We need to do this together

So far, Trump 2.0 is mostly a destructive project. In domestic policy, the administration’s primary aim has been to roll back freedoms, protections, and programs that workers and other oppressed people have won through previous struggle—through strikes, mass movements, and rebellions.

Freedom of speech—which goes back, in theory, to the Bill of Rights—was extremely limited in reality until mass agitation campaigns of the early twentieth century. Social Security and union rights are products of fierce struggles in the 1930s. Medicaid and civil rights protections against racial, gender, and disability discrimination all came out of struggles in the 1960s. The Sixties also produced the campus institutions that are now under attack: Black Student Unions and other organizations of the oppressed, as well as Africana and ethnic studies centers, women’s and gender studies programs. Trump’s attack on “DEI” is aimed at those, but also at hard-won protections like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and programs mandated in the same era to promote equality in public schooling. Significant gains also came from mass actions in the twenty-first century, such as same-sex marriage and protections for trans people.

Our gains have seldom been quite what we fought for, and they’ve never been enough. What’s more, Trump’s attacks are driving home how fragile they are. A lot of his leverage has come from sowing fear—fear of layoffs, fear of deportations, fear of repression, fear of who-knows-what comes next. Many people have felt confused and helpless, but at the same time, the breadth and brazenness of the attacks have also made thousands or even millions of people angry enough to look for ways to resist. It’s no wonder that public opinion tilted against Trump by mid-March or that Republicans started canceling town halls for fear of protests. Since then, millions have mobilized for opposition rallies across the country, including millions on a single day—April 5.

The opposition is widespread, but scattered. To win back what’s being taken from us, and to get ready to go for more, we need to learn to organize together in ways that most people have never experienced—democratically, from the bottom up. We also need a strategic vision to match this method, one that informs us where we have leverage and identifies our obstacles and our allies.

The constitutional crisis is already here: The judges won’t save us

To stop the attacks, we need all available means, including legal action. Here and there, judges have been putting the brakes on specific executive assaults—at least temporarily. But at best, legal action can only stem some of our losses. That’s important, but it’s not a strategy for building a real opposition.

When we’re dealing with legal issues, we shouldn’t just rely on what lawyers can do. We need to find ways for people to organize themselves. Activists conducting “Know Your Rights” campaigns among immigrants, including the “Red Card” project, provide a good example. They’ve helped to build an effective first line of defense—at the grassroots—against ICE deportations.

Another bottom-up tactic is to campaign around specific cases, such as Homeland Security’s abduction of Palestinian activist and green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil in early March. Cases like this offer a chance to use an organizational strength we’ve recently built—Palestine solidarity—and also to unite with a wider group of people who simply oppose such blatant acts of suppressing political speech. Thousands have taken to the streets and occupied Trump Tower in defense of Khalil and other abductees. It’s important to win cases like this one to preserve our rights—and to show that Trump can be defeated.

The same goes for the cases of other immigrants abducted since Kahlil, including more students and at least one labor leader. Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasted late last month that he has revoked 300 visas for pro-Palestine activism alone. When cases come to court, mass action can affect what juries and judges decide, and we should take every chance to do so. These are ABCs of a left approach to the legal system.

Trump’s willingness to ignore court orders, however, forces us to go beyond the ABCs. Many have feared a “constitutional crisis” since before the election because of Trump’s plans to turn the Justice Department into his personal weapon and to elevate executive power over that of the judicial branch. The administration’s most blatant defiance of a court so far has been in the deportation—without any hearings—of 261 Venezuelan men who allegedly belong to a criminal gang. The legal pretexts were an antique repressive law and a claim of a foreign “invasion,” but the key point here is the raw assertion of power: The administration went ahead with the deportations after a judge told it to stop.

The question now is whether Trump will continue to defy particular judicial orders or back off—and if that’s the question, the constitutional crisis is already here. It’s a crisis Trump was determined to create by probing how far he could go, on multiple fronts, beyond the presidency’s previously understood legal powers. At this point, there’s nothing to stop him from continuing to probe, so we should expect the crisis to continue. In the meantime, Trump no doubt hopes to appoint new judges who will simply let him do what he wants, and he’s already using federal power to punish and intimidate some of the law firms that are most competent to press cases against the administration.

