(Don’t you have somewhere to be?)
Donald Trump had a couple of mentors growing up. His father, Fred, taught him how to evade taxes. Attorney Roy Cohn taught him how to be an apex predator. Rev. Norman Vincent Peale taught young Donald to worship himself and “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952). Peale officiated at Trump’s first wedding.
Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People” (1936) seems not to be a Trump ur-text. Winning friends is not a self-loving, tax-cheating predator’s goal.
The Atlantic‘s Stephanie Bai examines how quickly Canadians unified to oppose a neighbor it once called friend until Donald Trump’s second term. They seem to have found their footing faster than Trump opponents south of the 49th parallel:
On the other side of the border, Americans who oppose Trump have struggled to come up with a unified response to his presidency. In part because of the speed and scale of his directives, it’s been hard to develop a protest message or strategy that is as ubiquitous as the “Buy Canadian” movement. Since January 22, the number of street protests in the U.S. has more than doubled compared with the same period at the start of Trump’s first presidency—but they also tend to be smaller in scale, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. Jeremy Pressman, a co-director of the organization, told me that disorientation could be a factor affecting protests. Since taking office, Trump has signed off on a flurry of actions that empower ICE to detain and deport people without due process, pave the way for Elon Musk’s shadow presidency, gut the federal government, and grant mass pardons for January 6ers (while also floating the idea of compensating them for their prison time). What should the next protest focus on when so much of American life is under attack?
But bigger protests are not necessarily better, especially when the man living inside the White House’s perimeter fence would like nothing better than to turn a protest that gridlocks D.C. into a live-fire exercise for federal troops. (His SecDef seems open to it.) Thousands of regular, smaller actions across the country may bring neighbors’ defiance closer to Joe Average in Jefferson City, Missouri. They might send a signal that this is what “people like me” do without making protesters easy targets.
Protesting conditions in the U.S. are more fraught than they are in Canada:
Protesters also face an environment especially hostile to dissent. When Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist on a green card, was arrested in New York last month, the government did not provide evidence of illegal activity. And when Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student who co-authored an op-ed urging her university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” had her visa revoked without her knowledge and was confronted by six masked federal agents last week, the Department of Homeland Security stated vaguely that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Their stories are a warning from the Trump administration: Defiance can come at a steep price.
So be careful out there at today’s National Day of Action. Maybe leave your phone at home or turn it off before arriving. Review Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense. Be aware of your surroundings.
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Have you fought autocracy today?
National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5 (TODAY)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense