Democracy is not a spectator sport.That truism has been repeated by notables from Gen. Jim Mattis to Barack Obama to George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. But it’s fitting that the person credited with first saying it was a private citizen whom nobody particularly remembers.
Lotte Scharfman (1928–1970) was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who became president of the Massachusetts chapter of the League of Women Voters. Her cause was an obscure one: She wanted to reduce the size of Massachusetts’s bloated House of Representatives from 240 members to 160. The measure failed on its first vote in the House in 1970, for the obvious reason that no representative wanted to risk losing their own seat. But after several House members were voted out later that year for opposing the reform measure, it cleared the state legislature, and in 1974 it won overwhelming approval from Massachusetts voters.
Corruption was “a way of life” in the Massachusetts state House of the 1960s and 1970s, a state investigating panel later concluded—it was rife with bribery, extortion, and money laundering. Yet even in that civic sewer, a legislative body was persuaded to do something that most political scientists would tell you is a logical impossibility: put one-third of its own members out on the street. That should clue you in to the power of participatory democracy.
“People know deep inside them,” Ralph Nader told me recently, that “if they really blow their top, nothing can stop them.” Is Nader, who at 91 has logged six decades walking the citizen-action beat, feeling optimistic that President Donald Trump’s multifront assault on constitutional government can be stopped? “Not optimistic,” Nader replied. “Just realistic…. As some people stand up to power, it becomes contagious.”
Granted, this country has never witnessed an abuse of presidential authority so extreme as what Trump is right now wreaking in every conceivable direction. But as I write this, an extraordinary national mobilization is underway. Every conceivable method of lawful opposition is being applied to arrest Trump’s bizarre and frequently illegal sabotage of the very government he was elected to lead. Some acts of resistance will work; others will fail. It will be some time before we have a clear sense of what works best.
Surveying this Boschian hellscape, many good people will despair. Yes, Trump is much more dangerous than he was during his first term (which was harrowing enough). He’s more giddily reckless about impounding funds, shutting down agencies, disobeying court orders, and using the government to punish political enemies. But if you allow yourself to tune out this ugliness, you might as well have voted for the man. The president is counting on such demoralization. “If you are overly cynical and think ‘Oh, there’s nothing we can do,’” warned David Cole, former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, “that also has a snowball effect.” Democracy is not a spectator sport.
There’s no messiah who will sweep in and make everything better. That’s up to you and me.
How can ordinary citizens fight back? To scout the best approaches, I canvassed activists, lawyers, scholars, politicians, and union leaders for advice. Some of what they suggest will lie beyond your abilities, expertise, financial resources, or sense of personal safety—in which case, choose something you can do. Just about everyone I spoke to emphasized that there is no silver bullet—no single arena, not even the courtroom, where Trump’s illegal power grab can be stopped. “There’s no messiah” who will “sweep in and make everything better,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. That’s up to you and me. The good news is there are a lot of us.
Indeed, there may be even more than we can know just yet. Because Trump isn’t careful about whose interests he acts against, Resistance 2.0 has potential to evolve into a bipartisan movement. “Successful authoritarian regimes determine what their winning coalition is,” observed Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the resistance nonprofit Indivisible, “and then they work very hard to keep that coalition together.” Trump lacks such discipline, and as a result he frequently screws over natural allies.
Trump alienates the military by installing as defense secretary Pete Hegseth, a boozer and womanizer who called an officer of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps a “jagoff” and, after he was confirmed, fired the top JAG officers in the Air Force, Army, and Navy. Trump alienates Big Pharma by installing as health and human services secretary a recovering heroin addict, womanizer, and (according to his cousin Caroline Kennedy) “predator” who less than two years ago said, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” As HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recommends treating measles with cod liver oil and letting bird flu spread unchecked through poultry flocks. Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says, “I’m not worried about inflation,” and “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Trump, meanwhile, terrorizes Wall Street with market-killing tariffs and stray threats not to honor the national debt.
No matter who joins this fight, it won’t be won next week, or next month. Barring impeachment and removal, Trump will be president for four long years, and not even his allies expect him to become less authoritarian and kleptocratic. So pace yourself. But the sooner you join in, the more effectively we can limit the damage.
Here’s how.
Sue the Bastard.
The most obvious arena in which to stop a lawbreaker is the courts, and that’s where Resistance 2.0 begins. More than 70 lawsuits were filed against the Trump administration just during Trump’s first month in office, challenging everything from his attempt to end birthright citizenship (which is embedded in the Fourteenth Amendment) to Elon Musk’s de facto shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development (which distributes about $40 billion in international aid per year).