In this circumstance, the Left can’t be neutral on the question of judicial power to restrain the executive. We know that defending the authority of judges to hold the president legally accountable won’t suddenly bring the legal system to the side of workers and the oppressed. That’ll never happen, and it can’t be our aim. The key point is that we can’t let Trump or anybody else get a free hand to attack us regardless of the laws. Whatever happens between Trump and the courts, we’ll need mass action on many fronts against the uncontrolled growth of Trump’s power.

The Democrats aren’t with us

Those who want to defeat Trumpism shouldn’t pin their hopes on electing Democratic majorities in Congress in the midterm elections or put any effort into making that happen. Consider an early example of what the Democrats stand for. When activists were marching and demonstrating against the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil in early March—defining, for the moment, the cutting edge of action against Trumpism—Democrats brought up the rear: Only 14 out of the 258 Congressional Democrats signed on to a letter calling for Khalil’s release.

Cases like this illustrate how ruling-class resistance to civil rights and progressive reforms isn’t limited to Trump and the Republicans. The U.S. has two capitalist parties, and the Democrats have a long history as a party of war and domestic repression. In fact, the pretext for the arrest of Khalil was the anti-communist McCarran Act of 1952, passed in the midst of the McCarthy era, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.

It’s not unusual for the Democrats to capitalize on social movements to regain power. Bill Clinton’s first run for president in 1992 coincided with the LA Rebellion, which followed the acquittal of the cops who inflicted a ferocious beating on Rodney King. In the same election year, half a million people demonstrated in Washington to defend access to abortion. Once in office, Clinton put 100,000 more cops on the street and passed legislation to apply the death penalty to fifty federal crimes. He also called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” and inscribed the phrase in the party platform. What’s more, the Clinton administration passed legislation that has been critical to establishing the current deportation machine.

The health care proposals of the Clintons and Obama were framed around the preservation of the insurance industry and the multi-tiered caste system of privatized health care. More recently, Kamala Harris, who spoke critically on racism and policing in 2020—the summer of the George Floyd protests—ran in 2024 on her background as a “tough on crime” prosecutor. She also made it clear that her support for the genocidal state of Israel was as strong as Joe Biden’s.

Under pressure from Trumpism, the Democratic Party establishment has been breaking to the right. In 2024, Harris ran for president on a punitive platform of suppressing migrants and pro-Palestinian activists. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a likely presidential candidate in 2028, has recently aligned himself with the anti-trans backlash of the moment—in a cordial conversation he arranged with the right-wing co-founder of Turning Point USA. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer passed up a chance to squeeze concessions on Trump’s spending bill when he voted with nine other Democratic Senators to avert a government shutdown in mid-March.

The Democratic establishment also acts collectively to limit the influence of the Left in its ranks. They united to block the presidential nomination of the reform socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020. They also consistently act to contain or co-opt the left wing of the party, such as today’s “Squad”; most recently, they supported the defeat of Missouri Representative Cori Bush in the 2024 primary for her outspoken support of Palestine.

For reasons like these, a strategy for resisting Trumpism can’t be built around winning Democratic control of Congress. Given their performance so far, it’s not even clear they can win. The party’s favorability rating reached a record low of 29 percent in mid-March, below that of Republicans.

We also shouldn’t pour our efforts into running left-of-center candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line. The organization best known for this strategy is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group that grew by tens of thousands amid hopes raised during the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and to some extent, from the initial victory of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) in 2018. DSA has declined since the fading of the Bernie effect, dragged down also because of their attachment to Democratic politicians who support Zionism, combined with their internal discipline against DSA’s leading pro-Palestine activists.

Because of this attachment to the Democrats, the Left’s largest organization damaged its credibility as a potential leader of one of the most sustained resistance movements in decades—the Palestine solidarity movement. More generally, DSA’s ability to step into activism is also compromised by its dependence on election campaigns to replenish its membership. As one DSA member noted:

[A]n influx of new bright-eyed members are brought into the electoral work of the organization based on their own interest in participating in legislative races. This is the most basic level of organizing that DSA undertakes, and where it gains the most members.

