Trump Won, Part 2 of 2
Continued from Trump Won. What do we do now?, which I recommend reading because it is exquisitely written and phenomenally insightful. Done? Great. Now join me, comrades, as we move on to items 4 and 5.
4. Find openings to do your part.
What will the resistance look like?
I can tell you what the resistance WON’T look like. It won’t look doing nothing except voting. It won’t look like a mainstream Democrat running for president. It’ won’t look like a fairy Godmother who magically makes you brave. It won’t look like a large nonprofit organization soliciting your donations. It won’t look like someone with a name tag and clip board on the corner who says “I’m a Resistance Leader, Sign Up Here.”
It won’t look like an owl carrying a fancy invitation for you.
In other words: The revolution will not be televised.
The resistance won’t look like you expect, and yet it will be exactly what you’d expect.
The resistance will be based in grassroots, on-the-ground mutual care.
It will be the true meaning of Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe. It will be networks of your circles of trust. And their communities of trust. Ever expanding, circles conjoining.
It will be people publicly demonstrating, defying, and outwitting cops.
It will be economic disruption. Union strikes, wildcat strikes, organizations of workers and students (after SCOTUS effectively dismantles the ability to unionize) across large sectors of the economy.
It will be physical disruption - jamming up airports, train stations, bridges, and tunnels. Disruptions of ordinary life and commerce.
It will be artists and writers telling the truth, again and again, and loudly.
It will be people quietly opening their homes to people who need to hide.
It will be folks trained up to provide abortions, or care for miscarriages, or care for undocumented immigrants, at the risk of their personal safety and/or medical licenses.
It will be neighborhood-led soup kitchens, free breakfasts, and childcare coops.
It will be reading groups.
It will be street medics and chained-together actionists.
It will be teachers who refuse to be silenced.
It will be children who have learned to hold hands, all together, and don’t let go, if ICE or cops show up at their school.
It will be white parents (at long last) joining their BIPOC comrades in teaching young children that cops aren’t the good guys.
And so much more.
You know what, on that last note about white parents, I want to talk about something I keep hearing white and middle-class friends say that’s been sticking in my craw:
“My family are not the ones I’m worried about under Trump.”
or
“My family will be safe. Trump and Project 2025 will affect marginalized people the worst.”
Why does this stick in my craw?
Not because it’s wrong.
Indeed, marginalized people will be subjected first and worst. They always are.
And let me be clear: I’m grateful that many of my friends recognize their privilege/s. Being concerned for those who are more marginalized, more directly targeted, more vulnerable is important.
But. What irks me is:
Just how comfortable are you with being safe under a fascist, racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, xenophobic government?
Are you comfortable with being comfortable under a fascist regime?
Now - and I mean right NOW - is when you find out who you’d be if you lived under a fascist regime.
Are you who you imagined?
Are you doing what you imagined?
Have you always told yourself you’d be in the underground resistance in Paris, looking aloof and super cool in your beret, smoking a cigarette, during World War II?
Have you always thought you’d be a conductor, or provide a house as a station, on the underground railroad before the U.S. Civil War?
Have you told yourself that you’d offer sanctuary, or hide people, that you’d stick your neck out to protect the vulnerable? To do what’s right?
Great! Yay, you!
So … what are you waiting for?
Do you think a fairy comes along in any given fascistic timeline to bop you on the head with their wand and say, “Sweet love sugarbootie, it’s time to join the resistance. Which is illegal, by the way. And very unsafe and very uncomfortable. Good luck!”?
Well, ok. Fine. I am that fairy.
Consider this your bop on the head.
Oh, wait. Did you think the fairy also magically grants you courage, and nerves of steel, and money for bail and a lawyer?
That’s outside of the fairy purview.
It’s just plain old (wonderful) quirky you, same you as yesterday. Except now you have a goose egg on your noggin from being bopped by a wand.
Let’s say it’s February 2025.
It’s been a Cat 5 shitstorm of nominations, confirmations, bad news, and worse news. There’s talk of a national ban on transgender care. A national abortion ban. Rolling back gay marriage. Camps for mass deportations seem to be spinning up. There’s already a new McCarthyism targeting dissenters and protesters, bringing them before Congress to answer to accusations of being “anti-Semitic” or “terrorist sympathizers.”
It feels SO chaotic. (That’s by design. Chaos and “flooding the zone” makes us disoriented, distracted, and uncertain.)
