Notes on the Varieties of Resistance
On November 6, 2024, and after, it became clear to me that a lot of organizations addressing climate and human rights had made plans for what to do if Trump won, and of course Daniel Hunter had already published his soon-to-go viral article on what to do if Trump wins. Which means that the resistance to Trump Round Two was already in place before the election. But I'm on book tour in Europe and doing lots of interviews and onstage conversations and it seems like Europeans have the impression that no one in the US is resisting the Trump Administration.
That is, first of all, a sign of lack of coverage of the most familiar form of resistance, protest, and that lack is a chronic problem for people understanding the present, the past, and the possibilities. The public doesn't see them because the press doesn't cover them very well. I think the press is dismissive toward protests and nonviolent action because of the assumption that demonstrations and protests and even movements don't do much of anything, from the habit of disconnecting where change begins from where it ends.
Let me unpack that: very often when politicians or officially powerful public figures do something, it's framed as "this just happened/this was handed down from above," when in fact it happened because of a long campaign from below that doesn't get represented in the news. There's an underlying question about what power is and who has it and a lot of people believe that it belongs to the few--the rich, the famous, the heads of institutions and elected officials. Elite news organizations and elite journalists like this worldview partly because it gives them a comparatively narrow field to cover, and because it flatters their own elitism. Even when a judge makes a ruling--and there have been hundreds against the administration--it generally means someone filed a lawsuit (or many someones, and PBS and NPR are among the most recent to file, and if, say, the ACLU filed a lawsuit it could do so because donors fund the organization).
But that's only first of all a sign of poor coverage of activism. It's also a failure to recognize the myriad faces of resistance, the quiet ones, the indirect ones, the spontaneous ones, the unseen ones that matter nevertheless. It's as if they decided resistance looks like a giraffe and so ignored that sometimes it's a zebra, a lion, a meerkat, a tortoise, a dragonfly, a murmuration--or the elephant in the room. Sometimes resistance is a protest in the streets, or a thousand of them. But sometimes it's a thousand forms of noncooperation and obstruction and countering the harm and rescuing those who are under attack.
Yesterday I found a new site that someone created of his own accord, called DOGE Track: Jacob Harris writes, "We are now several months into the second Trump presidency. It’s been hard keeping track of all that is being damaged and lost within the federal government. Emboldened by Musk and the absence of oversight, the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) has been rampaging through agencies to subvert their security, cancel contracts, fire staff and siphon up confidential data into large data warehouses. ...I do enjoy working with data and seeing what patterns will emerge over time from data collection and analysis."
That is a valuable part of resistance, and just saving the data that DOGE and the Trump Administration have been erasing and deleting and denying access to is important and happening in many ways and places, at the hands of many private citizens. (It's worth noting that all this data at all these government sites is valuable property that taxpayers paid for and the people own). At a site called ImpactCounter.com, I found another individual had created a tally of how many people have died as a result of the destruction of USAID and its aid to the starving, the sick, the stranded: "This dashboard visualizes the human impact of funding changes for aid and support organizations. Each metric represents real people affected by policy decisions." It records more than 300,000 deaths., a shocking and little-covered scale of carnage, as a result of the decision by the world's richest men that we cannot afford to feed starving children.
I suspect there is far more going on to help those under attack by ICE than is or should be publicly known, because bringing attention to the immigrants, refugees, and others would only endanger them, but there are also myriad projects to support them, protests at ICE facilities, protests at the universities where students have been seized for daring to have an (anti-Israeli government) opinion in public, and many protests I've been to have included signs addressing immigrant/refugee rights.
But this account was posted on social media by Pedro Rios, a friend of friends: "ICE's HSI unit conducted a raid at a popular restaurant in San Diego's South Park neighborhood. About 3 dozen agents, some in full tactical gear, arrested restaurant workers while patrons there and around the area were enjoying dinner. The federal agents didn't expect a resounding rejection by the neighbors and patrons. The community spontaneously protested the ICE agents. ICE discharged three flash-bang grenades to disperse the crowd. The people instead pushed ICE agents out of their community forcing the vehicles to retreat, shouting anti-fascist slogans. This is the way it should be everywhere." There are similar reports of citizens spontaneously turning back ICE in Somerville, near Boston, and elsewhere. This video (not sure if it's the event Rios describes) shows an extraordinary march on ICE by mostly middle-aged white people, forcing their retreat. The fierce determination is inspiring and awe-inspiring.
Meanwhile, Gothamist reports that in the aftermath of a protest against ICE, "In a dramatic incident captured on video, U.S. Department of Homeland Security police Wednesday handcuffed one of Rep. Jerry Nadler aides in the congressmember's Manhattan office, which is in the same federal office building as an immigration courthouse.... DHS later said in a statement that “one individual” — the woman seen being handcuffed — had blocked police from performing a security check they intended to do based on information there were protesters in the lawmaker’s office." That's an accusation of resistance– and gross overreach by DHS, which like ICE seems to be becoming the lawless, unaccountable secret police of other times and places. "The right of the people peaceably to assemble to petition the government to redress their grievances" is the second half of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
The Trump Administration is lawless, violating laws and trying to exercise powers not granted to it, and the pushback against this attempt to consolidate power and control far more than the administrative branch should is also resistance. On May 28th, Heather Cox Richardson (a mighty force of resistance herself), noted, "Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration." Lawfare tracks those lawsuits, keeping a careful running tally, at this site.
