A Practical Program for Resisting a Trump Second Term

In the days after January 6, 2021, it appeared that the worst was finally behind us. The shock of that event was felt quite broadly at first. It seemed as though Donald Trump might truly be politically finished, that we needed only to make it to Joe Biden’s inauguration without another incident and we would all be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief. The worst outcomes had been avoided—so it seemed at the time.

Yet here we are, in November of 2024. The results are in—Donald Trump will be our president once more. This time, it is not an artifact of our bizarre selection process, except in as much as that process depressed turnout in “safe states”. Regardless, this time around, Trump received not just more electoral votes but a plurality of the popular vote. Rather than electing an ordinary Democrat, American voters chose a man who has promised to deport 20 million people and make war with Mexico. And once again, those voters who turned out handed his party the Senate, at minimum. It is bleak, but it is the reality.

We are about to enter a very dangerous period and action to mitigate those dangers is urgently needed. We have to start today; we cannot wait. It is not just that Donald Trump has promised the largest population expulsion in human history; unlike 2016 when immigration factored relatively less in Trump’s appeal to his base, in 2024 the GOP itself handed out “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” signs at the RNC Convention. It is not just he has promised it and there is voter appetite for it; members of his administration such as Stephen Miller spent their time out of office figuring out exactly how to pull it off, flaunting their enthusiasm for the level of bloodshed that will be required. Finally, Trump has repeatedly insisted that he will be going after his political opponents using all of the tools available to the president.

Meanwhile, red state governments have spent the better part of the last decade showing exactly how the contemporary GOP behaves when in power. Extreme restrictions on abortion access that put the basic medical support needed by all pregnant women in jeopardy. Targeting the parents of trans kids or the trans kids themselves. Again and again, implementing the most vicious versions of right-wing culture war talking points.

During the first Trump term, a number of strategies of resistance were pursued. From day one, with the Women’s March, and again later with the George Floyd protests, mass demonstrations of enormous numbers served as an important reminder that winning office is no guarantee that a population will willingly submit to being governed. Also from day one, in fighting the Muslim Ban, opponents of the Trump administration took him to the courts. The law enforcement community was engaged, as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein judged questions about Trump’s dodgy activities worth appointing a special counsel to look into. Much of the press took on an adversarial slant, as Trump kept them constantly fed with new outrageous actions, and his barely-concealed shady past provided a trove of reportable stories. Finally, a Democrat-controlled House impeached him twice, a first in history.

Most of these strategies will need to be pursued again as the Trump administration breaks the law and bends the political system to its will in an attempt to deliver on the many horrible things he has promised to do. But there is good reason to think that they will be less effective this time around, and to think that Trump’s people will be more effective in seeking to accomplish more vicious goals.

I do not want to promise, just days after Trump’s victory and a little over two months before he takes office again, that the scenario will be drastically different this time. But we have many reasons to believe that it will. And should a quarter of what Trump promises come to pass, it will be disastrous. The time has come to seriously think about what it would mean to break the glass when the emergency is upon us.

First and foremost, what it will take is a plan of attack for blue jurisdictions to sandbag the implementation of fascism. State and local governments controlled by Democrats have the most potent institutional and legal levers available for this fight. A great deal of what we think of as federal policy in fact relies upon state and local administrative capacity. This provides leverage to a huge number of actors outside of the federal government. Protestors and activists must focus on applying pressure to these officials in order to act at key moments: to engage in strategic acts of opposition that reduce the ability of a Trump-dominated federal government to achieve its goals.

In the more traditional realm of policy, blue jurisdictions can pass laws and regulations that undermine the underlying political economy on which the GOP relies, and reform the political economy that has created waves of net out migration from blue states where the cost of living is high. These tactics, alongside organized direct action to assist vulnerable communities, will be our inside strategy for the second Trump term.