The result was a blizzard of federal court rulings that blocked, at least temporarily, various administration actions—46 rulings in Trump’s first eight weeks, according to The New York Times. His previous presidency occasioned 64 court injunctions, or more than half of all such rulings since 1963. That was over a period of four years. This time, Trump could easily exceed 64 injunctions within four months. At this writing, judges have enjoined Trump from, among other things, firing National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox; withholding appropriated federal grants and loans; and allowing Musk’s government-efficiency gumshoes access to Treasury Department payment systems. Four separate judges blocked Trump’s revocation of birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.
“The system is working,” Skye Perryman, president of the public-interest law nonprofit Democracy Forward, told me. “Litigants are using the courts to ensure compliance with orders…. Courts are requiring status updates. That is good.” When we spoke in late February, Perryman told me Democracy Forward had filed more cases against Trump than any other organization.
Granted, injunctions and (more commonly used) temporary restraining orders are an imperfect tool. They aren’t that easy for plaintiffs to get, and Trump administration lawyers are expert at finding bad-faith ways to evade them (most outrageously when it deported around 250 Venezuelans in March). At some point, it’s expected that the Trump administration will stop pretending and, following the advice of Vice President JD Vance (“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”), openly defy the courts. But the courts can always hold individual agency officials in civil or criminal contempt, leveling fines or throwing offenders in jail.
It might not end there. This president could respond, New York University law professors Trevor W. Morrison and Richard H. Pildes speculated in The New York Times, with pardons, or by ordering U.S. marshals not to enforce rulings from the bench. But such blatant lawlessness, they argued, would create chaos in financial markets, which depend on America’s reputation for political stability. At which point, it seems to me, an instinct for self-preservation might boost support among congressional Republicans to impeach.
What role is there for John Q. Citizen? If you’re a lawyer, consider volunteering for a nonprofit group engaged in Resistance 2.0, or donating money. Both are usually best done at the local level, but don’t neglect national nonprofits taking on Trump, which include Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, and State Democracy Defenders Fund. “The litigation is the fire starter,” Norm Eisen, SDDF’s co-founder, told me. “This week alone, I got two orders stopping government wrongdoing.” The national groups typically work in conjunction with local groups, whose names can be found on court filings readily available online. It’s the local groups that are best positioned to identify specific harms to citizens caused by Trump’s recklessness. They are also most in need of whatever type of assistance you can offer.
Also: “Support your local attorney general and make sure that we have enough budget and resources to fight these fights.” That advice comes from William Tong, Connecticut’s attorney general and president-elect of the National Association of Attorneys General. Attorneys general are in the strongest position to challenge Trump policies in court. “They have the deepest pockets,” Peter Shane of the NYU School of Law explained, and “in blue states they have a political incentive.” They are often well-connected to activists. Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, noted with pride that Letitia James, the New York attorney general who won a more than $450 million civil judgment against Trump for financial fraud, came out of the WFP.
A series of Supreme Court rulings during the past couple of decades, Shane told me, made it easier for states to establish standing to challenge the executive branch; to quote Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), states are “entitled to special solicitude in our standing analysis.” In most instances (Massachusetts v. EPA was an exception), these Supreme Court rulings were anti-regulatory, as were a parallel set of rulings, culminating in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, that invited judges to second-guess federal agencies. Today, with Trump in the White House, 60 percent of all district-level federal judges were appointed by Democrats, and appeals courts divide more or less evenly between Democratic appointees and Republican ones. Our reactionary high court may soon find that what was sauce for the red-state goose has become sauce for the blue-state gander. Not that partisanship has played much of a role thus far in court rulings against Trump. Many have come from Republican-appointed judges.
March.
“The combination of litigation and mobilization is a new one in this moment,” observed Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the Nader-founded Public Citizen. “It’s a very interesting new dynamic.”
Civil society can’t be saved in the courts alone. It’s up to us as a people to stand up and push back.
Gilbert is right. The civil rights movement, for instance, had its litigation phase, which culminated in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, and then its mobilization phase, which culminated in the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery. The anti-Trump movement does Selma and Brown v. Board of Ed simultaneously, with lawsuits and public protests ricocheting off each other. Cole, the former ACLU legal director, noted that the United States has “a much more robust civil society” than, say Hungary, whose strongman Viktor Orbán wrote the playbook Trump seems to be following. But civil society can’t be saved in the courts alone: “It’s up to us as a people to stand up and push back.”
