By Robert Kuttner
Copyright prospect
This article appears in the October 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
As summer comes to a close, Donald Trump’s attempts at outright dictatorship have become more explicit and aggressive, and his delusions of omnipotence more grandiose. A complete list would consume all of the space for this article, and more. The slide to one-man rule makes effective resistance all the more urgent, if democracy is to survive. But what sort of resistance?
“In 2025, no form of creative nonviolent resistance is wasted,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told me. “Everything that builds solidarity and spirit is helpful.” It may be hard to see the impact amid a maelstrom, but individual acts of resistance can collectively make a difference. You never know what might cause the dam to suddenly break and more effective opposition to crystalize in unlikely places.
For instance, several Republicans who had not been willing to publicly oppose Trump on tariffs, Ukraine, bogus declarations of emergency, destruction of valued public institutions, or budget cuts that hurt their constituents frontally opposed Trump in demanding the release of the Jeffrey Epstein documents. The Epstein pressure, seeded in the MAGA grass roots but quickly picked up by Democrats, was catalytic; it led Trump to make outlandish moves and claims in a frantic effort to change the subject, which in turn invited more opposition.
My survey of resistance, broadly defined, suggests that effective opposition often involves bank shots. Citizens can press elected officials to pressure or block Trump and promote noncooperation by state and local government. Broad protests like No Kings Day can demonstrate wide opposition to autocracy and recruit people for more targeted actions. Trump may be impervious to evidence, but publicity of his economic damage can give voters second thoughts. By spotlighting and disrupting Trump’s brutal immigrant kidnappings, activists can recruit more activists and deprive Trump of what was once a winning political issue. Relentless litigation can shame even pro-Trump judges into sometimes doing the right thing.
Battling in the Courts
One of the most formidable forms of resistance is the coalition of public-interest groups, Democratic state attorneys general, cities, states, and trade unions that has filed lawsuits. The group Just Security has tabulated 384 cases filed through August 28. Some 130 have led to court orders blocking at least part of Trump’s moves, and another 148 cases are pending.
During Labor Day week alone, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held, 7-4, that Trump’s claim of emergency powers to take over tariff policy is illegal; lower courts intensified their blockage of the administration’s attempted deportation of immigrants in violation of due process rights; and a federal district judge in San Francisco found that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles was illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act. The administration will appeal all of these to the Supreme Court.
Thus far, the Supreme Court has relied on the “shadow docket” to quickly approve administration requests for emergency stays while ducking the underlying constitutional questions, to buy time for itself and for Trump. But that string is being played out.
Key pending decisions are binary. Either birthright citizenship is clearly mandated by the 14th Amendment, or it isn’t. Either presidential usurpation of congressional authority on tariff policy is permissible, or it isn’t. Either Trump has the right to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook based on his own definition of cause, or he doesn’t. The fact that the charge against Cook of mortgage falsification turns out to be fake doesn’t help Trump’s case. Which way will the Court go?
The old saw, articulated by humorist Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional character Mr. Dooley, that “the Supreme Court follows the election results,” is still true. More to the point, the Supreme Court follows polls. As they keep empowering Trump’s lunacy, the justices have reason to be concerned about the Court’s own credibility. In particular, the two swing votes, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, could conclude that enough is enough. It’s one thing when the Court issues theoretical defenses of the unitary executive; it’s another when the unitary executive turns out to be a megalomaniac.
The Road to 2026
The most effective form of resistance is taking back power. As veteran organizer Michael Ansara puts it, “We are in a race between organizing to take at least one House [of Congress] and Trump’s efforts to nullify the election.”
As Trump’s own popularity plummets and budget cuts begin to bite, the 2026 election is unnerving the House leadership and Republican incumbents in swing districts. Trump has been repeatedly warned that he could lose the House. But Trump’s strategy has been to cut loose blue- and purple-state Republicans, and make up for that loss with extreme gerrymandering and other election-rigging schemes. This approach does not endear him to vulnerable Republican incumbents whose votes he will need in the future.
Rep. Raskin says, “People imagine that Trump will flip a switch and turn off the election. That’s not how it works.” Rather, Trump and his allies will use a variety of tactics, including extreme gerrymanders, attempts to limit mail-in ballots, intensified voter suppression and intimidation, and the final destruction of the Voting Rights Act. All of this will be contested in courts and on the ground, to prevent electoral death by a thousand cuts.