Delay, delay, delay

Even totalitarian regimes run on a personalist basis cannot move on the basis of every little whim from Dear Leader. Any political and legal system of sufficient scale is weighed down by the basic requirements for keeping a large organization going at all; something that brings with it significant inertia in terms of the practices of street-level staff. And the American system, for all its faults, is as far from totalitarian as it gets. While the presidency has, from its inception, always struggled to pull the system towards personalism, it has never truly succeeded. The fragmentation of American political authority, though lessened after the Civil War and especially after the growth of the federal executive branch in the 20th century, has on the whole persisted. And the massive growth of the federal executive branch, while nominally increasing the president’s authority, in fact has created numerous institutions that vary greatly in their responsiveness to the president’s demands. Some are not very responsive at all, often by design.

In the first Trump term, all of these structural frustrations to presidential personalism were on full display. State attorney generals and organizations like the ACLU sued the federal government to oppose executive orders written by Trump. Federal civil servants and even political appointees resisted Trump’s policies because they broke with existing policy or with the law as written. The Senate Democratic Caucus filibustered the GOP trifecta’s legislative initiatives, and the Republican Senate majority very coyly did not abolish the filibuster, allowing them to blame Democrats when laws that were potentially politically disastrous did not pass. Eventually, a Democratic House impeached Trump, to list only the most dramatic of the measures it took to oppose him.

Some of these really are what kept the first Trump term from being as disastrous as it might have been. The Muslim Ban was ultimately allowed in modified form, but the court fight delayed it for a year and a half. A year and a half is more than a third of a presidential term; during that time, the Trump administration had to devote time and resources just to get one of its first executive orders implemented at all. A presidency is ultimately a race against time; a first term president has at most three years before they must begin to spend time campaigning for their second term. A second term president becomes more and more politically impotent as outwaiting them becomes an ever-easier option. If, in the second Trump term, we successfully delay the implementation of some of the worst things he has promised for over a year, that will be a major victory, if not nearly enough on its own. After all, the implementation itself will also take time, bringing us yet closer to the impending deadline.

Of course, Trump is no ordinary president, and whether or not there will be a deadline is part of what is at issue here. Trump tried to overstay his welcome once already; there’s no reason to believe that he won’t try again in four years. The entire Project 2025 game plan is to make the federal bureaucracy and the military more responsive to his will. So the institutions that rendered a real coup impossible in 2021 may not stand in the way this time. However, once again, that very game plan itself takes time to implement. It is possible that a resistance strategy of delay, delay, delay, will be enough to save us in the end. Those of us who are very worried about what Trump will try to do need to be open to this idea. Delaying is one thing the American system is very good at; indeed, it may be the thing it is good at. If we aggressively make use of every institutional tool available to us, in a best case scenario, we might end up with a second Trump term that is only a little worse than the first. Not a great outcome, but far from catastrophic, with much of the institutional damage at least being quite reversible.

But we cannot assume life will be so convenient. In his first term, Trump did not just surround himself with sycophants; there were also a number of long-standing institutional figures who had a seat at the table. These included, most famously perhaps, Anthony Fauci, but also figures like John Kelly and Mark Milley who will certainly not have a role in Trump’s second term. The most extreme elements of Trump’s circle have had four years to build their personnel lists to ensure that all of these roles will be filled with people whose sole qualifications are personal loyalty and an indifference to or enthusiasm for the cruelty of what they are asked to do. In getting what they wanted on immigration, the first Trump administration did not just rely on executive orders, but an enormous number of more detailed internal changes to the bureaucracy, which they will be able to use as their starting point. Such things are much more difficult to challenge in the courts or even to uncover in the first place, much less oppose. And of course, while Biden has appointed over 200 federal judges, Trump expanded the GOP majority on the most important court at the very end of his first term. He will begin his second term with that 6-3 majority already in place—a majority that was willing to invent a new doctrine of presidential immunity from prosecution on his behalf.

We should continue to pressure officials to make use of all the tools deployed the first time around, and more like them. But we should be prepared to ask for more, much more. The political leadership in all blue jurisdictions must be made ready to recognize a truly lawless Trump administration for what it is, and to take drastic action accordingly.

