The Defiance This Time

Trump/Musk are galvanizing an opposition that could be different and stronger than the one that rose in 2017.

These are scary days. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student here in New York who is a legal resident holding a green card and married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, on the vague charge of being “aligned” with a terrorist organization for what appears to be nothing more than political speech, is deeply troubling and must be condemned and reversed before it becomes a precedent for more. Same with Trump’s decision to violate existing contracts with federal workers, forcing many to work from overcrowded offices rather than home (something their contracts explicitly allow), and in one case, with the TSA workers, its decision to completely reject an existing (and one would have thought binding) labor contract that was just negotiated and signed last year. Same with Musk using his X account to focus, like the ”Eye of Sauron,” the charge of treason on a sitting US Senator, Mark Kelly (D-AZ) who criticized the administration’s new Ukraine policy.

There are lots of outlets and newsletters that are doing a great job of reporting on the Trump-Musk power-grab, the democratic norms they are trampling on and the rising corruption they are enabling, as well as the destruction of vital parts of the federal government. It’s all unfolding like a gigantic series of shocks, and if you want to crawl into the fetal position and hide for safety, I understand. But as these shocks ripple out across the country, they’re generating opposition. We’re nowhere close to a popular uprising like the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests or even mass rallies like the 2017 Women’s March or the March for Science. But something is rising, and in the last few weeks its contours have started to become clearer. I’m a silver-lining guy, so this week I want to offer two stories, one macro and one micro, about the defiance taking shape.

Mt. Holyoke, MA (March 11, 2025)

The New Opposition

Let me first get one thing out of the way. We need to drastically lower our expectations about Democratic elected officials leading the opposition to Trump II. With a few important exceptions, most of these people have no concept of organizing. They’ve risen (and held on) to their positions because they are good at two things: raising money and spending it on TV ads. They see citizens who try to do more than give them money and vote as a threat. This is why top Democratic leadership is constantly stiff-arming or trying to control grassroots activists (be they of the left or more moderate). Such people push their representatives to do things that conflict with what their funders want them to do.

I really want to double-down on the fact that most grassroots Dems are not wild-eyed lefties; for example, my friend Susan Wagner who runs Markers for Democracy, a six-year-old post-carding network of several hundred mostly retired women who gather weekly to write handwritten letters to other voters, is a former Ed Koch official. Her gripe with the leadership of the Democratic party is that it refuses to give hardworking grassroots activists a seat at the table and only cares for such engagement if a group can bundle large sums of campaign contributions. I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who are in Democratic leadership are the best at neutralizing grassroots change agents, like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. (Footnote—let’s see if DNC chair Ken Martin agrees to give the newly formed National Grassroots Coalition the recognition it is asking him for.)

Yes, we need to stiffen the spines of Democratic representatives, especially when it comes to them maximizing the leverage they have in Congress over things like keeping the government open (which is coming to a head again right now in the Senate). Forty-seven Democratic and independent senators can do a lot if, and only if, they stick together to prevent the Republican majority from getting to 60 votes to invoke cloture. But these are not the public leaders that we need in front. Remember that in our hyper-polarized two-party system, action by one partisan side also strengthens the response of the other side. If Kamala Harris were out there barnstorming the country right now, yes, she'd be helping to mobilize worried Democrats but she'd also be injecting energy in the MAGA base, which would see rising partisan warfare as a reason to rally more strongly to their champion. Let's not forget how much fascist movements gain by having an energetic enemy to rally their people against.

If we're going to successfully defend democracy and the rule of law in America, it will be because civil society rises to do so and then creates the conditions for the opponents of Trump and MAGA to win future elections (which need to happen inside both parties and then in the general elections of 2026 and 2028). Elected Democratic leaders aren’t going to organize this; instead, they talk expectantly about benefiting from it after it happens. Don’t forget, it long ago stopped being necessary for these people to organize year-round to win elections. Thus, going back to 2017, when there was a ton of grassroots opposition to Trump I, you had the spectacle of Democrats like Schumer appearing at some early rallies of Indivisible groups and telling them that what they most needed to do was VOTE--even though the crowds were hungry for action they could take now, not 18 months later. If Schumer looks like an idiot trying to lead a "We Will Win" chant outside the US Treasury building, as he did a few weeks back, it's because leading big public demonstrations is not his job and he didn't get to his position by being good at that.

This Time Could Be Different

Today, we're seeing a qualitatively different opposition movement forming than the one that appeared in 2017, one grounded by working people and led from the center out rather than the left in. Back then, as with today, Trump's election was initially met by Democratic party confusion, inaction and misguided efforts to “find common ground.” Into that vacuum three strands of leadership emerged. One was grassroots and spread all over the country, exemplified by the Women’s Marches and Indivisible, and mostly populated by middle-aged women. One was centered on lawfare and trying to stop Trump in the courts, exemplified by the ACLU’s brilliant announcement the day after his election that “we’ll see you in court.” And the third came from former Obama administration officials and the national security establishment, led by people like former White House associate counsel Ian Bassin who launched Protect Democracy, which has grown into a critical backbone for anti-authoritarian elite-level organizing, and by a host of former intelligence and national security officials who ran for Congress on the strength of their past work defending democracy overseas, like Elissa Slotkin, Mikey Sherrill, Abigail Spanberger, Pat Ryan and Andy Kim—all of whom first ran for office in 2018.

