People are resisting at every level. Tesla Takedowns. Refusing illegal orders. Court challenges. Boycotting. Thousands of protests. (More examples!)
Alongisde grounding yourself in these times, here are some starting points on how to orient and help fight back.
Get with Others to Act
When you’re alone it’s too easy to freeze. While keyboard warriors and protest attenders are important — you’ll feel the greatest strength if you gather with others semi regularly to plan together, share together, and act together.
In Chile under a repressive regime, the “affinity group” model was developed as a way to help keep people safe as they took risky actions. The process is simple enough: gather some people together who share your concerns and are ready to act together. Aim to build trust with this group over time.
There are good instructions on creating an affinity group here. Whether your actions are high-risk or low — you’ll all benefit from supporting one another!
Another way to organize? Food and friends! Set a date and invite folks to meet up with a dish to share. Consider having planned actions (like phone calls or letter writing) to take while you’re together.
We need more politicization in these times — to help people navigate what is going on around us and understand how it got this bad. A study group can support learning as you and your people take action together and help to keep you in motion over time. There are plenty of resources across the choosedemocracy.us site you can use for your study group.
Care Calls are often wide-ranging conversations that ensure we are in touch folks in our neighborhoods. It can be walking door-to-door or just calling on people — but this is a way of connecting with people in our neighborhoods to see how they are doing (another version of this is deep canvassing). While these conversations may start as just check-ins, it’s a good way to find some other people who might want to act against the coup in these times — and to show love to your community no matter who you are.
There are thousands of community groups across the country already taking action, waiting for people just like you to get involved. Go to mobilize.us to find local activist groups to join that align with your hopes and priorities. You can also get involved in your workplace union or find a chapter affiliated with an organization taking action in this moment.
Pressure a pillar of support to defect
Authoritarian regimes are only successful when society bows to the orders of the autocrat. We can effectively fight back by identifying and withdrawing our support from the “pillars of support” (military, media, corporations, etc.) that prop up these dangerous rulers.
Watch this video to better understand the ‘Pillars of Support’. Then, pick a pillar you want to pressure and each day do at least one small thing to get them to defect.
Most companies are trying to find a non-existent neutral middle ground. If we only cause them pain, they might actually move away from us — so target wisely. However, large corporations are using the chaos to steal money from the government and avoid regulations so they can pollute and exploit freely. This cannot stand.
EASIER TO DO
Put pressure on companies doing Trump’s dirty work. With the click of a button, you can send 40 messages to the CEO and other top leadership of Avelo Airlines, the first commercial airline to fly deportation flights for Trump’s ICE agenda.
Leave negative reviews on Google and other platforms about businesses axing their Pride or Black History Month activities, or businesses helping to build and supply Alligator Alcatraz, Trump’s ICE detention facility in the Everglades. Consumers deserve to know which companies are supporting Trump.
MEDIUM TO DO
Join boycotts called by reputable groups — groups of size and significance to make a boycott meaningful. For example, sign up to join the flight to #PurgePalantir, one of the many tech corporations fueling ICE disappearances, raids and the growing surveillance state. Visit Boycott Central for a list of businesses to boycott, or reverse engineer MAGAs own tool, PublicSquare.
Boycott strategies are emergent, so participating requires staying up-to-date on active boycotts, being vigilant about what companies you spend your money on, and joining in calls to action and local protests.
HARDER TO DO
Organize workplace strikes and shut downs.
Set up picket lines outside of storefronts and offices supporting Trump.
Do actions at CEOs, executives, and board members’ homes to disrupt their daily lives.
And make these boycotts grow in size!
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s fascist bromance may be on the rocks, but Musk remains the world’s wealthiest person and is hell-bent on using his money to undermine our democracy. There are plenty of ways we can take action together to make it harder for him to amass wealth.
EASIER TO DO
Join the Tesla Takedown campaign and fill in the interest form for the ‘Divest Public Dollars From Elon Musk campaign;
Tell T-Mobile to stop funding Musk’s attacks on democracy. We can’t allow T-Mobile Elon Musk make billions through “T-Satellite”.
MEDIUM TO DO
Join any of the many Tesla Takedown actions all over the country.
If you are a T-mobile customer, contact T-mobile and let them know they may lose your business if they don’t drop Starlink.
HARDER TO DO
Organize a #TeslaTakeDown action in your community. Interrupt Tesla events, like Rise and Resist in NYC did. Plan an action targeting T-Mobile (like these Mariners fans did!) or organize protests against SpaceX and Starlink (check out these protests at SpaceX or Starlink!).
Federal workers have been a major target of the Trump administration. These workers and their allies are actively resisting his attacks on our democratic institutions and government agencies every single day. Join them.
