∼ ∼ ∼ This article is part of a series—At 250, Who Will America Be?—reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026. ∼ ∼ ∼
On Inauguration Day, at the precise moment he was becoming the 47th president of these Un-United States, Donald Trump uttered the first lie of his second term.
“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.…”
Hours later, on a day marked by a manic and typically adolescent Elon Musk twice giving a stiff-armed salute (Nazi or “Roman,” take your fascist pick), Trump issued a blitz of executive actions and other directives in his first attempts to take the country under authoritarian rule.
At least four of these maneuvers blatantly violated either the Constitution itself or established law: the freeze on federal funding, which sidestepped Congressional authority over power of the purse; the takeover by Musk and his minions of the Treasury Department’s vast database of personal records, breaching the right to privacy for millions of Americans under the Privacy Act of 1974; the elimination of birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States to undocumented immigrants, ignoring the 14th Amendment; and the sweeping and sudden termination of government watchdogs known as inspectors general, ignoring the 1978 Inspector General Act, which requires such removals to come with legitimate reasons and 30 days prior notice.
The funding freeze, the attack on birthright citizenship (which even questioned the citizenship of Native Americans), and the database seizure have all been temporarily halted by federal judges. The Trump administration, claiming the right to impoundment (for an explanation, see the first article in this series), is still refusing to release funds for numerous allocations, such as (no surprise) the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant. Yet another federal judge ordered the administration to re-start payments, which will likely bring a showdown in the courts. But this is all actually part of an overall strategy, the first step in eventually forcing the MAGA-friendly Supreme Court to rule on these cases (and others) in the administration’s favor. Even if SCOTUS doesn’t, Vice President J.D. Vance has made it clear that the administration sees itself as omnipotent: “Judges,” he recently wrote on X, “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Typical of a nascent autocracy, the administration also began a series of purges and punishments. In addition to clearing out the inspectors general, it revived the “Schedule F” order introduced in the last year of Trump’s first term (and killed by Biden), a directive that makes it easier to replace career civil servants seen as “disloyal” with sycophantic toadies. It also fired prosecutors who worked to convict Trump of crimes beyond his existing 34 felonies, such as election interference. And in concert with Musk’s outrageous and vicious statements about the humanitarian agency USAID being a “criminal organization” that he was “feeding to the wood chipper,” the administration effectively expunged the 62-year-old organization from the face of the earth, with a plan (interrupted for the time being by another federal judge) to get rid of over 10,000 employees.
The USAID decision was notably cheered by officials in more full-blown autocracies — Russia, Hungary, Belarus, El Salvador — who fear that the humanitarian group’s aid to the poor and downtrodden might spark notions of democratic reform. Trump and Musk, both admirers of dictators everywhere, would never pass up an opportunity to win their approbation — or to help grease the wheels for a mutually beneficial deal between oligarchs. It’s no wonder that soon after her confirmation, Pam Bondi, the new attorney general, disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and that Trump paused the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for U.S. companies to bribe foreign government officials. In the world of autocracies, it’s called “give and take.”
“Autocrats want you to be discouraged … they prefer a public that believes it has no power.”
As for punishments, Trump swiftly carried through on his promises to enact vengeance, revoking government protection from 50 critics and perceived enemies, including John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who are both still under threat from Iran, as well as Anthony Fauci, who is under threat from the entire right wing.
The proposed cuts to federal agencies by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, including the dissolution of USAID, might come under the “punishment” category as well. Two Musk-owned companies — Tesla and Neuralink — are under multiple federal investigations, respectively, for design flaws and abusive testing on animals. And the inspector general of USAID had been looking into the use of his organization’s supply of Musk’s Starlink terminals, sent to Ukraine to enable the country’s military to connect with the SpaceX fleet of satellites; there had been questions about whether the billionaire also supplied the vital terminals to Russia, which he has denied. Since 2022, when Musk first approved Starlink access for Ukraine, he has steadily retreated from supporting the country’s efforts to turn back the Russian invasion. On his social media platform, X, Musk has mocked President Zelensky’s requests for aid, and last year, in a conversation on X that included J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, he urged the U.S. to stop supplying Ukraine with weapons, proclaiming, “there is no way in hell” Putin was going to lose the war. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk and Putin had been in direct contact several times.