Trump has repeatedly asserted the right of the president to take over state and local elections, but even this Supreme Court may object. The Constitution is clear, in Article I, Section 4, that Congress shall specify “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives,” with actual election administration carried out by states and localities. The president has no constitutional role whatsoever.
To power electoral organizing, Democrats will rely on grassroots energy that dates back to the first Trump term.
Nonetheless, Trump’s executive order of March 25 directed the Election Assistance Commission to require voters in federal elections to produce a passport or other document proving citizenship. It also tried to rescind prior certifications of voting equipment, and have the Department of Homeland Security seize state voter files. In April, district court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an injunction enjoining federal agencies from carrying out most of Trump’s order. That injunction is still in force. Trump repeated the threat in late August.
The great gerrymander caper may turn out to be an affront to democracy but not decisive electorally. If California voters approve an offset to Texas’s theft of up to five House seats, most tallies suggest that the net Republican gain from gerrymandering would be no more than four to eight seats nationally. Republicans in some states such as Indiana have resisted. The gain could be even less if gerrymanders play too cute and don’t leave enough Republican voters in presumed safe seats.
In Texas, where Hispanic voters shifted heavily to Trump in 2024, four of the five newly gerrymandered seats have Hispanic majorities. As the Texas economy weakens, relatively recent Hispanic support for Republicans could erode.
In 2018, Democrats made a net gain of 41 House seats. Because of intensified voter suppression in red states in 2026, they will need nearly all of their pickups in blue or purple states, but there are more than enough target districts to flip the House if organizing is strong and people are motivated to vote.
To power this electoral organizing, Democrats will rely on grassroots energy that dates back to the first Trump term. The Women’s Marches of January 2017 led to the formation of groups such as Indivisible and Run for Something, which engaged millions of citizens. They not only took back the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020, but revived a permanent organizing culture.
Indivisible famously began with the posting of a 23-page handbook of strategies for resisting Trump, modeled in part on the right-wing Tea Parties. The authors were a Capitol Hill couple, Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, who worked, respectively, for two progressive congressmen, Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Tom Perriello of Virginia. The handbook went viral. Indivisible groups helped flip the House in 2018. Today, there are upwards of 2,000 local Indivisible groups, and new ones are formed every month. Levin and Greenberg host twice-weekly Zoom discussions on resistance opportunities that typically draw upwards of 10,000 people. Indivisible, Swing Left, Sister District, and other grassroots mobilizations will be active in the midterms.
The Damage of Dysfunctional Democrats
There has been a good deal of commentary on the anomaly of dwindling public approval for Trump not translating into support for Democrats. The deeper story is worth unpacking. It’s certainly true, as commentators keep repeating, that “the Democratic brand is damaged.”
The evidence includes a widely quoted Wall Street Journal poll from late July, which found that 63 percent of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls going back to 1990, and 30 percentage points higher than those who hold a favorable view. Even though Trump is disapproved by double digits, his approval rating and that of the Republican Party are well above that of the Democrats. A New York Times deep dive into voter registration statistics in 30 states found that Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections, while Republicans gained 2.4 million.
What’s really happening here? First, the wave election of 2018 was built on massive organizing and a large increase in Democratic turnout, especially among the young, all energized by opposition to the first Trump presidency. But in 2024, due to the fiasco of President Biden’s dwindling cognition and late withdrawal, followed by Kamala Harris’s weak performance, the mobilization pattern reversed. Democratic turnout declined by more than six million votes. A July 2025 poll by Celinda Lake found that nonvoters would have voted for Harris by a margin of 2-to-1, if they had been motivated to vote at all.
Second, party elites alienate the potential base. The influence of Israel-right-or-wrong donors turns off innumerable young people disgusted by the ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The parallel influence of Democrats beholden to crypto and other corporate special interests blurs the Democrats’ identity as the party of working people. Both splits signal a party divided against itself.
Yet a damaged national Democratic brand doesn’t hurt local candidates who run effective campaigns. In late August, Democrat Catelin Drey won a special election for the Iowa state Senate by 10.4 points, flipping a seat in a Sioux City district that Trump won by 11.5 points in 2024 and ending a Republican supermajority. This follows Democrat Mike Zimmer’s Iowa state Senate pickup in January, flipping a district that Trump carried by 21 points. And in another special election in March for Pennsylvania’s state Senate District 36, Democrat James Malone won in a district that Trump carried by 15 points. And in Virginia’s 11th Congressional District, Democrat James Walkinshaw won a recent special election by just under 50 points, 16 better than Harris did in 2024, exactly the average by which Democrats have performed better in special elections in 2025 than Harris did against Trump in 2024, according to analysis by The Downballot.