Of those three strands, the grassroots opposition of 2017-2018 was the most important and also least well understood. That’s because its leadership either came from the progressive left or chose to align with same, while its base was far less ideological and more pragmatic. I’ve written about this before so I won’t repeat the history here. My main point is that centering “intersectionality” was very important to the leadership then; that version of the left is much weaker now and perhaps also acting in a more strategic way. But for better and worse, the “resistance” (a word I hate using) of those years coded “progressive left” throughout 2020.

Today’s emerging defiance has the potential to be much broader--led, at least in part, by federal workers and their unions (many of whom are also veterans), and reaching out to fellow Americans from the center rather than from the explicit left. What DOGE has been doing is a huge shock to several million workers (and by extension, millions of their family and friends). These people are highly skilled, dedicated to public service for the most part, and furious. And surprised. Recall that before January 20, the expectation was that the first major victims of Trump's return to power would be immigrants, and that certainly has begun -- though the "mass deportations" and giant ICE raids that many feared would be done in the first days have not materialized. So while a great deal of preparatory work was done in anticipation of the need to help beleaguered immigrants (and indeed is quietly taking place), the DOGE shock was not expected.

And while the first visible responses have happened in DC at the entrances of federal buildings where the first cuts hit, there are federal workers everywhere. On March 1, park rangers organized protests in 170 national parks, for example (see below). And the people who showed up weren't just federal workers, the crowds also included people who live next to and make a living from all the tourism those parks generate. Plus, it’s pretty hard to resist the symbolic power of seeing upside-down American flags at national monuments like Half Dome in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.

My point is two-fold. E ven before the Congress makes cuts to entitlement programs, the blast impact radius is already big and spreading. The proposed cut of 80,000 workers from the Veterans Administration will harshly degrade the quality of care and services millions of vets rely on. (Did you know that the VA’s suicide hotline has already been shut down?) Monday night, an 80-year-old vet chained himself to a pole near the White House saying that Trump and Musk were “killing veterans” and saying his action was just an appetizer leading to marches by vets across the country on March 14^th.

People who are directly affected and who are fighting to protect themselves—as well as core ideas about America—can make for powerful movements. Even a small number of people faced with a threat to their lives can generate very powerful demands (see ACT-UP or the disabled activists who were key to stopping the repeal of Obamacare during Trump I). Yes, retired white middle class suburban women as well as Black women will still also be a vital piece of the movement as they have been since 2017--they are going to show up regardless because so much of the Trump-Musk-Vought-broligarch agenda is anti-women. But this time the movement looks like it could be much broader and led from the center out rather than from the left in.

This, I think, bodes a bit better for our chances of protecting democracy and improves our chances of protecting the most marginal groups who the Trump regime has been targeting first in part because they appear easiest to pick off—trans people, immigrants, student activists with unpopular opinions, etc. It's much harder to marginalize a civic movement led by park rangers and VA hospital workers and mail deliverers.

And lastly, as those people model what leadership looks like now, incumbent Democrats would be wise to elevate them and recruit them to run for office. My hunch is that many incumbent Dems, especially the ones who are frozen in place because they don't yet understand the threat we face or don't have the tools or experience to respond appropriately (and still remain in thrall to leadership that listens far more to what its corporate donor class wants than its grassroots) are going to face a wave of primary challengers next year coming from exactly this group. They'll know what they're fighting for, and unlike many of today's Democrats, they won't have to fake their allegiance to the working class because they'll be coming directly from it.

—Bonus link: Check out the Federal Unionists Network, an emerging hub for this work.

Lessons from One Local Meeting

Sunday, my local Indivisible group, NYCD16/15, held its monthly meeting in Yonkers. While only 28 people had RSVPed as of the prior Thursday, more than 100 filled the room. Many were people who had been on our email list for a long time and there was also a decent number of first-timers. The meeting was designed as a kind of community impact hearing (like the ones that some Democratic attorneys general have begun to do). Tapping our own networks, we had found about a dozen people with first-person stories to share about how the Trump/Musk regime was affecting their lives. It was heart-rending.

Two sets of parents, their voices trembling, talked about how their adult trans children was being harmed by Trump’s order to delete their identities from existence. A middle-aged woman whose aged mother depends on Medicaid for daily visits from a home-health aide shared how she was losing sleep over possible cuts to that program. A recently fired IRS worker and a recently fired lawyer for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau described the work they did and what it was like to be RIFed. An EPA lawyer with more than three decades of service explained what it felt like to get emails over the weekend demanding they report on five things they did that week and other forms of disrespect and chaos. I read, with permission, from a long post that my friend Elana Duffy, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, had shared on Facebook explaining how the planned cuts at the VA would harm her and her fellow vets. It was from her that I learned that the VA’s suicide hotline had already been shut down, how these cuts would make it drastically harder for the 200,000 vets who become eligible each year to access their benefits, and how vets like Elana with long-term health challenges from their service were going to be screwed.

