Zack Beauchamp at Vox has a great piece today that I would suggest you read in its entirety if you’re feeling as overwhelmed as I am. He recaps the atrocities. You know what they are and they are legion. But he has some perspective that I think is worthwhile:
[T]here are ways to fight back — to do more than is already being done. An effective strategy would revolve around three key points:
- First, Trump is weak. He has deputized Musk to grab power illegally because he doesn’t have the votes to win it through legislation. The illegality of Trump’s agenda means that there are lots of levers his opponents can pull to stop him. The most significant of these are lawsuits, many of which have already yielded injunctions against unlawful Trump-Musk orders.
- Second, delay means victory. The problem with the courts is that they are slow and reactive; Trump can do damage before they intervene that may prove impossible to repair. So democracy’s defenders need to think of their jobs as buying time for the courts — blocking and delaying everything to prevent him from doing irrevocable harm to the constitutional order before he can be ordered to stop.
- Third, delaying strategies help prepare America for the worst. Trump might defy a court order, sparking a constitutional crisis. In that event, the only levers remaining are extra-legal popular resistance — mass protests, strikes, and the like. The more ordinary citizens work to delay his policies now, the better prepared they will be to escalate in the event of an even deeper crisis.
He points out that one of the main strategies of this attempted takeover is to create new “facts on the ground” — to change things “so rapidly and irreversibly that even a court order can’t restore the status quo. ” But Beauchamp points out that a truly strong president would be able to get this program through congress and confer legitimacy.
[H]e wouldn’t need to unlawfully dismantle USAID; he would get Congress to pass a law abolishing it. He wouldn’t need to assert impoundment power; he could get Congress to pass a budget that reflects his priorities.
Thanks to the Republicans’ exceedingly narrow House and Senate majorities, he doesn’t have those options. To wield the degree of power he wants, he needs to depend on flagrant lawbreaking — on getting Musk and the DOGE crew to change the facts on the ground so dramatically that no one can unwind it.
The weak link here is the need for speed. To execute a “change everything before the courts get involved” strategy, you need to make the most of the time you have. But if Musk and Trump can be slowed, the entire thing could fall apart.
Beauchamp has been studying other countries’ experience with similar attempted autocratic takeovers and has advice on how to thwart this one. First he suggests that Democratic officials in Washington have a bad hand to play and that nobody should expect them to lead. He writes:
Minority opposition parties do not have a great track record in spearheading movements against democratic backsliding. They tend to place too much faith in the system and trust that the normal rules constraining power will constrain a would-be authoritarian even as the authoritarian busts through them.
“What happens is that the demagogue’s popularity drops as the corruption mounts, and the opposition parties say, ‘Oh my god, he’s at 40 percent, there’s no way we can lose, there’s no way he can steal it.’ Then what do you know — he steals it. And they never fully planned for the day after,” the anonymous democracy expert explains.
If that sounds a little like the Democratic Party’s institutional attitude in the past few years — well, you’re not wrong. And it underscores that waiting for Democrats to set the tone, or focusing on demanding more from them, is a tactical mistake.
He says we need protests:
Instead of looking to Democrats, Americans outside of government can take action on their own — directly protesting or otherwise frustrating Trump administration actions and, in doing so, setting an aggressive tone that Democrats can amplify and support from the inside. Indeed, the best international evidence suggests that only a combination of citizen and institutional pressure can halt democratic erosion once it’s begun.
And “the groups” need to come together quickly to establish a united front. Time is of the essence.
Federal workers are key:
Collectively, citizens and civil society have tremendous power. But few Americans are in better positions individually to help delay Trump than the civil servants being asked to implement his power grabs.
When asked to implement unlawful or antidemocratic orders, these workers can either openly refuse or feign incompetence to throw sand in the gears. They can look for bureaucratic chokepoints and man them. If Trump is going to treat them like the deep state, they can be the deep state.
This doesn’t depend on everyone in the federal government acting in unison immediately. Just a handful of defiant civil servants can spark something bigger.
In a recent piece for Jacobin magazine, Rutgers professor Eric Blanc argues that a series of 2018 strikes by teachers in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma — which successfully won concrete victories like higher pay — show how individual American government employees can spark broader movements of non-compliance.
Specifically, he argues that a handful of determined federal employees speaking out, paired with relatively easy actions designed to encourage others to join in, can create momentum that can translate into real disruption.
Delay tactics will only work to allow the courts time to hold the line. At this point that are the last institution standing. And if they don’t? Or if Trump goes with the “let him enforce it” strategy after all? Then we have no choice:
a massive, society-wide mobilization. Millions-strong protests, government officials refusing to work en masse, threats of general strikes: these are the kinds of radical actions that become necessary when an executive declares that the law simply doesn’t apply to it.
He suggests that contingency planning for such a mass mobilization should start right away. We just don’t know how this is going to go.
He offers all kinds of evidence from other attempted power grabs like this one to bolster his assertion that defeating this is possible. We are a unique country in a million ways but we aren’t the first, by any means, to face an authoritarian threat from within. We have strong democratic traditions and the president is weak politically and very stupid and vain. It can be done.
David Weigel wrote a piece today for Semafor called “the Resistance is working” pointing out that the Democrats are actually doing what they said they would do to push back — a well-coordinated legal strategy, which happens to be the most potentially rewarding — but that people aren’t seeing it because they are focused on the weakest link, the Democrats in Congress who have little real power and aren’t very good at resistance anyway.
Maybe it’s time to refocus ourselves as citizens on protests to support democracy?