In 2026, there will be no candidate at the top of the ticket to drain funds and perhaps drain support. As in 2018, the motivating forces will be resistance to Trump and the declining economic prospects of regular Americans. All politics will be local, though the consequences will be national.
In Maine, oysterman Graham Platner, running to defeat Susan Collins, is emphasizing working-class values on cultural issues but is very much a populist on economics. That strategy helped mechanic and union leader Dan Osborn run 13 points ahead of Harris in his 2024 Senate race in Nebraska against Sen. Deb Fischer, which he lost by six points. Osborn is running again, against Nebraska’s other incumbent, Pete Ricketts, in 2026. In fusion states and others where the Working Families Party is active, candidates can have it both ways, and run both as Democrats and as third-party candidates.
The old assumption was the WFP strategy could work only in the two fusion states, New York and Connecticut, where more than one party can endorse the same candidate on its own ballot line. And it’s true that the WFP performed well in New York City primaries in June, where all its endorsed candidates were elected. But lately, the WFP has devised ways to be effective in nonfusion states like Pennsylvania, where it mobilized citizens in 2023 to elect two WFP-only candidates to the Philadelphia City Council who have been effective in displacing Republicans and pushing Democrats to the left. The WFP is now operating in more than a dozen other nonfusion states, bringing activists who are skeptical of establishment Democrats into politics.
The Mamdani Paradox
The most vivid case of a candidate connecting with voters based on a powerful local appeal is Zohran Mamdani. The damaged Democratic brand did not dissuade some 50,000 New Yorkers from knocking on about a million doors and organizing their friends and neighbors via social media. Though Mamdani is a democratic socialist, his core theme—that ordinary people can’t afford to live—is available to the entire range of Democrats.
Mamdani’s youth is one cure for the other widely repeated knock on Democrats, that their party is a gerontocracy. Yet the trouble with Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is not his age (74); it’s that he is in bed with the party’s corporate and AIPAC donors. Likewise the Democrats’ House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who is a youthful 55. The party’s most beloved progressive leaders, Bernie Sanders, at 84, and Elizabeth Warren, at 76, are older than Schumer. But the party does need an infusion of candidates who are both youthful and progressive.
If Mamdani is elected mayor, New York City becomes ground zero for testing how far Trump will go to destroy a political opponent and what means a city has to resist. Trump has literally said that he will take over New York City’s government. He can’t do that, but there are perfectly legal ways to make it more difficult for Mamdani to govern.
Of New York’s total operating budget of $116 billion, about 6.4 percent comes from Washington this fiscal year. According to the office of City Comptroller Brad Lander, if you add capital grants and other categories of spending that don’t flow through the city’s operating budget, such as Medicaid, federally subsidized public housing, and funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for cleanup and repair after Superstorm Sandy, New York’s total reliance on federal funding is several times that. With Mayor Eric Adams as a Trump ally, that’s down only slightly from last year, but Trump could add further cuts without breaking the law.
The damaged Democratic brand did not dissuade some 50,000 New Yorkers from knocking on about a million doors for Zohran Mamdani.
The courts have constrained Trump’s retaliatory cutoffs of federal funds, but ordinary spending cuts hit New York disproportionately. Over half a million New Yorkers live in either traditional public housing or Section 8 voucher housing. HUD grants to New York total about $4.35 billion a year. And 35 percent of New Yorkers get their health care through Medicaid. In the 12 months ending June 2024, before the Trump Medicaid cuts, about $32 billion in federal Medicaid and other funding for low-income health programs flowed into New York. The city is also disproportionately reliant on public transit, another federally subsidized area not in the operating budget.
Quite apart from his extreme hostility to Mamdani, Trump wants to cut both public housing and public transit, while Mamdani has pledged to increase public support for both. Increased funding from the state can help, as can higher taxes on the rich, but Trump must have staffers staying up nights thinking of new ways to screw New York.
