In Donald J. Trump’s first term as president, some of his toughest opponents were not elected Democrats but left-leaning nonprofit groups. They bogged down his immigration and environmental policies with lawsuits and protests and were rewarded with a huge “Trump bump” in donations.
Now, some of those groups are promising to do it all over again.
“Trump’s gotta get past all of us,” Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote on the nonprofit’s website the day after the election.
“Trump’s bigotry, misogyny, anti-climate and anti-wildlife zealotry — all will be defeated,” Kieran Suckling, the executive director of an environmental nonprofit called the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote in an email to potential donors.
That bravado masks uncertainty. This time could be a lot harder. Mr. Trump’s administration could learn from past mistakes and avoid the procedural errors that made its rules easier to challenge. And the higher courts are seeded with judges appointed by Mr. Trump.
Another problem: Nonprofits are finding that some supporters are not energized by another round of “resistance.” Instead they have been left exhausted, wondering whether their donations made any difference. Some are afraid that they could be targeted for retaliation by Mr. Trump and his allies for donating to groups that oppose his administration.
“The response from donors has been shock, anger and depression, sprinkled in with a few checks,” said Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which challenged several of Mr. Trump’s previous immigration policies in court. “It’s not been a flood.”
This resistance-in-waiting illustrates how nonprofits — even tax-exempt charities — have taken on a larger and more aggressive role in American politics. Tax-exempt charities are not allowed to endorse candidates, but they are allowed to condemn policy ideas.
Since Mr. Trump’s first election, these nonprofits have increasingly taken on the role of surrogates for political parties out of power. They reach out to one party’s donors, offering to serve as sand in an opposing administration’s gears, using lawsuits, protests and opposition research.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, the A.C.L.U. fought his ban on travelers from several Muslim countries. The group’s donations doubled in a single year, to nearly $300 million. The A.C.L.U. eventually filed more than 400 suits challenging Mr. Trump’s policies, raising internal concerns that it had gone too far in embracing progressive politics and abandoned its traditional role as a neutral defender of free speech.
After Mr. Trump lost in 2020, his allies started nonprofits that copied this approach. They pelted President Biden’s agenda with lawsuits and opposition research and raised tens of millions of dollars.
Next week, an influential coalition of liberal donors will meet in Washington to prepare for the next round.
The coalition, called the Democracy Alliance, has steered hundreds of millions of dollars to PACs and nonprofits that form the pillars of the institutional left since 2005. In 2017, it published a “resistance map” for its donors that recommended an array of nonprofits and more traditional political groups, all focused on opposing Mr. Trump.
Among the scheduled speakers for the upcoming conference is an official with the National Immigration Project, a nonprofit that filed lawsuits challenging various aspects of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The Democracy Alliance’s president, Pamela Shifman, suggested the coalition needed to understand the causes of Democrats’ losses last week before charting a course for opposing Mr. Trump’s second term.
“If you are a surgeon, you need a clear diagnosis before you operate,” she said in a statement. “Easy answers and quick fixes will not suffice.”
Billy Wimsatt, who runs a donor network called the Movement Voter Project, which has a PAC that steers contributions to progressive groups in battleground states, urged his supporters to channel their grief and shock into donations.
“The Harris campaign, for all its strengths — and the $1-billion-plus it raised — is going away. It’s not going to be here anymore,” he told donors and activists on a video briefing last week. “You know who’s going to be here? All the groups that we fund. And they are going to be the ones leading in the next phase of this.”
Anemic Donations
Some nonprofits say they need cash to combat Mr. Trump’s agenda even before he is sworn in.
“I would guess that the first lawsuit is going to drop on the 21st” of January, Mr. Trump’s first full day in office, said Mr. Suckling, of the Center for Biological Diversity.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Suckling’s group filed 266 lawsuits challenging the administration’s environmental policies, seeking to block offshore drilling and to expand protections for species from grizzly bears to bumblebees. He said nine out of 10 cases had produced wins, though some came after Mr. Biden took office and reversed Mr. Trump’s decisions.
Mr. Suckling said he recently showed his staff a documentary on the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 boxing match, to pump them up. “That’s a lot of what we do, is you keep them off balance so that they’re responding to you,” he said. “You’re keeping them on their back feet.”
What he is missing is money. He wants to hire 12 new lawyers, but does not have the funding yet. “We can’t wait for the money to come in,” Mr. Suckling said. “We have to be prepared immediately.”
At the National Immigration Law Center, President Kica Matos had similar plans — and similar worries. During the first Trump presidency, her group sued the administration over rules creating a wealth test for new immigrants and on behalf of workers caught in an immigration raid on a meat-processing plant in Tennessee.
Now, Ms. Matos wants to triple the size of her legal department to battle Mr. Trump’s plan for a huge increase in deportations. But donations are not keeping up with her ambitions.
“Thus far, we have not seen the same levels of giving we experienced as compared to this time in 2016,” she said in an email. Other groups said the same, though they noted that even after Mr. Trump’s first election, fund-raising did not skyrocket until after he actually took office.
During Mr. Trump’s last term, his second day in office was marked by a Women’s March that drew more than 450,000 people to Washington. It was a stunning illustration of the scale of opposition to Mr. Trump, though later marches were smaller and the Women’s March movement was divided by infighting.
This year, the Women’s March is calling for another gathering, just before Mr. Trump takes office. The group’s executive director, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, said tens of thousands of people have confirmed, but it is impossible to know how many will show.
Making It Hurt
Another set of nonprofits is setting up “war rooms” to research Mr. Trump’s nominees and advisers. The goal is to highlight conflicts of interest or past scandals, which could derail a nomination or a policy idea.
That strategy found some success before. Mr. Trump jettisoned a series of officials after scandals were made public. Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, was ousted for spending extravagantly on private jet travel. Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned after reports that he had spent taxpayer money on first-class travel and used an E.P.A. staff member as a personal assistant.
But this time, Mr. Trump enters office with far more support, having won the popular vote.
The left-leaning groups are betting that the American people can still be shocked by the choices Mr. Trump makes.
“We’re going to be out there every day, making sure that people know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, said Tony Carrk, the executive director of the watchdog nonprofit Accountable.us, which is running one such war room operation.
The groups opposing Mr. Trump’s agenda also include a separate kind of noncharitable nonprofit, sometimes known as “dark money” groups, which have more leeway to get involved in politics. They include People for the American Way, whose president, Svante Myrick, said the group would try to block Mr. Trump’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants at a very local level.
The plan requires new detention camps, Mr. Myrick reasoned. Detention camps could require land and building permits. If his group can block land sales or permits for the camps, the entire plan could stall or even fall apart.
“We just want to make it hurt bad enough,” Mr. Myrick said.
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