March 2025: the abuela, the grandmother, of your across-the-street-neighbor-family becomes gravely ill.
She refuses to go to the hospital — she’s afraid of being detained and deported. (All county sheriffs in North Carolina must now cooperate with ICE.) What do you do? (Have you already reached out and met your neighbors? Asked them for sugar when you ran out? Brought them flowers when their dog died? Would you even know their abuelita is ill?) Will you help them? Or leave them be, because it’s not your business?
Remember: fascist regimes divide and isolate people. They use fear and divisiveness to function effectively, stoking fear of “out-groups” while privileging the in-group.
So let’s say that Congress, doing Trump’s bidding, enacts laws to sow division.
April 2025. Congress passes an “aiding and abetting” law, granting any citizen the power to sue someone else for “aiding and abetting” an “illegal” immigrant or a “suspected terrorist sympathizer,” and be awarded $10,000 or more for this vigilantism.
Does the Aiding and Abetting Law change your calculus? Your willingness to act?
(Does that law sound unrealistic to you? What if I told you that Congress modeled their legislation on SB 8 in Texas, passed in 2021, which allows almost anyone to sue someone suspected of “aiding and abetting” abortion, with a $10,000 reward for doing so? Sounds more realistic now, doesn’t it?)
When’s the last time you broke a law that you thought was immoral?
Can you physically, emotionally, and financially manage be sued? Or detained? Can your family manage?
Is this starting to feel like a little too much to ask?
Do you want to retreat back into your relative safety?
Is that who you imagined you’d be, who you told yourself you’d be, though?
May 2025. You’re in the car line at your kids’ school.
You’re scrolling through Instagram when you hear a commotion. It’s ICE rolling up on a family. (Do you know what ICE vehicles look like? Hint: they are usually unmarked SUVs, freshly washed, American-made.) A mother and children are screaming and crying. Separate agents are grabbing the mother, the kids.
Will you stay in your car and watch because you don’t know the family and it’s none of your business?
Will you film it on your phone but not intervene?
What if Congress passes a law that it’s illegal to capture video of law enforcement officers doing their jobs? And SCOTUS upholds that law?
Do you still film?
What if the child being targeted is your child’s best friend? What if you are friends with the mom?
Does that change how you feel, what you feel led to do?
What if your kids are in your car with you?
Do you need to prioritize your children’s safety? Do you need to prioritize solidarity with the vulnerable family? Can you do both?
Yeah.
None of it is easy.
It gets real, real quick.
June 2026. You’re at work. You’re a social worker, a lawyer, a teacher, a librarian, a medical provider … you are anyone with files containing personal information and home addresses of “illegal immigrants” and “terrorist sympathizers.”
The Sheriff, flanked by five deputies and some random “patriots” with guns, shows up at your workplace. They demand to see your files, NOW. No warrant or explanation.
They point their guns at you after you say no.
What will you do? Will you continue to say no at gunpoint?
Will you film them (illegally) but let them take the files?
Will you acquiesce because it’s fucking terrifying to be threatened by law enforcement?
Do you need to cooperate to keep the people in your workplace physically safe?
Are you already hiding vulnerable people at your workplace and can’t risk more fuss?
July 2026. Three armed white supremacists are harassing two college-age kids in keffiyehs.
Trump has already stated he supports the informal deputization of members of the Patriot Front, the Proud Boys, and the like.
He’s said he will pardon any citizen convicted of a hate crime, anyone charged with harassing or detaining an ”illegal” or a “terrorist sympathizer.”
What do you do? Do you put yourself in danger? Intervene? Film? Call the cops?
(Do you honestly think the cops will run to the aid of the kids wearing keffiyehs? I’ve got some bad news for you, my sweet sweet naive little waif.)
Maybe you think all these scenarios are wildly unlikely.
Are they? Maybe they are are. I hope they are. But some of them are already happening. Have been happening.
Since 9/11, Islamophobia has been constant. In 2001, my bestie’s little brother was beat up on his way to school in California, just for being an Arab Muslim.
White supremacists and young men sympathetic to white supremacy have been perpetrating mass shootings and mass murders for decades.
The US has been breaking up families to deport people for years and years. Obama was dubbed the Deporter in Chief. He deported more people than any president before him. Were you part of the resistance? Have you or your congregation offered sanctuary before now? What is different about this moment? Is there a different, or new, urgency or invitation?