In late August, Trump signed an executive order denying federal funds to states and cities, such as New York, that have enacted “cashless bail” options for judges. Trump contends that letting minor offenders free without bail has increased crime. Whether Trump is right or wrong on the facts, this is one of innumerable gray areas where Trump may be able to legally deny New York and other progressive cities federal funds.
Neither Schumer nor Jeffries, both New Yorkers, has endorsed Mamdani. This is likely largely the result of pressure from donors. But assuming that Mamdani gets elected, they will need to defend fellow New Yorkers from crippling budget cuts, regardless of who is the mayor.
As for Trump taking over the governing of New York, the foray of the National Guard into Washington, D.C., is seen as a dry run. But D.C. is a special case, because presidents have explicit authority to commandeer the District’s police department, at least for a short period. It is neither practical nor legal for the National Guard or the Army to literally occupy and govern New York.
While New York’s likely next mayor may be controversial in some precincts of the city, New Yorkers will rally around a Mamdani besieged by Trump. One senior Mamdani adviser told me, “The more it feels like Trump vs. NYC, the more it will feel like New Yorkers are coming together to resist an authoritarian takeover.”
Chasing Off the Guard
On June 9, after four days of protests, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the deployment of 700 Marines and some 4,000 National Guard troops into Los Angeles. They mainly stood outside two federal buildings, one downtown and one on the Westside. Troops also briefly occupied MacArthur Park, in a heavily Latino neighborhood, in a performative, symbolic show of force. There were no arrests.
After a month of organizing and protest from an ordinarily indifferent citizenry, on July 21, all the Marines and about half the National Guard troops were ordered withdrawn. Today, only about 300 remain, further constrained by the courts. Afterward, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the military presence had “sent a clear message: lawlessness will not be tolerated.” But that was hot air. The occupation accomplished nothing other than to fuel lawful resistance. Trump looked more impotent than all-powerful.
Trump’s attempted takeover of D.C. increasingly looks silly. The main effect has been to depress tourism. In late August, prime visiting season, the National Mall was mostly empty. National Guard troops were seen clearing trash, spreading mulch at the Tidal Basin, and standing around near Union Station. Though the White House has more direct authority over D.C. than other cities, litigation by city Attorney General Brian Schwalb led the Justice Department to back off illegal demands to assume direct control over the D.C. police.
National Guard troops and federal agents from the Justice Department are primarily performing low-level policing actions such as traffic stops and arrests for smoking pot in public, as well as gun permit violations. About 2,000 such arrests were made during the first month of Trump’s intervention, with no significant impact on D.C.’s already low rate of serious crimes. The public has increasingly rejected the use of military troops on American soil, and D.C. residents have engaged in similar tactics as in L.A., including local challenges to ICE raids and mass protest.
Two Democratic governors have stepped to the fore of the resistance: California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’s JB Pritzker. Newsom has found a way to do it with ridicule, imitating Trump’s childish ALL CAPS social media posts and lampooning Trump’s claims of infallibility. This clearly gets under Trump’s skin and upstages his own act.
Pritzker has used real constitutional eloquence. Even before a federal judge ruled that Trump’s dispatching the National Guard to L.A. was illegal, Trump held a narcissistic, staged-for-TV cabinet meeting. He requested that Pritzker request federal troops for Chicago—an unintended admission that Trump lacks the authority to do it over the governor’s objection. At a hastily called news conference, Pritzker punched back: “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.”
By early September, Trump was reduced to seething. “We could straighten out Chicago,” he told reporters. “All they have to do is ask us.” Trump then said he might send troops to Louisiana instead, where they’d be welcome, and he later pivoted to Memphis. Resistance can work.
Reviving a Permanent Culture of Organizing
I once wrote a piece for the Prospect titled “Tocqueville for Toffs.” In Democracy in America, I noted, Tocqueville “famously identified ‘the art of association’ as an essential complement to American constitutional democracy.” Associations “breathed civic life into formally democratic institutions of government … ‘Americans of all ages, all stations of life … are forever forming associations,’ he wrote admiringly.”
But today, that no longer describes Americans of “all stations of life.” Of the top-spending trade associations or issue organizations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce leads the list with a lobbying budget of $76 million. Only one pseudo-liberal group, AARP, is even in the top 20.
The labor movement, the center of a permanent organizing culture, represents a smaller percentage of workers than it did in the mid-1930s before the Wagner Act. While there has been a great deal of talk about long-term relational organizing and “deep canvassing,” a lot of it is just talk. In the absence of a strong labor movement, there are few lifetime career paths for organizers.
