Sharpening the Anti-Trump Resistance

Mass Social Disruption, Soft Tissue, Local Organizing, and Spotlighting the Post-Trump Promised Land

On March 20th, shouts and jeers rang out from protesters in Trump Tower, New York, sending echoes booming off the marble and gold-plated walls. Those same walls, ten years earlier, watched Donald Trump descend an escalator and burrow himself into our political psyches. But now, the real estate man’s prized landmark was breached, recast as a stage for popular defiance while NYPD stood frozen, as brazen an act as fedora-headed Italians dancing in Mussolini’s Court.

The scene typified an anti-Trump fury that’s exploded like landmines across the country. Only four weeks after major outlets reported “no signs of mass protest,” the 50501 movement has swamped state capitals; Tesla Takedowns have picketed dealerships in every state; Cybertrucks have gone up in flames; anti-ICE protests have clogged LA freeways; a Women’s March enveloped LA city hall; and 21 state attorneys-general have Voltron-ed into a Trump-suing juggernaut.

But even these impressive mobilizations have barely slowed Trumpian damage. On March 8, ICE kidnapped Mahmoud Khalil and flew him to a prison in Louisiana, violating federal law. They then did the same to a grad student in Boston. Trump’s DHS ignored a legal order and flew 230 Venezuelans to a Salvadorian prison famous for torture, including a hairdresser, makeup artist, pro soccer player, and others who ICE admitted had no criminal records. Trump halted life-saving aid for millions by gutting USAID; he plans to terminate tuition assistance for disabled students by dismantling the Department of Education; he’s preparing to impeach judges, punish non-MAGA law firms, prosecute demonstrators, and forcibly move Palestinians to Africa, which would be a crime against humanity.

And in Trump Tower, NYPD officers eventually moved on the red-shirted crowd, zip-tied women’s hands together, and dragged them out as they kicked and screamed.

Popular resistance to Trump 2.0 is awake and loud, but it is not yet strategic. Resistance leaders rightly urge more people to get off their phones and into the streets, to stop scrolling, join a group, make a sign, and start marching. But even staunch activists struggle to imagine exactly how bigger, badder street protests will stop a power-hungry egomaniac from doing whatever he wants to our government and country.

Trump’s decision-making process is notoriously impervious to oppositional voices. In a rebuke of politically diverse supergroups like Abraham Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals” that won the Civil War and JFK’s “ExComm” that saved humanity during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Trump has expelled non-MAGA voices from all of government and from press pools tasked with informing citizens of government actions.

When his administration displays frightening and dangerous incompetence - texting war plans to private citizens, canceling aid to fight Ebola, or firing FAA workers amid the country’s deadliest plane crash in 16 years - he denies fault and blames unconnected people he dislikes, claims that then ping on all our phones. Trump’s profane psychology and protective media shield prevent the sober reevaluation and course-correction that protests try to force.

Worse, he appears to revel in the conflict that a loud opposition provides. He campaigned as a fighter and as his supporters’ “retribution.” But one can’t “fight” without an opponent, and the only mention he’s made of opposition protests is vandalism of Teslas, which he labeled as worse than January 6 and worthy of rendition to El Salvador. With Twitter in his pocket, he can flip a damaging narrative into a booming warcry so loud it can make million-man marches feel like throwing pebbles at a freight train.

In response, resistance leaders are trumpeting the “3.5% rule” - popularized by Harvard’s Dr. Erica Chenoweth - which says every movement that’s galvanized 3.5% of a country’s population has succeeded in forcing major change. But it’s unclear what lever of change gets pulled once anti-Trump resistance clicks from 3.4% to 3.5%. The answer is none. As Dr. Chenoweth clarifies, a movement’s strategy is far more important than its size.

In the last decade, at least 19 state leaders have been ousted by their citizens outside of an election cycle. Research of those movements and others going back to 1900 by Dr. Chenoweth and others reveals at least five maneuvers that successful movements execute. The current anti-Trump resistance has made almost none of these moves, yet.

1. Provoke Defections

It was two thousand years ago that history’s most famous autocrat was ousted by those around him. On the Ides of March, 44 B.C., members of the Roman Senate - including his friend, Brutus - stabbed Julius Caesar to death. The conspirators were compelled by what historians call the “three last straws”: Caesar embarrassed Senators when they tried to honor him, he angered the public by evicting their representatives, and he publicly toyed with becoming “king.”