Besides purges and punishments, the administration set to work building the foundation for a white Christian nationalist state. They eliminated a 60-year-old rule that helped protect women and people of color from job discrimination in federal positions; eliminated other D.E.I. initiatives across all federal agencies; eliminated thousands of pages from agency websites (in some cases, entire websites) that contained any references to diversity, including CDC advice on vaccines, information about the Head Start program for children of low-income families, and FDA guidelines for expanding the racial mix of clinical trials; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America; commenced immigrant round-ups, focusing first on Chicago in a clear attempt to intimidate leaders of a declared sanctuary city; shackled migrants from India like slaves for a 40-hour deportation flight back to their country; and notified the Army and the Marines to prepare for the deployment of up to 10,000 troops to the Mexican border, a number big enough to suggest a military campaign.
The racist plans extend into foreign policy. Trump declared that he wanted the U.S. to take over rubble-strewn Gaza, clear out two million long-suffering Palestinians in a Stalin-like forced displacement, and develop the “valuable waterfront property” (in son-in-law Jared Kushner’s cold-blooded words) into what Trump imagined would be a “Riviera of the Middle East.” So, make America great again by revisiting its brutal history of wiping out native populations.
“A spark had been ignited. Not a drop of blood had been spilled, not a bone broken, but on that day, with that gesture, an image war had begun.”
Of course, Trump’s most shocking (but predictably authoritarian) act was his grand welcoming gesture to extremists in his pardoning or commuting the sentences of all those who participated in the deadly attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two far-right groups devoted to white nationalism and violence. When specifically asked whether those groups might have a part in the new administration, Trump replied, “Well, we’ll see.”
This blitz of directives (and there were many more) comes straight out of Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s strategy from the first term — “flood the zone with shit” — a gameplan designed to dazzle supporters, confuse the press, and strong-arm everyone else into compliance or bystanding silence. Already, a number of firms in the private sector — notably Target, Walmart, Ford, Amazon, and Facebook’s parent, Meta, none of which are subject to executive actions against DEI — have demonstrated cowardice under fire by canceling or backing away from hiring policies that call for diversity (which makes you wonder if their executives have wanted white guys to rule boardrooms all along).
That “you-will-be-assimilated” intimidation presses on the average voter, too. For those of us who have opposed a politician convicted of fraud and found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and defamation, a man who has frequently praised the world’s autocrats, it’s pretty much unavoidable to feel a sense of helplessness and hopelessness at this early stage.
In his 2024 book, Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, Robert Edwards reminds us, “Autocrats want you to be discouraged … they prefer a public that believes it has no power.” A former Army intelligence officer turned filmmaker/producer (Land of the Blind, One More Time), Edwards has written a level-headed, straight-talking fulmination of a book. The first chapter, “How to Tell Your House is on Fucking Fire,” is as sharp a takedown of the MAGA-verse as you’ll find anywhere. But if you’re tired of that sort of thing, go to Chapter 9, in which Edwards explores methods for annoying, mocking, thwarting, and ultimately defeating Trump Redux, stressing the need to take advantage of what an autocrat fears the most: the people themselves. “A despotic regime,” he writes, “can only remain in power if the citizenry is unwilling to mobilize sufficiently against it (without underestimating how difficult that mobilization might be).”
SILENCE = DEATH OF DEMOCRACY, or SILENCE = FASCISM, or SILENCE = CAPITULATION
Edwards laments that “public displays of defiance were sorely lacking during Trump’s [first] term,” noting the millions-strong Women’s March the day after the 2021 inauguration as “an outlier.” Yet he downplays the effectiveness of marches and rallies. Certainly, the biggest ones — the 1963 March on Washington, the 1967 March on the Pentagon, and the 1982 anti-nuke rally in Central Park — helped shift the direction of attitudes and policy, but Edwards quotes longtime civil-rights activist Zoharah Simmons (a director of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign) as saying, “Demonstrations by themselves won’t get it,” referring to lasting impact. “You have to have organization … something bad happens, people rise up, they get mad, and they march, but that is not being galvanized into movement structures.”