When a judge makes a ruling--and there have been hundreds against the administration--it generally means someone filed a lawsuit (or many someones, and PBS and NPR are among the most recent to file); universities, nonprofits, states, corporations, individuals, are among those filing lawsuits. Upholding the law is resistance to lawless overreach, and while judges are supposed to be nonpartisan, this is not a right or left, Republican or Democratic business in their hands: it's what the law says, and the law often says fuck off to the Trumpists. Even the usually mildmannered U.S. Court of International Trade found against the Trump tariffs last week.
When a regime is lawless, upholding the law is resistance; when a regime endeavors to operate in secret or tries to obfuscate with lies, bringing its actions to light and telling the truth about those lies is resistance, the kind we call journalism. A host of strong voices against the regime have emerged, including Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo, the sometimes profoundly inspired and often on-point writing by Anand Giriharadas at the Ink, legal experts on social media such as Lawrence Tribe and former Judge J. Michael Luttig, authoritarianism experts with newsletters including Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Timothy Snyder.
So much around us tells us we have no power: how history is taught, how entertainment focuses on muscly ubermenches doing their violence rather than collective nonviolent actoin, how the news narrates our world as, again, an elite handful making all the decisions, holding all the power--. But we have a lot of power, and one way you can see that is by noticing that those elites are actually afraid of us. Elon Musk found out that people have power when Tesla Takedown protests and other activism helped make the brand suddenly repulsive to buyers. Musk thereby found that he was in retail, where the customer is always right. I hope someday to see Musk and every member of DOGE on trial for their crimes against the govenrment and people of the United States.
The reactivated Indivisible has seen many new local chapters launched since Trump returned to office; 50501 has joined Indivisible as a national force helping orchestrate protests; Third Act (on whose board I serve) is a climate and democracy organization building grassroots activism centered on people over sixty, and we're leaning hard into the democracy part.
My cousin Jessica Duncan has been a force of resistance from her home in Canada (she grew up with me in California but has lived in Canada and Scotland for the past three decades or so,; her father was made an orphan and refugee by fascism and she's not tolerating it in her country of origin. She has been industriously writing letters to US senators since February, sharing some of the witty, fierce stuff she sends and the sometimes good, sometimes dodgy replies she sent. She's launched a newsletter (hosted on Ghost, the same platform this newsletter is on) called Letters from a Canadian (and yes, that's a riff on Cox Richardson's Letters from an American, and yes the name is my fault, taken from a remark I made to her). On the site she has this incredibly helpful tutorial and spreadsheet on "how to email all the senators." Because you can resist without leaving home or entering the USA.
Elected officials--notably Illinois Governor Pritzker and Congress members Alexandria Ocasio Cortes, Maxwell Frost, Jasmine Crockett, and Jamie Raskin are among those who I think it's fair to say are in the resistance, along with senators Sanders and Warren. Ocasio Cortez's and Sanders's rallies across the nation gathered huge crowds and showed the appetite there is for taking on the administration. All these are just examples of resistance off the top of my head as I travel, and there are dozens more, including by the many federal workers who have quietly or dramatically refused to have their missions corrupted, to cooperate with DOGE, to even let DOGE invade their premises. The Library of Congress just refused to be invaded by the Administrative Branch (since it's part of the legislative branch, as its name indicates). State attorney generals (you know which states) have also been active in opposition.
I believe that this summer things will get a lot worse--farmers and builders will feel the impact of terrorizing the immigrants who do most of the manual labor that feeds us; west coast ports, the trucking industry, some manufacturers, and a lot of retail will feel the impact of all the Chinese cargo ships that don't arrive because of punitive tariffs; higher education start to see what losing lucrative foreign student enrollment means; the tourism industry will see the impact of losing foreign visitors to both cities and areas surrounding national parks and scenic places. Not everyone who opposes the administration does so because of a direct and immediate impact from it. But those who are directly impacted may be moved to join or at least support opposition.
It's surprising that people even in Europe can reach this "nothing is happening" conclusion with so much happening, or really it's not, because "nothing is happening" often turns out to mean "I didn't see anything" which is often a consequence of not looking or not looking in the right places. Or that the journalism they rely on to tell them what's happening didn't look on their behalf.
One of the frustrating things I run into constantly in conversation and therefore in the thoughts people air in conversation is all or nothing thinking. Something not entirely good is entirely evil; something not entirely effective is totally ineffective; an imperfect solution is no solution at all even if there is no perfect solution; everything not won totally and comprehensively is a loss, and so forth.
With that logic, the fact that resistance at this stage is not a combination of the French Revolution and I dunno, a superhero action movie, might be why people think there's no resistance at all. It's clearly not (yet) enough, but there is a lot of latitude between enough and nothing. And all this stuff I outlined above builds foundations for what is yet to come. The something we have may get us to enough if we join it, support it, shine a light on it, and that begins by recognizing it.
p.s. I've mostly been on book tour for the past four weeks and it's the most exhausting thing I do, and a total disruption of everything I normally do. I've felt bad about going more than two weeks without a newsletter, but I left for this European tour on May 21 and there just hasn't been time....
(And then just after I hit publish on this essay, I saw this video of furious citizen resistance to ICE in Minneapolis: https://bsky.app/profile/cwebbonline.com/post/3lqqsj2eiss2z
another version of it here: https://www.tiktok.com/@independentsource0/video/7511871602359946526
and students walking out of high school to protest an arrested classmate in Massachusetts here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1620684111963309 )