The analogy is imperfect: a GOP assassination of Trump would not be ideal - the aftermath for Rome was 15 years of civil war. But Trump has mimicked Caesar in key ways, including humiliating those around him, angering millions receiving government aid, and signaling his desire to become king and dictator. These parallels suggest major defections around Trump are possible, if not probable. The U.S. saw this happen in 1974 when GOP legislators convinced Richard Nixon to resign the U.S. presidency.

Trump’s hold over his supporters is famously forged in granite, but many of his richest patrons remain transactional. Many in the Republican Party - and private industry - have limits of damage to their finances, reputations, and country beyond which their support for this administration will fade.

Cracks are already forming. Republican reps publicly criticized Trump for canceling aid to distressed communities, for threatening to terminate NATO leadership, and for planning to close 48 Social Security offices. Trump’s famous disinterest in other people’s irritation all but guarantees those cracks will spread.

Scholars at the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, in their “Checklist for Ending Tyranny,” note how defections around autocrats tend to occur.

“As disruption continues, cracks also begin to appear within the government and other institutions (i.e., police, military, media, and political, bureaucratic, and economic entities) critical to the state. These cracks often lead to defections, and as defections cascade, the core capacities that an authoritarian depends on for their rule - control of material resources, human resources, people’s skills and knowledge, the information environment, and the capacity to commit sanctions - are devastated. Left with no viable chain of command with which to execute their orders, tyrants ultimately run out of options and are coerced out of their position by sustained nonviolent pressure. Sweeping change has often been the result.”

An effective anti-Trump resistance should refocus major energy from loud, flashy marches to expediting defections from around the President. But how?

2. Target “Pillars of Support”

The Russian landmass is almost twice as large as the United States, but one day in 1917, a group of workers, sailors, and soldiers took the whole thing over. The Bolsheviks - an opposition faction pushing for rapid revolution - snatched power from an oppressive provisional government by overwhelming societal chokepoints.

In the morning of October 24, Bolsheviks fanned out through central Petrograd, taking over bridges, telephone wires, telegraph offices, and railway stations, usually by convincing guards that the end was near and they’d benefit from abandoning their posts. Unable to call for backup or move armaments or people, the provisional government fled and handed power to the Bolsheviks with almost zero violence.

The modern U.S. is not pre-Soviet Russia; taking over communications and transportation in DC, or any other city, would be daunting. But the Trump Administration still relies on Pillars of Support with vulnerabilities that make them ripe for disruption.

A major area of soft tissue for Trump is the billionaire class squirming behind him at his inauguration, plus numerous conglomerates trying to avoid Trumpian harassment. If their revenues and stock prices turned sharply downward, their outward support for Trump could quickly dry up.

Targeting billionaire fortunes has already drawn blood. Of hundreds of protests, none elicited a response from the White House until Tesla Takedowns. Elon Musk tweeted angrily about it, threatened organizers, and awkwardly teared up about it in a Fox Business interview. Trump called the protesters domestic terrorists, and FBI director Kash Patel launched a task force to prosecute perpetrators. The reaction is almost certainly connected to Tesla's plunging share prices, Musk’s major source of wealth.

But Musk enjoys the ability to divert government contracts to his companies, a benefit most billionaires lack. If Jeff Bezos one day watched Amazon Prime cancellations balloon, and millions of customers move from Whole Foods to Sprouts, from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure, and from The Washington Post to ProPublica (specifically for its DOGE Tracker), the Amazon board might call an emergency meeting to reassess political alliances. If Sundar Pachai noticed Google search traffic leaking to DuckDuckGo, or Alphabet cloud computing contracts leaking to Microsoft, or YouTube activity leaking to TikTok, he and Bezos could quietly use their massive control over internet traffic to suppress support for Trump.

For on-the-ground resistors, economic boycotts - and publicizing them widely - are likely more effective than street protests, which Trump-shy media mostly refuses to broadcast. In February, Forbes reported that after a one-day economic blackout of Target, the company experienced an 11% drop in customer store traffic. Similar campaigns against Chevron, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowe’s, META, Nestle, Uber, and Walmart could finally crowbar the country’s richest patrons from a profligate president.

Another point of soft tissue is vulnerable GOP Representatives. Democrats and anti-Trump media figures are hosting “People’s Town Halls” in districts where the GOP Reps followed party orders to stop facing constituents. The Democratic Party has endorsed the town halls and funded a billboard campaign to shame GOP reps and whip up energy for more accountable representation.

Dr. Allison Gill - a longtime Veterans Affairs bureaucrat and host of the popular Daily Beans podcast - held a People’s Town Hall in the North San Diego district of Rep. Darrell Issa, who recently introduced a bill that would restrict federal judges from ruling against Trump, and who has stopped holding town halls. Silicon Valley Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna did the same, 250 miles south in Bakersfield, to pressure GOP Rep. David Valadao to oppose Trump’s plans to cut Medicare and Medicaid.