A great deal of what passes for organizing is the ad hoc efforts of conventional electoral campaigns, in which door-knocking often gets crowded out by social media, phone-banking, and paid ads that leave little trace once the campaign is over. Far too much of the money gets consumed by campaign professionals who in turn rely too heavily on TV spots that generate commissions for them and engage too few voters.
Yet resistance to Trump in all its forms can energize citizen organizing. Fighting Trump can reverse the trend of citizenship giving way to consumption, and democracy itself becoming just another market, as political money crowds out speech.
“There will never be enough professional organizers,” says Maurice Mitchell, who heads the Working Families Party. Everything in effective small-d democratic life, from school board elections to collective bargaining, is built mainly on amateur organizing. Without that kind of organizing, economic elites win.
The citizen movement against ICE also includes going after corporations that contract with ICE.
The biggest and most formidable citizen organizing of Trump’s second term is the 50501 movement. 50501 stands for 50 states, 50 protests, one movement. Beginning mostly on social media, the movement helped organize the massive No Kings rallies in June, when millions of people came out to protest Trump across the country. Another mobilization is set for October 18. The No Kings coalition includes Indivisible, bringing an electoral component and a popular front to weaken the Trump regime.
A vexing question is the connection between organizing in the usual sense of mobilizing citizens to hold protests, advance issues, form unions, or elect leaders, and the kind of organizing needed to resist dictatorship. The latter sort of organizing looks more like civil disobedience, but using that to restrain a president eager for pretexts for mass arrests requires careful thought.
Gandhi’s passive resistance could work against the British because the British Raj, despite its brutality in India, was an embryonic liberal democracy at home. Gandhi’s tactics would have been crushed had they been tried against Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.
Civil disobedience was central to the successful civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. The freedom rides, sit-ins, and marches in the segregated South all deliberately broke local laws that were denying Black Americans their rights. But Dr. King and the other activists of the era had the federal government and the courts as allies, first gingerly, then wholeheartedly. Today, the entire federal machinery is being wielded to deny rights, sometimes in concert with far-right state governments.
So if protesters organize civil disobedience, they are likely to suffer the consequences. At the same time, there are useful gray areas where organized citizens can disrupt Trump’s incipient dictatorship without explicitly breaking the law.
The Slippery Case of ICE
The emblematic arena of citizen resistance is disruption of Trump’s brutal crackdown on immigrants. In Massachusetts, a broad and decentralized coalition, loosely coordinated through a statewide group called LUCE, does everything from organizing neighborhood watch systems, providing lawyers to immigrants, training community groups, finding stand-by guardians in cases where parents are at risk of abrupt removal, publicizing abuses, harassing local ICE offices, lobbying for state and city noncooperation laws, and in some cases working with clergy to give sanctuary to immigrants at risk of arrest.
Similar networks operate in other localities, like Los Angeles, where defiance came in many forms. ICE watch groups swarmed attempted detentions, including one at Dodger Stadium, filming and agitating and forcing agents into retreat. Citizens-turned-activists handed out red cards so immigrants knew their rights. Others learned which hotels ICE agents were staying at, and held noisy all-night rallies outside their windows.
The Los Angeles Unified School District adopted an explicit policy of treating schools as ICE-free zones of safety. In one case, apparently unrelated to Trump’s national strategy, four local investigators from the Department of Homeland Security showed up at two South Los Angeles elementary schools, Russell Elementary and Lillian Street Elementary. They asked to conduct “wellness checks” on five allegedly undocumented students. The two principals demanded to see a warrant, which they could not produce, and both refused to let them in. There were no further attempts.
In Rochester, New York, in early September, a crowd of about 200 surrounded an ICE vehicle. They prevented ICE officials from arresting two allegedly illegal-migrant roofers. While they were attempting to get to the roof, someone slashed the tires. The vehicle limped away, and was towed. There were no arrests. Rochester expanded its role as a sanctuary city in August.
The citizen movement against ICE also includes going after corporations that contract with ICE. Ground Avelo is aimed at the small airline, Avelo, that has a contract with ICE to transport detainees to ICE concentration camps. Activities include signing a pledge to boycott the airlines, holding protests at airports, and pressuring state and local governments and universities to join the boycott. Avelo’s East Coast hub is New Haven’s small airport. Recently, New Haven prohibited city employees from using the airline, and Avelo also closed its West Coast hub at Hollywood Burbank Airport.