Why blue jurisdictions

The federal government relies on state and local governments to provide administrative capacity to a significant degree. As political scientist Martha Derthick put it:

Congress loves action—it thrives on policy proclamations and goal setting—but it hates bureaucracy and taxes, which are the instruments of action. Overwhelmingly, it has resolved this dilemma by turning over the bulk of administration to the state governments or any organizational instrumentality it can lay its hands on whose employees are not counted on the federal payroll.[1]

She notes that even Social Security, considered by many to be the premier example of a purely federal policy, “relies on state governments for much of the administration of the disability portion” of that policy. “It is up to state agencies to make the initial determinations of disability through which an individual qualifies for monthly payments from the Social Security Administration.”[2]

The status quo on the ground today provides state governments with enormous leverage in intergovernmental disputes because they are, more often than not, the administrators of policy set at the federal level. While the federal government developed many tools to fight the federally illegal Jim Crow regimes in the south, this fight was broadly supported by the American public at the time, and made use of competent civil servants who spent their careers learning from the ways intransigent localities adapted to each attempt to police them. A Trump administration is unlikely to command that kind of mass mandate, and the entire premise of Project 2025 is that competent civil servants will be purged in favor of loyal ones. The odds that they will learn, in less than four years, how to be as capable as the Civil Rights Division became over a period of decades is a dubious proposition even if we ignore that these Trumpists won’t be picked for being capable in the first place. The more successful Trump is at purging the federal bureaucracy, the less likely they’ll be able to keep up with the maneuvering of blue jurisdictions. On the flipside, the less successful Trump is at purging the federal bureaucracy, the less likely they are to go along with his flagrantly illegal orders.

Just as the Heritage Foundation developed an action plan in extreme detail, liberal think tanks must draw on the best legal and political science talents to develop strategies of institutional noncooperation and political resistance, depending upon the policy area and upon the political calculus faced by the particular blue jurisdiction. The options available in California or New York are not available in Pennsylvania, never mind in Texas’ Travis County. The levers available to states and localities in immigration differ from the levers available to resist a Trumpist FTC. The approach a politician will take when they wish to be quietly noncooperative may differ from when they wish to be coy but indiscrete, which may differ from when they wish to be openly aggressive in their opposition.

One final note on this point: it will be critical for blue jurisdictions to get their law enforcement agencies on board with the plan to resist. Federal law enforcement is a drop in the bucket of law enforcement capacity in this country. Even state level law enforcement is quite small compared to the vast army of local police officers. Former Trump officials have been quite clear that any mass deportation plan at even a fraction of the scale they have promised would require extensive integration of as many state and local police as they could persuade to cooperate.

It is therefore of utmost importance that local Democrats have a good relationship with law enforcement. Measures may need to be taken to improve such relations, through budgeting choices and public flattery; pressure campaigns in particular ought to carefully pick their rhetoric so as to be respectful of those that need to be won over while being unyielding in the demands we make of political officials. “Abolish the police” and anything in that rhetorical vein needs to be buried.

Pressure campaigns

Even sympathetic politicians will not take action on their own initiative. They will have to be persuaded that it is in their political interest to do so.

The biggest weakness of The Women’s March was its lack of strategic objective or timing. It simply demonstrated mass dissatisfaction with the Trump administration the day after it began. The best use of mass protest is in response to something specific. It does not even need to be an action, it can be as simple as some specific thing that Trump or a member of his administration says. But it has to have some substance, some specific area of concern. Perhaps it is about prosecuting his enemies. Perhaps it is about mass deportations. No one doubts there will be a steady supply of choices to latch onto. Those seeking to mobilize protests need to make sure they do pick something specific to latch onto, and be disciplined in making opposition to it the loudest rhetoric of the protest.

Outside strategy in a second Trump term will almost never be about aiming at obtaining gains or mitigating losses in the realm of policy, but instead about doing so in the realm of institutions. A lot of opposition in the first Trump term was holding action. You can fight in the courts, as was done with the Muslim ban and a number of other things. And mass protest may make officials hesitate to implement Trump’s policies, or members of Congress hesitate to support Trump’s bills.