Down-ballot momentum for Democrats is building. Pennsylvania just flipped a bright red state senate seat blue. According to mega-organizer Jessica Craven, if Democrats can similarly flip two blood-red Florida seats in special elections on April 1, they can take control of the House and possibly save Social Security.

Booting GOP representatives from office and provoking defections will help isolate Trump and trigger him to overreact and anger more defenders.

Autocrat defenestrations like these happen slowly at first, and then all at once. How do we speed them up?

3. Mass Societal Disruption

In 2011, Egyptians flooded Tahrir Square, blocked traffic, blared chants, cooked and fed each other, policed their own communities, stood for interviews, and captivated the world for two whole weeks. After 18 days of mass disruption, the country’s military escorted President Hosni Mubarak from the Presidential Palace and called for new elections.

Public demonstrations do not oust autocrats by magic. They attain actual power by aggressively invading the public consciousness, inconveniencing lots of people (including elites), and portraying the leader as having lost control. The Arab Spring is full of examples. According to Waging Nonviolence, “[t]he Tunisian General Labour Union carried out widespread strikes, swiftly weakening Ben Ali’s power. Students in Yemen’s Sana’a University basically camped on campus, 24/7, chanting ‘We won’t leave until the president steps down.’”

In 2002, business leaders and workers in Venezuela agreed to a “paro” (stoppage) of the country’s private sector. From 6 am to 6 pm on December 10, they shut down shopping centers, factories, newspapers, banks, private schools, professional sports leagues, some hospitals, and the entire stock exchange. According to the Horizon Project, “The strike paralyzed the country, shutting down 90% of its economy for the day.” The plan pushed Chavez’s approval down to 30%.

The most potent effort we have toward ousting Trump is likely a General Strike. Organizers of this campaign are trying to elicit 10.6 million American workers (3.5% of our population) to pledge to walk off their jobs on the announced day. The current number of pledges is just above 310,000.

The type of work that stops also matters. Barbers not cutting hair and chefs not making pizza are nice signs of solidarity with vulnerable neighbors, but more impactful stoppages would involve Amazon drivers not delivering packages, Whole Foods clerks not beeping produce, Walmart truckers not stocking stores, trash not getting collected, pilots not flying planes, officers not guiding traffic, teachers not teaching students, and city workers not fixing broken stop lights - especially in Washington D.C.

Mass social disruption’s effectiveness rebukes Senator Chuck Schumer’s decision to keep Donald Trump’s government open and funded. His reasoning sounded logical: a shutdown would hurt millions relying on government services, and Trump would retain more power to dismantle bureaucracies. But Schumer failed to weigh that Trump and Musk can disassemble government while it’s open, and that mass stoppages of needed services are a potent weapon that can swiftly hobble an autocrat before he hobbles all institutions designed to rein him in.

Mass social change cannot happen without sacrifice. Protesting should not feel like volunteerism we do for a temporary respite from normal life. It must push normal life to a different place. The only way we guarantee Trump and Musk feel it is if we all feel it first.

4. Organize Locally; Coordinate Widely

Many who oppose Trump cannot afford to walk off their jobs, travel to DC, or march for hours in the elements. Luckily, there are critical roles non-marchers can assume to galvanize mass civil disruption.

According to the Horizon Project, research shows that the most effective social movements involve broad, diverse coalitions united around a shared strategy of success.

Here is how to do that:

-Join a group. Indivisible is the most widely organized anti-Trump resistance group, but other organizations have dynamic branches in random places, which budding resistors should research.

-Collaborate aggressively. Reach out to like-minded groups to share event information, creative ideas, and best practices. Attend each other's events. Indivisible has begun partnering with 50501 and Tesla Takedowns. Combining forces makes demonstrations louder in the media. Groups should form alliances with local branches of the Democratic Party, MoveOn, the Women’s March, and the Working Families Party, among many others.

-Collect stories of local damage from Trumpian actions: Find someone who’s lost their social security, or was terminated from a government job or contract, or was deported or disappeared. Announce it to the group, spotlight it on email blasts, and organize a public event to support the case. Monitor news of future Trump policies that will cause similar damage. Implicate local officials supporting or ignoring that damage, and find a talented local to oppose them in the next election. Local damage is the most potent way to convince non-political neighbors to take action.

-Make all resistance efforts provocative, creative, and fun. Protesting can feel laborious. But organizers have used ingenious ways to make their events enjoyable and life-giving.