Intensified removal of immigrants is one of the few areas of Trump’s drive to autocracy where the law is basically on his side, even though he often breaks the law by picking up legal residents and depriving immigrants of due process. There are as many as 14 million migrants in the U.S. illegally. The left has long taken care to use the euphemism “undocumented,” as a reminder that they are also human beings. But the hard fact is that they have far fewer rights than citizens or legal residents.
White House officials have given ICE a daily quota of 3,000 arrests. While ICE has not met that quota, the numbers are increasing ominously. As of August 10, there were 59,380 people in ICE detention, and 31,282 people were booked into ICE detention in July alone. Armed with a mountain of money from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, the administration is offering signing bonuses for new ICE recruits, and has detailed people from other federal agencies to ICE.
Even so, the effort to disrupt ICE and defend immigrants has engaged large numbers of Americans, strengthened alliances between citizen groups and local governments, and slowed the process of deportations that deny due process. This strategy has also dramatically shifted public opinion. According to a Quinnipiac poll in June, a majority of Americans disapproved of the activities of ICE by 17 points, and more than two-thirds support giving most undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship—a dramatic shift from 2024.
Some 17 states, including New York, California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, and dozens of municipalities have passed sanctuary laws denying Trump the cooperation of local law enforcement. These efforts on the whole are popular. In mid-August, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent out a letter threatening “sanctuary cities” with a cutoff of federal funds. None caved.
In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu, up for re-election this fall, gave a news conference rejecting federal demands, which turned into an anti-Trump rally. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller then told Fox News that Boston will now “face not only revocation of funds, not only the loss of taxpayer support, but also potential criminal charges for harboring and smuggling.”
Good luck to that. The courts have repeatedly overturned denial of federal funds intended as retribution. Long-standing judicial precedent relies on the Tenth Amendment, which holds that powers not expressly delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states. The related “anti-commandeering doctrine” allows states to refuse cooperation with federal law enforcement.
The press is filled with accounts of ICE swooping in and breaking up families, often with extreme cruelty. But the cruelty is the whole point. The administration hopes that the publicity will encourage undocumented migrants to “self-deport.” But brutal kidnappings, evocative of the Gestapo, are monumentally unpopular, and part of the general downdraft on Trump’s approval ratings.
College Resistance
In the first several months of his administration, Trump’s strategy of shaking down institutions that thwarted many of his actions in his first term worked all too well. Media corporations owned by conglomerates or billionaires facing regulatory decisions caved in to Trump’s demands. Corporate law firms, subjected to gross extortion demands, judged it cheaper to pay tribute to Trump than to risk lucrative client business.
These preemptive surrenders backfired in several instances. Media outlets like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post lost several key writers, a large amount of readership, and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, while law firms that played ball lost outraged partners and outraged clients. Those law firms that refused Trump’s demands and took him to court suffered no losses.
Big universities have followed this pattern. Even before Trump brought down the hammer with withdrawal of federal research grants, denial of visas to foreign students, threats to accreditation and tax status, and demands to review applications and admissions, several universities engaged in anticipatory appeasement. Columbia changed its own policies to redefine antisemitism to Trump’s liking, fire faculty for their views, and constrain free speech on campus. In the eventual settlement, in July, Columbia paid the federal government a $200 million fine, a number invented from whole cloth. In return, Trump agreed to restore frozen federal funding totaling as much as $1.3 billion. But as numerous critics pointed out, there was nothing in the deal to prevent Trump from upping the ante with new extortion demands.
By contrast, Harvard resisted—in spite of itself. Throughout July and August, The New York Times regularly published articles based on administration leaks that Harvard was on the verge of settling with Trump for $500 million and concessions on university governance. In exchange, Trump would release research funding worth several times that, and relent on other forms of harassment, such as targeting foreign student visas and challenging Harvard’s tax exemption and accreditation. On August 25, Trump himself, speaking at a cabinet meeting, confirmed that his price was $500 million. But no such deal was forthcoming.
One of the most visible and vulnerable corporate turncoats is the well-named Target, which attracts numerous Black shoppers.