As discussed in the previous section, the main targets of outside strategy in the second Trump term should be Democrats, in jurisdictions where the Democratic Party is dominant. And the goal of such action should be to permanently alter the relationship between the institutions they control and any government apparatus controlled by Trump’s party. Even if some Democrats in some blue states might readily be on board with that idea, most will hesitate, and Democratic localities in red states will be even more reticent. They will need to be pushed, relentlessly. In the media, in phone calls and letters directly to representatives, and through mass demonstrations. Existing organizations that can be drawn into the cause will need to leverage their existing relationships with state and local Democrats, and new organizations will need to be built.

Reshaping local political economy

The political scientist Alexander Hertel-Fernandez has documented how Republican-aligned groups sought not only to win elections, but to “use policy to change the power structure available to their allies and opponents.”[3] A typical example would be weakening collective bargaining and otherwise draining the resources available to unions. Democrats need to play this game as well if they’re to reduce the ability of the Trump administration and its red state allies to mobilize locally.

This is particularly relevant for states where power changes hands between the parties on a regular basis, or where Democrats might take power for the first time in many elections. There are a host of policies that tend to get passed in such situations, including automatic voter registration, expanded early voting, and mail-in ballot procedures, which are certainly important. But Democrats would do well to also go after the local backbones of the Republican Party. Car dealerships are a good example; right now, nearly every state prohibits car manufacturers from selling directly to consumers. Car dealerships are an artificial product of policy decisions that have frozen industrial organization in a moment in time. And they overwhelmingly invest their resources in Republican causes. Kneecapping car dealerships is both good policy and good politics.

There is a whole class of person like this where the policy case for putting the squeeze on them may be less strong than car dealers, but the political logic—given the emergency in which we now find ourselves—may need to win out. Anything to weaken the material and organizational base of support for fascism in America.

We cannot simply attack the political economy that supports the GOP, however; we must rebuild the political economy of deep blue jurisdictions. If states like New York and California continue to bleed people and investments to states like Texas, Arizona, and Florida, more and more people will fall under the most extreme forms of MAGA tyranny. We must crack up the political economy that maximizes rich residents and pushes out poor and vulnerable ones. The large Democratic polities must become good at building again, both housing and infrastructure. So long as all energy and manufacturing investment is going to deep red states, that is where people will go for opportunities. So long as it is too expensive to live in major blue cities, people will not be able to afford to move to take advantage of what opportunities there are there—or to seek refuge there, for “The scarcity of housing functions to keep variously marginalized persons dependent on or abused by superordinate persons.”

An underground railroad for vulnerable communities

Throughout our history, activist networks have worked to move vulnerable people from jurisdictions that make their lives difficult to better ones. Whether it was the underground railroad helping escaped slaves to permanently move away from slave states, or ARAL helping women get abortions outside of the US, organized direct action has always played a role in improving people’s lives.

We are already in a situation where immigrants, women, and trans people, at minimum, could use assistance relocating to less hostile jurisdictions. With Trump back in office, the threat has intensified enormously. Investing in networks to provide aid (for example, mifepristone and misoprostol) and assistance in finding and settling in safer locations is going to be critical. Blue jurisdictions in red states may, for example, be less able to directly stop Trump’s mass deportation program in their locality, but still able to pass information to key organizations if they find out that federal agents are honing in on someone who lives there. Indeed, even Democrats elected in Republican-controlled jurisdictions can potentially serve that role.

But we cannot rely on elected officials alone. There is already an enormous network of immigration activists and lawyers in this country. We must build further upon this strong foundation, as we seek to engage in activities beyond influencing policy and fighting in the courts. We must also build relationships with sympathetic federal civil servants (so long as these still exist) who can serve as sources of information.

As A. D. Blair put it, “nothing that happens in the United States is going to make resistance impossible and certainly nothing that has happened yet has done that.” We are not powerless. There are a lot of us, and we command significant economic, political, and cultural capital. It is important to use that now rather than take a wait and see approach, because it will only get more difficult later.

I have tried to provide an outline for what needs to be done, if not a fully fleshed out plan of action. I will not leave it here, either from a planning and discussion perspective, nor in terms of my own actions. The time is now. We cannot wait any longer.

[1] Derthick, Martha. Keeping the Compound Republic: Essays in American Federalism. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2001. 63.

[2] Ibid, 68.

[3] Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander. State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 36.

Featured image is Trump Protests, by Ben Alexander