EASIER TO DO
If you know individuals that work within government, give them support and love — or connect them to resources like this one.
Send a letter to those who run our elections – who have been facing constant harassment and intimidation – with Protect Our Elections.
Re-share posts from Alt Nat Park Service and AltGov, platforms created by federal workers from these agencies to resist Trump’s chaos and cuts.
MEDIUM TO DO
Organize a delivery of cupcakes or other sweets to thank federal workers who are holding the line to let them know they are appreciated. This Valentine’s Day action is how it’s done!
If you’re a federal worker, don’t quit. Stay inside and gum up the machine and take account of what’s happening around you.
Circulate resistance strategies and toolkits like the WWII Simple Sabotage Manual that emphasizes disguised actions from inside such as working slow, stalling during meeting, etc.
HARDER TO DO
Organize or contribute to mutual aid funds for federal workers who have lost their jobs.
If you see something, say something. Whistleblowing or telling the truth about what’s happening is critical to ensuring people have the full truth about what is going on.
If you’re a federal worker, prepare for nonviolent direct action at your workplace. Don’t quit. Don’t obey unconstitutional orders. Blockade to stay. Make them drag you out and video tape it!
Our elected officials – from across the political spectrum – need to hear from the people they represent. Have Republican officials been feeling despondent? There are already cracks — and research shows it’s the coup leader’s party that has the most influence on them. Every inch matters.
EASIER TO DO
Daily, call elected officials and tell them to take action on the issues you care about. You can use 5Calls.org, which has a dialer tool and template scripts on a number of important issues.
MEDIUM TO DO
Put up political signs in your window, yard, and/or around your neighborhood. You can order designs from from Stop The Coup on Etsy or download and print graphics from Just Seeds.
HARDER TO DO
Start recruiting a slate of pro-democracy candidates for City Council or School Board. Run, support, or get involved by connecting with Run for Something.
Join efforts to targeting elected representatives. Indivisible has done excellent organizing on this front. Join them or use their guide for pressuring your elected official.
Trump is calling on police, military, ICE agents, the National Guard and other forces to terrorize our communities. While Trump throws money towards militarization, policing, and racist border “protection”, there are plenty of ways we can push back, and protect ourselves and our neighbours.
EASIER TO DO
Know Your Rights and support print and distribute Know Your Rights Cards to better equip your community for ICE and police raids.
Learn and share about how the Trump administration has enlisted data-mining giant Palantir for mass surveillance and data collection services in order to speed up the deportation of migrants.
MEDIUM TO DO
Join with migrant rights groups who are providing rapid-response deportation defense. Campaign for the release of unlawfully detained persons. Prepare with your affinity group to non-violently resist ICE raids and police repression.
Talk to members of the military you know about how they can refuse unconstitutional orders (share this guide, for example).
If it is safe to do so, speak directly to members of the military, national guard, and ICE agents about their complicity in illegal acts. This TikTok video captures the powerful words of a man calling out Marines at an ICE protest in downtown Los Angeles on July 4th.
HARDER TO DO
Join activists who are protesting outside ICE detention facilities. Track and share which businesses are servicing these facilities and invite your networks to call them out and boycott them. If you are multi-lingual, provide translation support to families seeking answers about their loved ones in detention.
The Trump administration is attacking our legal system from all angles. His government is ignoring laws and human rights – including ones protected in our constitution. He’s attacking our institutions and targeting judges, lawyers and others in the legal field who don’t comply with his government.
EASIER TO DO
Thank organizations and leaders like the ACLU and Democracy Forward who are fighting battles to protect our rights and democracy. Donate – or encourage others to donate – to ensure their work can continue.
Some law firms have offered up millions of dollars in free legal services to Trumps government to avoid being targeted. Demand decision makers at these major law firms stop capitulating to Trump.
MEDIUM TO DO
Join protests that defend our rights and democracy — like these through the 50501 movement (or find actions)
HARDER TO DO
Organize protests of support for the rule of law near and outside of courts before decisions are made on important decisions. Organizing in the streets matters to reduce the likelihood courts backslide.
Support your industry to make statements against what’s happening (for example, American Bar Association standing against Trump’s illegal orders).
The Trump regime is stoking polarization, spreading misinformation and attacking our schools, libraries, and colleges. Any institution advancing science, history, DEI, or other knowledge that threatens Trumps agenda has become a target of the far-right, but people are fighting back. Here’s how to join them:
EASIER TO DO
Correct mis/disinformation with fact-based posts, fliers, posters, or writing opinion pieces in your local paper. Even sharing Snopes articles can be helpful for cutting through the constant lies coming out of the White House.
