In 2025 We Showed Up: Notes on Resistance to the Regime
A young white woman in yoga clothes berating masked ICE agents in a parking lot this spring. A pope speaking up again and again for immigrants. Furious judges dressing down the Trump administration and ruling against it time after time after time, in response to the blizzard of lawsuits filed by human rights and environmental groups, states, cities and individuals. A senator speaking nonstop for 25 hours and another flying to El Salvador to find out what happened to his kidnapped constituent. The biggest day of protest in US history as an estimated 7 million people showed up for No Kings on 18 October in small towns and red counties as well as big blue cities.
Weekly protests at Tesla salesrooms earlier this year that succeeded in damaging the brand, depressing global sales and prompting Tesla CEO Elon Musk to retreat from his Doge slash-and-burn project. Federal workers resisting sometimes merely by adhering to law, truth and fact, and sometimes by speaking out as whistleblowers or in protests, as with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff who staged a walkout in late August in solidarity with senior staff who’d just resigned in protest against the health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s anti-vaccine policies.
Extraordinary solidarity organizing for and with immigrants, refugees and the people targeted for looking like them on the streets, in the neighborhoods of Chicago, at Home Depot parking lots, around schools, in courtrooms. Democratic state attorneys general suing again and again, independently and together, and Illinois and California’s governors spending a lot of time ripping into Trump. Airports refusing to play the homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s partisan-propaganda video about the congressional shutdown. Seven major universities refusing to sign a contract with the administration promising financial incentives for compromising academic freedom. This is some of the resistance to the Trump administration and its policies we’ve seen since 20 January, and it’s worth surveying on the anniversary of the election.
When people tell me that there’s been no resistance to the Trump administration, I wonder if they’re expecting something that looks like a guerrilla revolution pushing out the government in one fell swoop or just aren’t paying attention, because there has, in fact, been a tremendous amount and variety of resistance and opposition and it’s mattered tremendously. When will it be enough is a question that can only be answered if and when all this is over and we find out what comes next. Another source of disappointment seems to come from the expectation that there will be some sort of obvious and logical building up toward regime change, rather than the reality that tipping points in particular and histories in general are unpredictable animals.
Resistance is everywhere, both geographically and in terms of the constituencies participating: civil society and civil servants; human rights, climate and environmental groups (who in many cases had plans in place before the election and hit the ground running when the new administration came in); religious leaders and institutions, elected officials at all levels from city councils to the US Senate, the military, lawyers and judges, educators and students, librarians, of course, medical professionals, journalists, editors and publishers, people in the arts. Of course there’s been shameful collaboration, submission and silence from many figures in most of these constituencies as well. It has been striking that the most wealthy and theoretically most powerful have, in this crisis, often been the first to surrender. It’s non-elites who have stood on principle even when it means taking risks.
It wasn’t clear beforehand what the focal point of opposition would be, and the early protests against Doge and the Tesla Takedown actions were in response to the administration and Musk’s attacks on the federal government. Though activists and organizations are defending everything from renewable energy to reproductive rights, the heart of active resistance is now solidarity with those under attack by the border patrol, ICE and the other agencies assigned to terrorize, brutalize, kidnap and violate rights across the country. This manifests in myriad ways from volunteers striving to protect immigrants and refugees when they show up for their immigration-court appointments to neighbors walking kids to school when their parents are afraid to leave home to the lively protests in front of ICE in Portland, Oregon, and the extraordinary neighborhood activism across Los Angeles, and then Washington DC, and then Chicago.
As Sarah Conway reported in New York Magazine: “In their free time, or, in some cases, by actively taking time off work, everyday Chicagoans are building rapid-response teams to keep eyes on the streets and follow the movements of federal agents. Some pass out whistles in bars and laundromats; others keep vigil outside Home Depots and taquerías. Activists have begun locating agents’ suburban hotels and hosting noisy protests outside. Some take shifts patrolling their neighborhoods on foot, in cars, and on bikes to alert neighbors to the presence of federal agents and to document their aggressive tactics and arrests.”
The Catholic church has shown up, from a midwestern church that put cardboard silhouettes in the pews to represent members of the congregation afraid to attend to Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV. The new pope, seemingly in direct opposition to loud-about-his-Catholic-conversion JD Vance, has repeatedly spoken up for immigrants and the poor. It’s not just Catholics, though: ministers and rabbis have participated in protests, and more than 200 Chicago-area clergy signed a letter titled Jesus is Being Tear Gassed at Broadview. Many cities have reaffirmed their statuses as sanctuary cities and their policies of not cooperating with Ice.
Miles Bruner, in resigning from his job as a Republican fundraiser, wrote in the Bulwark: “I quit the Republican party and my job as an accomplice to the party in the throes of an authoritarian cult.” Marine Col Doug Krugman explained his resignation from the military in the Washington Post: “Instead of trying to work within the Constitution, or to amend it, President Trump is testing how far he can ignore it.” The admiral who resigned abruptly from the navy’s southern command last month did not give a reason, but it was widely assumed to be in response to the murderous attacks on small boats in the Caribbean. The veterans group About Face launched a campaign on the Fourth of July to support military members refusing illegal orders and encouraging them to do so.
Boycotts have always been a powerful tactic of nonviolent resistance. The Tesla, Target and Disney boycotts all had an effect, and Indivisible has just launched one against Spotify for running Ice recruitment ads. The Disney boycott seems to be why late-night host Jimmy Kimmel got reinstated after being pushed out for making mild remarks after far-right activist Charlie Kirkwas assassinated. Often acts of submission to the administration provoke their own acts of resistance, as when individual lawyers left some of the big law firms that caved to the administration early this year. A lot of journalists have left the Washington Post and other publications that have shifted right to go independent, and small, alternative and independent media have been a vital part of keeping the public informed and engaged.
Indivisible has grown hugely in chapters and membership since the new administration took over, 50501 was founded soon after the inauguration to organize more activism and a number of other local and national resistance organizations have sprung up. Trump has called the resistance and progressives more generally “the enemy from within”. But the enemies of human rights, the rule of law, the balance of powers and the constitution, of voting rights and fair elections, of science and history, are in the partially demolished White House. If this country has a future, it’s in the streets, the courts, the movements and the continued exercise of free speech and freedom of assembly against this administration.
p.s. This one is also at the Guardian, which graciously allowed me to cross-post. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/09/trump-resistance-is-everywhere