That’s happening. On February 17, for example, thousands of protesters chanting “No kings on President’s Day” marched in Washington and in state capitals to reassert constitutional separation of powers—reinforcing courtroom challenges against Trump’s violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, and so on. Thanks to social media, such protests can be organized at lightning speed. The President’s Day event, and a similar protest held two weeks earlier, were organized by a new group called 50501 that didn’t even exist until late January. In February 2017, there were over 900 protests nationwide, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard and the University of Connecticut. In February 2025, there were around 2,000.
The purpose of such protests is not to influence the president. “Trump doesn’t really get moved by hundreds of thousands of people marching against him,” noted Daniel Hunter, self-described “activist-educator-trainer” and co-founder of Choose Democracy, a political action committee. The purpose, a Democratic strategist explained to me, is to bring like-minded people together into resistance networks; to attract publicity that will draw new people into the movement; and, through that same publicity, to alert other politicians that failing to oppose Trump will cost them support.
What next? “Tesla Takedown” protests are proliferating, causing Tesla’s stock price to plummet. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, more than 50 people showed up at a Tesla dealership waving signs that said, “No One Elected Elon Musk” and “Hell No! Billionaire Grift.” In Portland, Oregon, demonstrators picketed outside a Tesla showroom with signs that said, “Stop Musk Sell Your Tesla.” The same methods can be applied against any other oligarch who actively pushes forward Trump’s agenda.
Finally, there’s what Choose Democracy, in a dead-tree resistance guide published before the election titled What if Trump Wins?, calls “strategic disobedience.” “I’m a disrupt and disobey person,” Hunter told me. For the adventurous, an online Choose Democracy guide provides a link to a Simple Sabotage Field Manual prepared during World War II by the Office of Strategic Services. It steers protesters toward milder recommendations, such as worker slowdowns and stalling during meetings, and away from what in peacetime would constitute criminal activity, such as setting fires or vandalizing equipment. The latter are terrible ideas for more reasons than I have room here to elucidate. As Sgt. Phil Esterhaus used to say on the TV cop show Hill Street Blues: Let’s be careful out there.
Pester Your Elected Officials.
Congressional Democrats are getting a lot of criticism for failing to stop Trump. And it’s true, as Jodi Jacobson, executive director of the nonprofit Healthcare Across Borders, told me, that “you cannot rely on Democrats to do the work for you.” But to presume you ever could rely on them is to treat democracy, pace Lotte Scharfman, like a spectator sport. There are actions that members of Congress can take—even when in the minority—but to the extent they don’t take them, it isn’t just their fault; it’s also yours, for failing to demand them.
Don’t expect your representative to thank you. Axios ran a titillating story reporting that House members were “pissed” that groups like MoveOn and Indivisible were generating thousands of phone calls to congressional Democrats complaining about Trump policies. Even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was reportedly ticked off. Some of these representatives went on the record. “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” griped Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York.
The thrust of Axios’s reporting was that these out-of-control progressive groups were at risk of alienating their congressional allies. But that gets it backward. This wasn’t a bad-news story; it was a good-news story. The congressional Democrats’ annoyance demonstrated that they were feeling appropriate pressure from voters to swing into action. The groups that mobilized them had done well.
Indivisible sprang up after the 2016 election to educate voters about how to harness their power as constituents, adopting some tactics (but none of the politics) of the right-wing Tea Party movement. Indivisible ended up playing a significant role in preventing Trump from eliminating Obamacare and in the Democrats’ recapture of the House in 2018. After the 2024 election, Indivisible updated its primer on constituent power; the new Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink is refreshingly blunt. Elected officials care about “advocacy that requires effort” such as phone calls, personal emails, “and especially showing up in person.” They don’t usually care about form letters or a social media post. A constituent acting alone is easy to blow off; a constituent acting with other constituents is not, especially if the others include constituents who are wealthy or otherwise prominent. A list of requests will be ignored; a “concrete” single request for a vote or a public statement will not. Indivisible acknowledges in its new guide that “responsiveness to our advocacy” has “weakened since Trump first won office.” Republicans are more afraid of primary challenges; the mainstream press has less influence; and elected officials have gotten better at limiting their exposure to anybody who might disagree with them. But the mechanisms of accountability “still exist,” and “we choose to use” them.
Congressional Republicans, for instance, can’t altogether avoid holding town meetings in their districts, and when they do, they hear from irate constituents, not all of them Democrats. At a February town hall meeting conducted by telephone, Representative Stephanie Bice, Republican of Oklahoma, fielded an angry question from a man named John Adams about “college whiz kids” at DOGE making cuts to Veterans Affairs. Adams identified himself as a registered Republican and retired Army officer who served five combat tours. “Despite what you want to try to spin it as,” Adams said, “anytime you cut a thousand people from the workforce, that comes with a cost.”