Credit goes to Crimson Courage, which has kept the pressure on Harvard President Alan Garber and the Harvard Corporation to not cave in to Trump. In mid-August, Crimson Courage and other groups sent a petition signed by more than 14,000 Harvard alums, faculty, and students to Garber and the university’s governing board, warning that “[a] settlement with the Trump administration will have a chilling effect on the Harvard community and on all of higher education.”
Garber has been an accidental and unintentional hero of the resistance. In the Columbia fashion, he preemptively altered many of Harvard’s policies that offended Trump, and spent much of the spring pursuing a deal. As part of a January settlement of Title VI allegations, Harvard agreed to adopt the extreme definition of antisemitism created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which defines some kinds of criticisms of Israel as per se antisemitic.
But then, Trump saved Garber from himself. The administration sent a letter in April with new demands, including “audits” of academic programs and departments, screening for the viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff, and changes to the university’s governance structure and hiring practices, threatening $9 billion in federal funding.
Garber indignantly wrote, “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” Instead of settling, he sued. And on September 3, Judge Allison Burroughs of U.S. district court in Boston ruled that Trump’s freezing of billions of dollars in Harvard research funds was illegal, which will make it even harder for Garber to cave.
Wesleyan’s president, Michael Roth, one of the first to publicly denounce Trump’s shakedown of universities, told me, “There are the opportunists and collaborators preaching neutrality and just staying quiet, but resistance is growing.” Roth cited the bravery of George Mason University President Gregory Washington for refusing to apologize for trying to diversify his faculty, and Mike Gavin of Delta College in Michigan for organizing more than 200 other community college leaders into Education for All to resist Trump’s anti-DEI crusade.
Resisting the Collaborators
Initially, only a handful of corporations resisted Trump’s demands. At Costco, Apple, and Levi Strauss, shareholders overwhelmingly voted with the company board against proposals to re-evaluate DEI policies. Delta Air Lines reaffirmed its commitment to DEI. Ben & Jerry’s, now spun off from Unilever, has been vocal in its defense of cultivating a diverse workforce.
But these are the exceptions. Corporations and universities have either been killing DEI programs outright, or changing their names to anodyne offices such as “Belonging, Respect and Fairness” (Nationwide Insurance). This gives aid and comfort to Trump’s claim that there is something wrong with diversity initiatives, or that Black employees should be presumed diversity hires until proven otherwise. However, it also creates opportunities for resistance.
One of the most visible and vulnerable corporate turncoats is the well-named Target, which employs large numbers of Black workers and attracts numerous Black shoppers. Target is also key because in 2020, after the George Floyd murder, Target’s CEO made a commitment to invest $2 billion in Black-owned businesses, double the number of Black-owned brands on its shelves, increase Black employee representation by 20 percent, and donate $100 million to social justice organizations. But in 2025, in response to pressure from Trump, Target walked away from these commitments.
Black leaders, led by Pastor Jamal Bryant of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, made Target the focus of a nationwide boycott. The result has been severe damage to the Target brand. Foot traffic is down, and the stock has plummeted. A PBS report quoted Dr. Bryant on the logic of singling out one high-visibility company. “We thought it prudent to just go after one at a time,” Bryant said. “The Montgomery bus boycott went for a year and a day. And this is just our fifth month.”
Tesla Takedown is an epic case of grassroots disruption of a close Trump ally, Elon Musk. Since its launch in February, the campaign has organized protests in front of hundreds of Tesla showrooms, helping to depress sales and drive down Tesla stock. According to Evan Sutton, one of the campaign’s organizers, more than 500 people have hosted a demonstration. “About half of them had never hosted a protest before, and people thanked us for giving them a way to get involved.” The campaign’s next anti-Musk project is an effort, in partnership with the Communications Workers of America, to pressure T-Mobile to cut its ties with Musk’s Starlink.
Perhaps recognizing these successful anti-collaboration efforts, a number of corporations have begun pushing back on Trump, notably in areas that are damaging their business, such as the crackdown on immigrants, the cancellation of renewable-energy projects in which billions have already been invested, and the on-again, off-again tariffs that wreak havoc on supply chains. Tariffs on inputs are costing John Deere, an iconic American export champion, $600 million this year, and leading to layoffs.
These areas also create opportunities for joint efforts by business and labor. In California, where crops are starting to rot for lack of farmworkers, the California Farm Bureau, representing agribusiness, is working with the California Farmworker Foundation to support farmers and farmworkers, and both are working with state officials to pressure ICE to lay off.