Edwards argues instead for “meticulously planned campaigns” of “active noncooperation” or civil disobedience, which “need not be limited to familiar forms like sit-ins and shutdowns.” He imagines this second Trump administration being met “not only with protests in the streets, but by the widespread refusal of the public to cooperate with ICE … by bureaucrats slow-walking their duties, by the bureaucracy itself overloaded with pointless requests … by churchgoers leaving their houses of worship en masse if those organizations refuse to stand up against the administration … by consumers refusing to deposit money in banks.…”
Fears of retaliation have so far squashed any signs of resistance at bureaucratic or corporate levels. When Trump recently ordered the release of two billion gallons of water from California reservoirs, in an idiotic political stunt to prove that the resources could have helped fight the Los Angeles wildfires, the Army Corps of Engineers blindly obeyed, completely wasting what is desperately needed for crop irrigation. Likewise, Google leadership symbolically shouted “Jawohl!” when they immediately altered maps to display the Gulf of America.
Encouragingly, there are quieter efforts to thwart ICE round-ups. Immigrants, undocumented or not, can acquire from various organizations so-called Red Cards — quick-reference cards printed in numerous languages that list their rights and provide succinct advice on what to do and say when ICE agents show up at a home, school, or church. The cards can also be printed directly from the website of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
There are also rapid-response toolkits — a series of documents that can help individuals, communities, and activists prepare for ICE raids. You can find a number of such guides, all excellent, on the website of a Catholic organization called CLINIC.
For other ideas around disobedience, Edwards points to the website of Nonviolence International, where you can find several hundred tactics, including mock trials and elections, boat blockades, flash mobs, and postal bombardment. Speaking of bombardment, in January a rumor spread online about the ICE tip-line phone center being clogged by thousands of calls asking for Musk’s deportation. The report turned out to be a viral joke, but it’s a damn good idea.
Additionally, Edwards lauds the potency of political street theater, particularly the confrontational events staged by ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the 1980s and early ’90s to increase awareness of AIDS and HIV. Among many planned disruptions, the group shut down the FDA, commandeered Grand Central at rush hour, and, dressed in Santa costumes, chained themselves together in Macy’s on a peak Christmas shopping day to protest the dismissal of an HIV-positive Santa. Their slogan, SILENCE = DEATH, Edwards notes, “is memorable to this day.” A co-opted version might work nicely for anti-Trump demonstrations: SILENCE = DEATH OF DEMOCRACY, or SILENCE = FASCISM, or SILENCE = CAPITULATION.
Humor might be even more effective as a form of protest. Edwards reminds us of the countercultural antics of Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies, who promoted a pig as a presidential candidate (“Pigasus the Immortal”), and in 1967 showered the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (then open to the public) with dollar bills and watched some of the traders, who were dealing huge sums, scramble to snatch at the money. Hoffman wrote about the episode in his autobiography, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture: “A spark had been ignited. Not a drop of blood had been spilled, not a bone broken, but on that day, with that gesture, an image war had begun.”
No one better understands the power of a photographed or televised political prank — especially, the humiliation it brings — than Srđa Popović. Cofounder and executive director of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), Popović first became involved with political demonstrations in his native Serbia, under the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milošević. In 1998, after Milošević announced a takeover of the country’s six universities, Popović and his fellow students formed Otpor! (Resistance!), a group dedicated to annoying the dictator, not with the usual megaphoned rage but with street comedy. For one of their first pranks, they painted a barrel with a realistic rendition of Milošević’s grinning mug and placed it in a busy retail district, along with a baseball bat and a carnival-style sign, reading “Smash his face for a dinar.” It wasn’t long before amused shoppers, emboldened by the sense of fun, started plopping their coins into the barrel’s slot and taking mighty swings. When the police eventually arrived to cart the thing away, Popović’s pals photographed the “arrest” (as planned) and happily distributed the pictures to opposition newspapers.
Popović recounts the scene in his first book, Blueprint for a Revolution, an engaging (and inspiring) look at the movement that helped topple Milošević, as well as his group’s efforts to teach other activists — in Egypt, Syria, the Maldives, Venezuela, and elsewhere — the tactics of what Popović has dubbed “Laughtivism”: targeted, disruptive events of biting irony and absurdist humor. The book’s subtitle captures the spirit of the work: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World.
In Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism, a free PDF download, Popović (along with Penn State professor of international affairs Sophia A. McClennen) turns an analytical eye to 44 provocative demonstrations from around the world and from various decades, explaining them as “dilemma actions” — an activist term for protests that (as Popović writes) “force those in power into a lose-lose situation,” trapping them in an “irresolvable dilemma.” In the barrel episode, the police could either arrest the joyful group waiting to swing the bat (which included children) or they could, humiliatingly, haul away the dictator’s battered face. This brief study concludes that well-calculated dilemma actions are rather effective at destabilizing an autocratic regime, “not just by revealing injustice and excess, but also by mocking the oppressor and showing its weaknesses — and ultimately undermining its authority.”
How might a notoriously thin-skinned president and his incompetent, subservient cabinet react to street scenes — staged, say, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or Trump Tower — of marvelous, response-forcing ridicule? Let’s find out. Pranksters unite!
“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that I was ever born to set it right!”
Still, a single brilliant protest that gets on CNN and goes viral on the Web isn’t going to bring about enough change to topple an autocrat. What’s needed — what every veteran activist will emphasize — is a series of goals and events that become a sustained campaign. That’s where another former member of Otpor!, Ivan Marovic, executive director of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), comes in. His clear-sighted book, The Path of Most Resistance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning Nonviolent Campaigns, another free PDF download, outlines how to build an effective grand plan for activism, taking you through what’s known as SWOT analysis (a look at Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), cost/benefit estimates, and brainstorming methods. The guide includes helpful case studies — Otpor’s voter-turnout events, the civil rights movement, and Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March — and a course for training leaders in these techniques.
Not all collective actions against a repressive regime are protests; some come under the category of “mutual aid.” In the late 19th century, Russian naturalist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote a series of essays on the ways that animals he observed in Siberia, such as reindeer and bears, would form societies to help each other endure the harsh winters, arguing against the strict Darwinian view of life in the wild as a vicious competition, “a survival of the fittest.” The writings, which also addressed human cooperation in more primitive eras, were collected in 1902 in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, and the book would become a kind of bible for communal anarchism in the tumultuous years that followed.
Today, “mutual aid” refers to the collaborative efforts of the underprivileged in managing a crisis or threat, a collective self-sufficiency that runs counter to the survival of the richest. Dean Spade, a professor at Seattle University’s School of Law and author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), tells us, “Mutual aid is inherently antiauthoritarian, demonstrating how we can do things together in ways we were told not to imagine, and that we can organize human activity without coercion.” His book provides guidelines for establishing and maintaining any sort of do-it-yourself lifeline, with advice on leadership, participation, recruiting, and an emphasis on consensus decision-making.
Spade cites several examples of mutual-aid success stories — the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children Program (which ran for three years, beginning in the late 1960s); non-governmental disaster relief in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, in 2017; and the protection of immigrants from ICE raids in 2019. He’s not making any current suggestions here (the book was published in October 2020). But certainly, if the Trump administration, embracing Project 2025’s plans for an assault on the poor, manages to eliminate or reduce essential federal aid — such as Medicaid, the Head Start program, the nutritional help of WIC for low-income families — Spade’s book could prove very handy in helping ease the needs and distress of those affected.
The Trump autocracy is going to be enervating, with daily uncertainty, worry, rage, and just about every other rotten state of mind you can imagine. Having a set of principles for dealing with the deluge of Bannon’s zone-flooding “shit” that will enter our lives is a good way to stay focused, safe, and sane, and you can find precisely that in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Short, pithy, pocket-size, and carrying that old-fashioned title, Snyder’s book harkens back to those political pamphlets from the Colonial era that encouraged rebellion against the injustices of British rule. A professor of history at Yale, Snyder initially wrote his 20 lessons as a Facebook post, eight days after the 2016 election that first gave us Trump as president. Now, they’re more pertinent than ever.
Expanded from the Facebook post into brief chapters in the 2017 book, with examples from the history of repressive regimes, the lessons are really a series of cautions for dealing with authoritarian rule. “Do Not Obey in Advance.” “Listen for Dangerous Words.” “Be Calm When the Unthinkable Arrives.” In the epilogue, Snyder quotes Hamlet: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that I was ever born to set it right!”
Carry On Tyranny around, and, like Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown reading a self-help book on the sidelines during a playoff game, refer to Snyder’s cautions in your brief breaks from the action on the field. They will remind you to stay alert, and not to get complacent. ❖
In the Voice’s previous incarnation, Robert Shuster wrote pieces on art, culture, and books. He is the author of the novel “To Zenzi.”