MEDIUM TO DO
Are you a student, professor, or worker on campus? Join the Firewall For Freedom campaign to call on your school to defend the rights of students against Trump’s attacks on free speech, academic freedom, and DEI.
Campaign against book bans in your state or town — even before they are proposed. Join Pen America’s Book Bans campaign. If you’re a librarian, resist the pressure to ban books (here’s an example).
HARDER TO DO
Push local schools and universities to uphold DEI policies using the Education For All Hub.
Ask schools, churches, and hospitals in your community to stand up for their historic right of sanctuary.
Devote yourself to a long-term project
All of us cannot only be on defense. There are many productive projects you might want to be part of that help address underlying problems of rising authoritarianism.
We’re following Daniel Hunter’s categorization from 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won (also available in video format):
Pick a path and then find an action that fits your degree of difficulty (we’ve categorized harder actions as those that require more time, people skills, and often a small group to launch with).
Autocrats don’t want us standing up for each other. An easy step to disobey that is sending signals into your community that you care — that you will publicly stand with targeted communities. Here are some examples:
EASIER TO DO
Partner with a local pride group to ask local businesses to put up a sign acknowledging that all folks are welcome in their stores. The “Welcoming Project” provides free signs and FAQ resources to encourage businesses, health care/service providers, organizations, and congregations to display welcoming signs.
Make sure every location you go to has a sign that says all people are welcome here (such as this work from artist Favianna Rodriguez). Shop somewhere, ask them. Attend a workshop somewhere, ask them. Kids go to little league somewhere, ask them.
MEDIUM TO DO
Partner with a hospital or clinic to start an abortion-support fund, for folks seeking out-of-state medical care. You can find a local abortion-support fund to support/create on the national map hosted by the National Network of Abortion Funds.
Build a bi-partisan coalition to research, expose, and educate the community about white nationalist threats. Examples: Idaho Leaders United calls out extremist ‘culture of permission’
Get your school board, city council, hospital commission or any government agency to affirm that they are a welcoming community to all people. For example, you can get your community to explicitly welcome and celebrate immigrants in the community joining the 300+ communities welcoming immigrants with the “Welcoming Network”.
Get your religious group, school, or little league to make a resolution in support of targeted folks. For example: why vaccinations are good practice or why everyone deserves to play sports, regardless what gender was assigned at birth. Faith institutions could stretch the limits and see if police departments or local officials are willing to inform them in advance what community members might be in danger of being snatched for deportation, so they can move to protect them.
HARDER TO DO
Train volunteers in your city and state on basic safety skills that could be used as white nationalist violence ramps up. Training support on action safety: Action Security and De-escalation with links at the end for further training.
Start recruiting a slate of pro-democracy candidates for City Council or School Board. Run, support, or get involved by connecting with Run for Something.
Campaign against book bans in your state or town — even before they are proposed. Join Pen America’s Book Bans campaign.
Autocrats love weak institutions — because they can twist them to their personal goals. Institutional ethics, values, and bureaucracy can all be used to resist those efforts. We may often think of federal institutions (like the military), but a lot of these institutions are very local: health commissioners, local scientists, schools, election officials. We can seek to defend local civic institutions, particularly when they are doing their job and refusing to engage in immoral or unsavory acts.
EASIER TO DO
As a veteran, connect with other groups who are resisting politicizing the military. Join Secure Families or National Security Leaders for America.
For Civil Servants, download and read “Serve the People: A civil servant’s guide to 2024 and beyond.” Learn strategies for what to do in the future. (And connect with the folks at Civil Service Strong.)
Send supportive letters to people who run our elections, who are facing increasing hatred, bile, and even death threats. Send a letter with Protect Our Elections.
MEDIUM TO DO
Start a citizen campaign practicing random acts of support. For example, order food for over-staffed nurses, blanket yards with signs supporting county health commissioners, or actively give out thank you cards with tips to front-line workers who are protecting us.
HARDER TO DO
Collect a list of lawyers who will pro bono support for first amendment protestors ahead of crackdowns. Communicate these lists to local activists.
Create or support a bail fund for local activists when political repression comes. Here is a link to existing bail funds.
Autocrats rely on people “obeying in advance,” meaning anticipating a more restrictive version of society and behaving accordingly. This shows those in power how far they can go, and it moves the needle of what’s “normal” that much more quickly. Disrupting and disobeying the status quo diverts the autocrat’s resources and puts them on the defense instead of allowing them to plow ahead unencumbered. It also signals to others with less courage that they’re not alone in opposing what’s happening and may inspire them to take action.
EASIER TO DO
Build an affinity group. Simply put, get together with a group of people you trust, build some trust together, and start to talk and plan about what risks you are willing to take.