Prospects for a New Democracy
Trump’s multifaceted assaults offer more opportunities. Trump is making the already flawed student debt system even more expensive and cumbersome, but outside of the Debt Collective, mass challenges to these policies have been muted. Trump is destroying science and the country’s leading research institutions, but we have yet to see a well-organized protest spearheaded by leading scientific organizations. Trump is gutting the VA health system. As Suzanne Gordon has written in the Prospect, there have been intermittent protests, but the largest veterans service organizations have yet to make resistance a priority.
Another area that has only begun to realize its organizing potential is the connection between Trump’s economic policies and rampant economic inequality, which affects millions of Trump voters. This has been a constant theme of Bernie Sanders and AOC’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, which has made a point of touring red areas. On Labor Day, hundreds of Workers Over Billionaires protests were held in cities throughout the country.
“Bringing pocketbook issues to the fore can help drive a wedge in the MAGA coalition,” says organizer and author (and former Prospect board member) Chuck Collins, “as economic conditions worsen and more Trump supporters begin to conclude, ‘This isn’t what I voted for.’” In a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll published September 1, nearly 70 percent of Americans said that it wasn’t possible to work hard and get ahead. The Journal separately reported that “American companies are once again beating profit expectations,” but through job cuts and price hikes, not higher consumer spending. How popular is that?
At least some Republicans, seeing this growing unpopularity, are beginning to offer resistance. In mid-July, ten GOP senators led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) urged Trump to release $6.8 billion in frozen public-school funds, which cut funds for recruitment and training of teachers, English proficiency learning, academic enrichment, and after-school and summer programs. Ten days later, the funds were released.
Later, a bipartisan group of senators strenuously challenged a gimmick called “pocket rescissions” to impound $4.9 billion in previously authorized foreign aid without congressional approval. The Office of Management and Budget contended that since the rescission came within 45 days of the end of the fiscal year, congressional consent was not required. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), chair of the Appropriations Committee, facing her own difficult re-election campaign, flatly said, “Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.”
Each time Republicans frontally challenge a Trump violation of a congressional prerogative, it emboldens Republicans to act on the next incursion. As this article was being finalized for publication, the evisceration of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stimulated serious opposition from key Senate Republicans who never should have voted to confirm HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the first place. There are now coalitions of states setting up their own shadow public-health coalitions to provide vaccine guidance.
I come away from this survey of resistance with new respect for the genius of America’s Founders. After all, each of the major firebreaks against Trump’s tyranny reflects some aspect of the constitutional design. The Founders decided that Congress, not the executive, would be the paramount branch; and that the whole House would face the voters every two years. Though it is taking too long, Congress is beginning to reassert its prerogatives. As the midterms approach, Congress will become even more alert to public opinion, which could well flip one house and further constrain Trump.
The Founders also gave us an independent judiciary. While the Supreme Court has been too beholden to Trump, lower courts have slowed him down and the high court may come around on key decisions.
If Americans have been free to organize and protest without fear of arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention, they can thank the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments that were added to the Constitution at the insistence of the Jeffersonians. And to the extent that state and local governments have become a key part of the resistance, we can credit American federalism, the accidental legacy of separate colonies, which was also explicitly enshrined in the Constitution. To be sure, some of the final document reflected expedient compromises, yet it has an elegant coherence centered on the protection of popular, legitimate rule.
In the era of FDR and LBJ, mostly benign strong presidents, the checks and balances bequeathed by the Founders were a source of progressive frustration; in the Trump era, they have been our salvation. The Founders, after all, designed their constitution as a reaction against King George and his trampling of their historic liberties as Englishmen—and to prevent future would-be kings. They knew exactly what tyranny looked like.
All of the foregoing suggests that the great American democratic experiment is far from over. If the slide to autocracy can be slowed and reasonably fair elections preserved, the millions of citizens engaged in resistance could stay mobilized to elect a drastically different governing coalition and set of policies. If the antibodies to tyranny continue to revive, Trump’s paradoxical legacy may be a reawakened citizenry. Over the long term, that is the only antidote to Trumpism.
I could be wrong, of course. As Trump becomes more cornered and more crazed, he and his enablers might attempt more flagrant forms of fascism: arbitrary arrests, assassinations, more extreme uses of the military and private police, shutting down Congress, defying even the Supreme Court. Whether that happens could depend on how effectively the resistance contains Trump now.