Bice replied, “Thank you for your service, sir,” and justified the cuts by saying, “Did you know that the VA was in charge of payments for illegals for housing?” Which didn’t satisfy Adams and also wasn’t true. The VA has an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to process medical (not housing) payments for undocumented immigrants that ICE holds in detention against their will. This work is performed by “no more than 10 employees,” a VA spokesperson said last year, and the cost is borne by ICE, one of several federal agencies to contract such services out to the VA (which, through processing around two million medical claims annually to veterans, got quite good at it). ICE and other agencies tap VA bureaucrats so they don’t have to create costly and duplicative bureaucracies of their own, the very thing DOGE’s whiz kids supposedly want to root out.
What should constituents pressure Congress to do? Nader pointed out that Democrats “can have unofficial hearings in the House and Senate.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened three weeks into the Trump administration to initiate such hearings “if Senate Republicans continue to refuse to uphold their congressional duty to provide oversight on the Executive Branch.” But it was already obvious that Republican oversight would not materialize, and that these unofficial hearings should commence. In March, Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California held one such hearing on local impacts Trump impoundments had on infrastructure. More hearings should follow on the effects of the president’s funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health on the availability of cancer drugs; on Trump withholding money appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act to create manufacturing jobs in red states; on the effect of VA cuts on the processing of VA medical claims; and so on.
Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic representative from New Jersey, told me the House can also take more direct action by proposing resolutions that are “privileged,” i.e., must get a floor vote whether the Republican leadership wants one or not. Under the Impoundment Control Act, for instance, the comptroller general (who heads the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm) is authorized to report to Congress on whether the president requested congressional approval for withholding funds, as required by law. Spoiler alert: Trump did not. If the comptroller general said Trump did not, that would trigger a mandatory vote and, Malinowski explained to me, “If both houses don’t vote to approve the impoundment, then it doesn’t stand.”
The comptroller general is appointed by the president, but his independent agency, the GAO, works for Congress. That may explain why Trump hasn’t fired him yet. The current officeholder is Gene L. Dodaro, who’s held the job 17 years. If Dodaro were to report that the president didn’t follow the Impoundment Control Act, then Trump would likely jettison whatever scruples previously kept him from trying to fire the man (who, by statute, can be fired only by Congress). But Congress would still have to vote on impoundment. Even if both houses approved it, Republicans wouldn’t like going on record as ceding power of the purse to Trump.
Another privileged resolution Malinowski would like to see brought up would concern whether Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose indiscriminate tariffs is legal. That would force Republicans “either to go on record against the president or own the economic chaos that results,” Malinowski wrote in The Bulwark.
Keep Up.
None of the foregoing is of much use if you don’t keep up with whatever mischief the Trump administration is into at any given moment. If you’re reading this article, odds are that you know already pretty well how to stay informed. But it isn’t easy, because Trump is doing so many outrageous things in so many parts of the government all at once. Even experienced Washington reporters like me struggle to keep up. (Don’t tell my boss!)
The most important thing is to follow the mainstream press. It’s long been a badge of honor on the right not to subscribe to The New York Times or The Washington Post. Liberals have lately followed suit. That’s just foolish. These national newspapers, along with The Wall Street Journal, are imperfect but indispensable sources of reliable information. So is your local newspaper, if you’re still lucky enough to have one.
But you should also use social media. Yes, most of it is a fetid swamp of half-truths and outright lies, and if it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t be terribly sorry. But some of it conveys useful information. I lack space here to explain how to spot the difference, but universities routinely post guides about this.
The two social media sites mentioned to me most often as I reported this story were Bluesky and (to my mild surprise) TikTok, which Trump saved after Congress exiled it based on its Chinese ownership. “If you aren’t on TikTok,” said Pamela Keith, who represents a group of FBI agents suing to halt Trump’s attempted purge of January 6 investigators, “then you aren’t following the resistance.”
Keith is particularly enthusiastic about TikTok and Substack posts by Aaron Parnas, who, improbably, is the son of Lev Parnas, a Soviet-born Giuliani crony who did prison time for making illegal contributions to Trump’s 2020 campaign. “My father’s stuff is completely irrelevant and has no bearing on what I’ve done,” Aaron snapped at me when I asked him about Lev. A lawyer in his mid-twenties with more than three million TikTok followers, Aaron Parnas follows anti-Trump lawsuits round the clock. “Every time one of these orders comes out,” Keith told me, “we hear it from him first.” When I asked Parnas whether he kept a list of his scoops, he said no: “I wish I had the bandwidth.”