MEDIUM TO DO
As an affinity group, pick a specific issue to work on. We will need you to support migrant rights groups around deportation defense, for example. We might also need you to stop further climate chaos being wrought by fossil fuel companies and their financiers Reach out at info@disruption-project.org to get some coaching on how to take action.
Join with migrant rights groups to join their need for rapid response deportation defense.
Test the boundaries of the law, just a little. Alternatively to a massive sit-in to shut down a plant, you can have each person just cut one chain in the fence — as practice of resistance.
Call the Resistance Hotline (844-NVDA-NOW) to get coached on how to do an action even more powerfully.
HARDER TO DO
Engage in active noncompliance. Noncompliance is taking bold action against a system that you feel is immoral. Noncompliance can be about a larger way of life that says that the whole system is fundamentally broken and that we need mass numbers of people not participating in it. As documented, authoritarian regimes don’t fall because of protests — they fall because the people refuse to go along with the regime, through mass defections in military and government, strikes that paralyze parts of the normal functioning of society, etc. Read more on Strategic Escalation in the Trump Era.
Jail solidarity. There was not a team of lawyers attempting to bail out Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. They were held until they were released. Think about your team the same way. If you are arrested taking action, why would you pay money into a broken system? Why not stay in jail? This is known as jail solidarity. This serves two purposes. First of all, if enough people engage in jail solidarity it becomes a real problem for those in charge. Where do they house everyone? Second, the story of who is in jail can be pretty compelling too. Folks who are in for multiple days have access (or their friends do) to the press and can tell their stories, why they are there and why they are taking huge risks to support immigrants, or fight for the climate.
Wildcat strikes. If you’re in a union, can you organize your union to walk out in a wildcat strike, at a particular key juncture, when some threshold is crossed around worker protections? Or for undocumented folks? Begin those conversations now.
Organize your workplace. If you’re not in a union, can you organize folks in your workplace? To fight back against workplace raids? To stop work if some threshold is breached?
Organize, organize, organize — especially in neglected places. In 2017, many organizers moved from progressive areas back to where they grew up to start organizing projects in their hometowns. We will need more of these. In the section on protecting institutions, we mentioned some civic organizing that needed to happen. But, there is also the need for people to attempt ambitious organizations, whether it is faith institutions in the Quad Cities, Iowa; tenant organizing in Erie, Pennsylvania; or fighting to raise the minimum wage in Waukesha, Wisconsin. We need a lot more of these local organizing projects. While starting a new organizing project is challenging, we’re not going to dispute that, we are also available to talk with people to assess whether they can start something. We think lots of dedicated people can do interesting and important work. And, you don’t have to start all at once, you can also start with some of the suggestions in the first section on protecting people and see if you can gather some people together or win some smaller victories.
Shut things down. We’re happy to discuss details, but so much of what needs to happen is the shutting down of business as usual. Whether this is a strike at the ports or whether we could shut down finance or logistics, or extraction, this is the kind of mass action we need to be thinking about — not just protests.
EASIER TO DO
Bring community together. Organize a potluck or clothing swap. Get folks together to talk about what they fear or hope in the times ahead. You can see one such agenda at There are More Of Us: Community Gatherings.
MEDIUM TO DO
Build a community garden. Make it a community project to grow food and community.
Start a monthly or weekly mutual aid group. Mutual aid is a way to offer a place for exchanging needs in the community. It’s not a charity model but about the community finding its own resources, like offering unsheltered people homes in a church or community center or setting up ways to exchange meals, naloxone, legal help, pet supplies, winter clothing, etc. etc. (Training on mutual aid here: Mutual Aid 101.)
HARDER TO DO
Help build the future we need by developing community solar or renewable power owned by the people. 350 has one such resource at OurOwnPower.org.
Get your city or state to promote participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a direct democratic process where community members decide how to spend the public budget. It gives people real power — direct ownership over the decisions with full transparency. Learn more from the Participatory Budgeting Project.
Promote policies to abolish the electoral college, support third parties, or otherwise make this country more democratic. This is a big project — but lots of groups are exploring ways to do this. Because there are so many and many of them are nascent, we don’t have recommendations here — but encourage you to research ones that align with your values and organizing instincts.
Liberated territory. The right-wing militia movement in this country has created some liberated territory, whether that lives in their ranches or in the election of “Constitutional Sheriffs” who do not recognize the federal government, they swear an oath to the constitution. Create similar territories of sanctuary and protection, where folks are able to live free lives.
There is a lot of information here, so take a deep breath. There is a Jewish teaching that says that you are not responsible for completing the work, nor are you allowed to desist from it. We will succeed because millions of people do a couple things well, not because one person does a million things.
While we wish we were not compelled to travel down this path of resistance. We are excited to realize the collective beauty we can and will create together.
You got this.