DSA still has many committed activists, particularly in the labor movement—not to mention a significant number of members who plunged into Palestine solidarity despite the opportunism of their national leadership. Unfortunately, because the organization is so dependent on electoral campaigns for recruitment, a growing proportion of DSA’s diminished membership has no experience or training in social movement activism, or in any activism that involves collaboration with forces outside their own organization, a hallmark of the kind of mass movements we need—and should fully expect—in the coming months and years.

Explosive struggles, weak organizations

In the past twenty years, workers and oppressed people of the U.S. have engaged in massive struggles. These include the immigrant rights movement of 2006, which involved as many as 6 million people, and then a nearly unbroken string of other outbreaks since the acute economic crisis of 2007-2008. A partial listing of these would include the National Equality March of 2009, which set the stage for marriage equality and greater trans freedom, the national movement of occupations inspired by Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012 and the Red State teachers’ strikes of 2018, the Ferguson and George Floyd phases of Black Lives Matter (2014 and 2020), and the Standing Rock rebellion against the Keystone XL pipeline (2016). During the first term of Trump, there was the explosion of #MeToo in 2017 and innumerable other protests, including the massive Women’s Marches just after the inauguration, airport occupations in response to the “Muslim travel ban,” and widespread protests against migrant family separations at the border. The biggest protests of the Biden era were the Gaza/Palestine solidarity movement, which began in 2023.

In some cases, these struggles produced significant concessions from the authorities. But the most important gain for us today may be the way these movements helped shape people’s consciousness. This is most pronounced among people under 35—people whose whole lives are also marked by the experience of interlinked economic, climate, and social crises. This development of consciousness is precious. Though some have turned to the right, many others look to the left—with skepticism about both parties, suspicion of state authority, a sense that oppression is systemic and requires systemic change, and a lack of faith that capitalism can solve the problems it has created. Ideas like these are raw materials for movements that can change the world.

At the same time, we need to admit that in most recent struggles, we keep starting from a low point of organization. Sometimes, we even start from the most basic form of organization: the crowd. Crowds have a fleeting existence, though they have some collective powers—blocking traffic, for example, or making people feel they aren’t alone in their convictions. They can be summoned by one-way advertising by small groups or through viral posting on social media. Most of the communication within a crowd is also one-way, from speakers at the microphones.

The Occupy movement, modeled in part on the movements of the Arab Spring, was a development beyond simple crowds. A continuous occupation of a public space is a bit like a crowd that doesn’t fully disperse. It can serve as a seed for future crowds, and most importantly, it can develop organized features—first of all, to sustain the occupation itself, but also to facilitate self-education and discussion of tactics and strategy. Thus, where crowds feature one-way communication prominently, occupations and encampments are sustained with dialogue. (Occupy even featured a technique for dialogue in meetings of large outdoor groups—the “human microphone.”) And unlike a lot of crowds, occupations are not anonymous; their members get used to working together. They can become true, dynamic organizations that foster numerical growth, initiative, collective learning, and cooperation, and they can change the political outlook of their participants forever. But they can also be evicted and dispersed.

The international occupations of the early 2000s were an innovation made necessary by the lack of sizable, credible organizations that could foster mass movements. The occupations took off in the period following the economic crisis of 2008, when there was a widespread eagerness to protest the indifference of the authorities to the growing precarity of the working class. When there’s a will to fight, people ask, “How does one get involved?” If there’s an occupation, the answer is, “One goes to a place.” One goes to Tahrir Square, to Zuccotti Park, or to the Palestine solidarity encampment on the campus quad.

It’s not that previously-existing organizations played no role in these events. The point is that none of these groups were equipped to draw people out in the way or on the scale that fit the moment—that fit people’s need and appetite for action.

Labor unions can also serve as organizational centers for larger movements, particularly if their members are organized to push union officials into action. Before the Chicago Teachers Union won the 2012 strike, a leftist Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) put out a vision of social justice unionism organized from the bottom up, to develop rank and file leaders in each school. CORE also identified the fight against racism in the school system as a key point for social justice, and for building broad working class solidarity. They campaigned alongside students and parents to stop closures of schools in Black and Brown neighborhoods. CORE swept into union leadership in 2010, and the anti-racist solidarity work was crucial to bringing out wide working-class support for the 2012 strike.