Two things stood out for me from this meeting. The first was something the EPA lawyer said at the end of their remarks:

“Every minute of every day you are touched by a federal employee. When you wake up and take a medication – you are touched by a federal employee who made sure it is safe. When you brush your teeth with clean water, you are touched by a federal employee. When you eat your eggs and drink your milk, you are touched by federal employees. When you drive your car, you are touched by the work of federal employees who made sure the car was safe and the road was safe.”

The second came from a newcomer, a woman from a nearby town who had taken it upon herself to organize a protest outside a local Tesla dealership a few days earlier. She said she started on a Tuesday when she decided she had to “do something.” Then she texted a few friends, picked a date and time for a few days later, and then they reached out to everyone they knew. About 50 people came, she said. “A lot of cars honked in support, and yeah, we caught a few people giving us the finger too. It was a lot of fun,” she added.

Imagine that! You can have fun and save the country at the same time. (Organizing tip: When something is fun, people want to do it again! And more!)

—Bonus link: For a daily round-up of developments on all the growing efforts to defy Trump-Musk and save our country from fascism, I recommend The Resistance Sentinel. Its written by a small collective of researchers and analysts and does an excellent job of summarizing major news on all the diverse forms of opposition arising around the country and putting it in context.

Other Notes on Organizing

Dizzy Zaba, a technology fellow at the Ford Foundation, has just published a terrific new study called Beyond Bifurcated Organizing that explodes the false, though widespread, notion that there is a difference between online and off-line organizing. This is really useful, because as a survey at the heart of her report finds, a lot of people have jobs as “digital organizers” when in fact what they have been hired to do is digital communications.

To wit, she writes,

Let's say an organization or a union starts a TikTok account and has various workers tell their stories about harassment and inadequate breaks at work. Is this organizing? No. Is this digital organizing? Also no. The same organization then assigns an organizer to direct message each person who comments on a particular video to have a conversation on the phone and invite them to the next virtual meeting. Is this organizing? Yes. Is this digital organizing? Also yes.

Let’s look at the reverse. An organization sends an organizer to a major road near the closest Walmart to talk to people when they get off their shift, as they wait for the bus to go home. Is this organizing? Yes. Is this digital organizing? Depends on what happens next. If the organizer follows up the next day with the person they met at the bus stop over text message, is that digital organizing? What about when they have a one-on-one over the phone? Does your answer change if it’s Zoom instead of a phone call? Or what about when the worker joins a WhatsApp group with their coworkers? Are we digital organizing yet?

Zaba surveyed 156 digital organizers across a range of groups and found that the largest subset, 28%, were situated in their organization’s communications department. Very often they were responsible for things like email sends, websites, text blasts and social media posting rather than building relationships with members or people the group was trying to organize. “More than 65% of digital organizers we surveyed say they are responsible for building their email list—the third most common responsibility,” Zaba writes. “Yet a majority say that growing the email list should be a low priority, ranked in the bottom quartile of effective tactics.” The whole report is studded with such gems of insight. Read the whole thing!

Long Read

My friend Catherine Bracy, the founder and CEO of TechEquity and former member of Code for America’s senior leadership team, has just published an important new book called World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy. In it, she takes you through her own experience in the Bay Area over the last decade and a half, from the early years of the tech boom when everyone – including idealists who truly thought they were going to change the world for the better – were launching start-ups, into the more recent times of rising inequality and tech-lash. If you want to understand more clearly the ruthless mentality driving people like Elon Musk, David Sacks (Trump’s crypto and AI czar) and Marc Andreessen, and how it has come to dominate business culture, read World Eaters.

I got a chance to read an early version of World Eaters last year and learned a ton from it. Not just about how venture capital has essentially taken over the whole market for capital investment, driving founders of all stripes into shaping their pitches toward a hyper-predatory model of growth, but spreading into realms of the economy like housing. Her chapter on “proptech” and VC-backed companies like Waypoint, Invitation Homes, Mynd, Main Street Renewal, Lofty, Divvy Homes, and Landis—companies that are all taking advantage of weaknesses in the the rent-to-own and single-family rental markets—is quite eye-opening. (Not to mention Flow, the new real-estate start-up from Adam Neumann, the infamous founder of WeWork.) Bracy’s book isn’t only a critique of VC’s impact on the economy; she also highlights several examples of entrepreneurs who are paving a better path, one that rejects the blitzscaling/grow-fast-at-all-costs method that is so toxic. It’s hard to see how such pathchangers will thrive in the current environment, but when the time comes to start afresh, World Eaters not only shows what we have to set aside, but how a healthier and more balanced approach might be built.

End Times

NYC does not fool around.