Indivisible Rochester hosted a “die-in” to protest the Trump administration's cuts to healthcare and science funding. Protesters laid on the sidewalk in front of the Kenneth B. Keating federal building holding up signs shaped and colored like tombstones that read, “Could Not Afford Chemo,” “Died after Miscarriage infection,” “Denied Care,” and “RIP Trans Youth.”

More humorously, the Serbian Otpor Movement set up a barrel that looked like Slobodan Milosevic on a busy street next to a baseball bat and a sign that read, “Hit Slobo for a dollar.” The same movement rewarded members who attended five, ten, or 20 demonstrations with different colored t-shirts, which became coveted badges of honor.

Egyptian protesters held sing-alongs, poetry readings, rotating speakers, cook-offs, and film screenings to keep demonstrators entertained.

Indivisible Las Vegas hosted a “Buy-In” where members met at a store publicly resisting authoritarianism and bought as much as possible. They chose Tofu Tees, founded by Kumei Norwood, a 16-year-old activist who began designing and selling pro-democracy apparel when she was 8.

In Wunsiedel, Germany, where neo-Nazis hold an annual march, neighbors and local businesses donated to anti-Nazi organizations based on how far the neo-Nazis marched. Near the finish line, a sign thanked marchers for their contribution to the anti-Nazi cause, and rainbow confetti peppered the crowd.

Rolling Stone reported on a single protester in Manhattan who was able to close down a Tesla showroom by standing outside with a sign and engaging with customers. Three people outside a showroom in Minnesota made it on multiple nightly news broadcasts, spreading their message to millions across the Midwest.

All human behavior moves on incentives, and even the most fervent Trump resisters have limited energy. A few people brainstorming how to keep protesters entertained can be more impactful than adding 100 new people to a crowd.

5) Start Painting the Post-Trump Future

The anti-Trump resistance stands against many things: oligarchy, fascism, incompetent and corrupt governance fueled by bribery and retribution, among others. But it’s largely silent on what it’s for. It’s likely that anti-Trump protests are not larger (and General Strike pledges are at 3% of their goal) because few Americans yearn for an immediate return to the system “before Trump.” Few, if any, protests have illuminated exactly how supporting their actions will usher in a better future for everyone.

Trump’s actual policies are unpopular. His obsession with tariffs is roiling an already-shaky economy. His gutting of Social Security and Medicare is sparking angry town halls across the country. Snatching legal immigrants off sidewalks and rending them to a torture dungeon in El Salvador is chilling the nation, while overtures toward annexing Greenland and invading Canada are chilling the world.

Trump’s bizarre politics present an opportunity to recapture public support with policies that aggressively oppose, reverse, and prevent Trumpian damage. But the Democratic Party has long avoided this tactic for fear of appearing too radical, socialist, or woke. Candidate Harris famously failed to speak clearly or candidly on important issues, and rather evaded strong statements in interviews like Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix. A default toward avoiding mistakes rather than taking political chances will not work against an unhinged Trump. Blaring bold policies that reflect core values, despite the reaction, is the only thing that will.

-Trump gutting Medicare will make healthcare more expensive. We should embrace a public healthcare system, which would abolish the profit model that inflates these costs.

-Corporations are consolidating aggressively and hitting record profits, which pushes inflation up. We should embrace breaking up industry behemoths and barring mega-mergers from ever capturing such dominance again.

-Experts predict already-too-high housing costs will rise under Trumpian financial deregulation. We should embrace aggressive rezoning, draining of NIMBY power, and outlawing private equity firms that are vacuuming up all affordable homes and apartments in the country.

If it was ever “too radical” to make healthcare a public good, to disassemble abusive corporations, to expand zoning for affordable housing, or outlaw private equity firms, that era is over. Trump’s actions have made these policies more reasonable and necessary than ever.

If we execute the anti-authoritarian steps in this article, we’ll increase the chances Trump is prematurely evicted from office by the people around him. More likely, we’ll spend his second term combating him in the courts, in Congressional investigations, in midterm elections, and then in whatever wild scenario 2028 brings.

For the moment, we resistors need to abandon the instinct to wait for marching orders from Congress. We need to assume leadership of this resistance and guide our Representatives toward policies that bolster the strategy we anoint. Institutionalists - those in Congress - are rarely comfortable taking the unconventional steps that successful revolutions require.

We are in charge now. We’ll collaborate aggressively with people and groups we never imagined embracing, through collective pain wrought by a shared enemy, a man snatching the vast resources of humanity’s greatest nation all for himself. And when we oust Trump from office, we’ll ring new, louder chants off the gold-plated walls of Trump Tower, New York.