College campuses have, at least since the 1960s, been sites for the production of some radical ideas—and of lightning-fast student organizing—most recently by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and others. That’s clearly why Trump is waging war on universities, starting with Columbia. So far, the Columbia administration is breaking under the threat of federal funding cuts and complying with demands to take the school back toward Cold-War levels of repression that typified colleges in the 1950s. Nevertheless, there are signs of resistance at some schools, including Princeton and Rutgers, whose senate has called for collective self-defense from the Big Ten.

In the past thirty years, perhaps the most steadily-growing organized presence on the center-left has been the nonprofits, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They come in quite a variety, some more activist than others. Jewish Voice for Peace is one NGO that’s been prominent recently, a group that grew substantially after October 2023 and has played a significant role in numerous actions since then.

NGOs have a number of basic limits, however. Their focus tends to be on incremental reforms that are measurable and “winnable,” because that’s the kind of campaign that needs to be pitched—and made acceptable—to rich donors and foundations. That money pays the staff who run the show and steer the activity. This situation tends to sideline big-picture analysis and social theory, as well as strategic thinking to connect today’s activity to bigger, longer-term goals. It also tends to tie NGOs to the same donors who finance the Democrats, and to lead those nonprofits to align with and coordinate with the Democratic Party.

Crucially, the operating structure of nonprofits prevents them from being member-driven—to practice organizational democracy and incorporate the initiative of the people it mobilizes. That’s especially important because now, in the Trump era, we can anticipate an extended period of widespread initiative and self-activity by workers and the oppressed.

Our new moment

That activity began early. Though the Democrats initially held back this year from the mass mobilizations that characterized the early part of Trump’s first term, street actions from Inauguration Day 2025 onward actually ran at twice the rate of 2017. These tended to be do-it-yourself actions that were small, even “molecular,” but they indicate a widespread refusal to submit to Trump’s onslaught.

The first large mobilizations were rallies to “fight oligarchy” by Bernie Sanders and AOC in various Western cities. These stepped into the void left by the lack of the broad Democratic-inspired anti-Trump mobilizations of 2017, such as the Women’s Marches. The response to the rallies showed the willingness of tens of thousands to show up in opposition to Trump, but the events themselves were set-piece rallies that didn’t promote self-activity or further organizing by the participants.

The “Hands Off” rallies of April 5 drew out millions at more than 1,300 locations around the country and gave a better measure of popular opposition. Some on the Left pointed out that the rallies, called by Democratic-aligned organizations such as Indivisible and MoveOn, drew a broad response by issuing a vague call to action. But in the circumstance, this was beneficial: Participants eagerly filled in particular demands with their own contingents, signs, and slogans, including some, such as “Hands off Palestine,” that the big sponsors would not have endorsed.

A more worker-centered effort this month is the Day of Action for Higher Education—which, despite its name, is also focused on defending K-12 public education. The supporting groups are promoting simultaneous actions and virtual events across the country on April 17.

Multiple membership organizations—from immigrants’ rights advocates to unions to community and church groups—have also been getting behind a call for actions nationwide on May Day. At this point, preparation seems to be most advanced in Chicago, where demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes are planned from May 1 to Cinco de Mayo. If you’re near a local May Day event (find out here), bring yourself and some people you know, and you’re already on your way to being an organizer.

We can’t expect repeated mobilizations, by themselves, to get us what we need, but they can be important parts of a bigger mix of activity. Right now they’re especially important as a chance to meet up with others who are looking for ways to stay involved between the mobilizations—to learn skills, to engage in political education, to debate and plan future action. The self-activity we’ve seen so far, from small grassroots efforts to large ones, and the likelihood that the action will continue until Trump is history, show that the time is ripe for member-driven organizations rooted in social movements. These can serve as infrastructure for more effective resistance from below. The Tempest Collective is committed to building such organizations, including our own. They can be sustained by member initiative. They can grow. And they need to.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured Image Credit:Image by Magda Warszawa modified by Tempest.