating: pay to play, punish your enemies, wield power without constraint, test and probe the limits, and if you go beyond, never apologise. We’re probably heading for a constitutional crisis pretty soon.”