The US has been funding genocide — ethnic cleansing, starvation, burning children alive — in Gaza for over a year. Have you been part of the resistance? Have you stuck your neck out against the “war”? Why or why not?
Maybe you feel more motivated to be part of the resistance under Trump.
Well, aren’t you a lucky ducky because here we are.
My message is this: solidarity means putting yourself in the same danger as marginalized people.
It means living with the fear that you could be put in a camp, stripped of your citizenship (Trumpers are already openly talking about revoking birthright citizenship), deported. It means recognizing your privilege — and being honest with yourself about what you’re going to do with it.
Because you might not be the first population targeted, but boy howdy I guarantee that unless you get with Trump, or you capitulate (“go along to get along”), if a fascist regime continues, and you are the resistance member you always told yourself you would be, there will be a time when they come for you.
You may have very good reasons for laying low. Three jobs, no energy for anything else. Caregiving children, elders, ill or disabled family members - you can’t spare a moment. Chronic illness making it difficult for you to focus on anything but survival. These are real, legitimate circumstances. May the Great Cosmic Echidna shine her disco globe upon you and give you peace. And rent money.
But/and — when your circumstances change —and Octavia Butler taught us that if there’s one thing you can count on, it is change — there will be openings and opportunities for you to resist. Even teeny tiny ones.
But honestly? If you’re just feeling “meh” because you’re hopeless and paralyzed by the news (and white liberals, I’m especially talking to you), please see my last post and GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.
As you think about and look for more specific openings for resistance, be doing two things:
BUILD YOUR TRUST-NETWORKS OF MUTUAL CARE.
How? Get together with people. Throw a block party. Throw a dance party. Attend resistance networking fairs. Go to Zoom meetings of organizations you admire.
And: map your pods.
What’s a pod?
[A pod is] the people in our lives that we would call on to support us with things such as our immediate and on-going safety, accountability and transformation of behaviors, or individual and collective healing and resiliency.
Mapping your pods helps you specifically name the people, and their networks, that you can count on. It helps you expand those networks through people power. Pod mapping is an easy and transformative tool developed by BATJC. Learn about Pod Mapping and fill out your own pod-mapping worksheet.
DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE.
Do not self-censor or capitulate due to fear. (Even while we watch Congress do so.) This is one of the most important things we can do RIGHT NOW.
This is the first lesson in Timothy Snyder’s excellent, very readable book, On Tyrrany: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
- Timothy Snyder, On Tyrrany
It’s tempting to hedge. Rephrase, recode, recede. But we just can’t.
Guess what. The writers you read? The podcasts you love? The activists? The artists? The teachers? The resistance organizers who emerge? Most of them are scared.
You have to do stuff anyway. Not because you are brave, but because it’s important.
In the end, there’s not a big difference between pretending to be as brave as Princess Leia and being as brave as Princess Leia.
Your comfort really might need to be the first sacrifice you make. And you may need to make that sacrifice over and over.
I find this graph of four quadrants of resistance, from Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence, helpful:
I think “defend civic institutions” is a little late, but you do you.
If you are a wonderful cook, and the way you show care is by nourishing people, do that. Team up with cooking comrades to provide food for activists, unhoused folks, or a combination thereof.
If you are a lawyer, make yourself available to a local defense clinic, Palestine Legal, or Abortion Defense Network.
If you are into transformative and restorative justice, help us build a new world based on Indigenous practices, centering BIPOC wisdom.
If you are into “Disrupt and Disobey,” I’ll see you there.
And finally, we get to:
5. FIGHT TO WIN.
How? Spoiler alarm: we don’t know.
Yet.
But to start, I suggest reframing our question.
It’s not “What do we do now?” or “What can we do?”
No.
To paraphrase Stefanie Fox of Jewish Voice for Peace in her wonderful book, Solidarity is the Political Version of Love,
The question is not, “What can we do?”
The question is, “WHAT WILL IT TAKE?”
It might take more than we think.
It definitely won’t be comfortable. But. Solidarity is the Political Version of Love.
I love y’all.
Solidarity forever.
XOXO
Wow, Jen! We really hope it does not get to this extreme (but, correct, history tells us anything can arise).
From here in Oz I'm wondering if Trumps tarrifs on imports will jack up prices so much that the very demographic that voted him in will be doing the rebelling!
May the Great Cosmic Echidna look after y'all.