Despite streaming video 24/7 on social media (he TikTok’d his own wedding), Parnas is the opposite of flamboyant. Indeed, I found him as scrupulously deadpan as Edward R. Murrow. “I try to keep my personal views out of it,” he told me. “I have both Democratic and Republican viewers.”
Parnas’s video dispatches often find their way onto MeidasTouch Network, another frequent conveyance for information about Resistance 2.0. MeidasTouch Network is more overtly political, functioning as both a news source and an anti-Trump political action committee. Its podcast recently edged out Joe Rogan’s as the most streamed in the nation.
Ken Harbaugh is a Navy veteran who hosts a popular show on MeidasTouch Network focused on national security. He told me that individuals in the military, the reserves, and the National Guard are more receptive to opposing Trump than most people understand. They pledge to serve their military superiors and commander in chief, yes, but also to serve the Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. What happens when these duties come into conflict? “Even though we’re acculturated to obey orders and in some cases obey them without hesitation,” Harbaugh said, “we’re actually obliged to disobey illegal orders…. The constitutional crisis that looms might not be decided before the Supreme Court. It might be decided by a captain at the border ordered to shoot immigrants.”
Other useful sources of information include the 1440 newsletter (a daily news digest), CivilServiceStrong.org (information for federal workers), the AFL-CIO’s Department of People Who Work for a Living (federal workers), Democracy2025.org (lawsuits), and Protect Democracy (lawsuits).
The woods are burning. What are you waiting for?
All these websites teem with Trump horror stories. Share them online or, better yet, in person, because you can’t resist effectively by acting alone. There are local resistance groups aplenty; join one and get the word out. “Sadly, messaging about democracy and autocracy falls flat,” wrote Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and rule of law expert, in a text message to me. “But people get it when you talk about the threats to vital services, when you talk about billionaires taking everything over to make themselves richer, and when you talk about tyranny and liberty.”
The woods are burning. What are you waiting for?
Get Informed
Join the Trump Accountability War Room, which offers fact sheets on the bad actors in Donald Trump’s Cabinet and primers on their policies, and the AFL-CIO’s Department of People Who Work for a Living, which tracks how funding cuts are affecting federal workers.
Follow MeidasTouch Network, a pro-democracy news organization with a massive social media presence and a suite of podcasts. MeidasTouch personalities such as Leigh McGowan (a.k.a. PoliticsGirl) and Aaron Parnas have reinvigorated the resistance on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack.
Monitor constitutional oversteps and the legal challenges to Trump’s executive orders with Lawfare or Just Security.
Get Strategic
Explore Choose Democracy’s interactive Choose Your Own Adventure activity, which asks you to “guide us towards a better, more humane democracy.” In “What can I do to fight this coup?,” the group offers drop-down menus of resistance techniques arranged by level of difficulty. It also provides training agendas on everything from de-escalation to mutual aid.
Study Indivisible’s Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, which shares strategies for defending the democratic process against authoritarian creep and a list of tactics constituents can use to pressure their elected officials.
Review the tool kits, how-to manuals, and informational leaflets at Build the Resistance’s comprehensive, crowdsourced resource hub.
Get Outside
Check NoVoiceUnheard, which compiles peaceful protest opportunities, viewable by state or by organization, across the country. For an even more expansive inventory, look at The Big List of Protests.
Brush up on your rights at the ACLU’s protesters’ rights page, which shares information on the kinds of locations where you are protected, when you need a permit, and what to do during a police encounter. Call the Resistance Hotline at 1-844-NVDA-NOW or email [email protected] with your questions, and you’ll get a response within 24 hours.
Enlist with the ACLU’s “grassroots army” of volunteers working to safeguard civil liberties. Visit the program’s website for a wealth of actions, including signing the organization’s petitions, that will take just a few minutes.
Get out Your Wallet
Donate to legal defense and bail funds. The National Bail Fund Network maintains a directory of pretrial bail funds and immigration bond funds.
Get on the Phone
Call Congress using 5 Calls, which provides policy guides, office numbers for your representatives, and call scripts.
Get in the Way
Flood the Office of Personnel Management’s anti-DEI tip line at [email protected] to protect federal employees targeted by the Trump administration’s crackdown. —Kate Mabus
The post Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance appeared first on New Republic.
