For the millions of Americans now desperate to reclaim our democracy from the plutocratic vandalism of the second Trump administration, the main challenge before us is simple: We have to unify and fight back. This isn’t new and it isn’t rocket science—the one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians is that success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition. What that should look like and what that demands of each of us is the heart of the new movement to defeat a more disciplined and lawless Trump White House, but before we get to where we’re going, we have to start with where we are.
We run a national pro-democracy grassroots movement organization that’s been helping to marshal local volunteer groups against Trumpism for nearly a decade. Trump’s innovation in his second term is his strategic alignment with neoreactionary forces personified in Elon Musk. As one underground memo circulating in pro-democracy circles recently explained, the neoreactionary goal is “replacing the existing Constitutional system with a privatized state structure akin to a corporation, with a monarch-like figure at the top modeled after a CEO.” It’s no wonder that historians like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson are raising the alarm about a boiling constitutional crisis.
It’s hard not to sound alarmist about such alarming events. Whether we call it a coup, a constitutional crisis, a hostile takeover, or something else, we side with the two-thirds of Democrats who want Democrats in Congress to oppose Trump at every turn rather than appease him.
From our perspective as political organizers, the most important thing about this agenda is that it’s wildly unpopular. Project 2025, the governing blueprint for the neoreactionary ideology, polled at just 4 percent support before the election. The marginal voters who gave Trump another term wanted lower prices for bread, and instead they’re being served a hot dish of techno-dystopian fascism with a side of egg shortages.
For those of us looking to break the MAGA coalition, this should be a major political opportunity. Trump and his allies in the White House are overreaching dramatically. And rather than acting as a check on executive power, congressional Republicans are rubber-stamping nominees and helping Trump and Musk consolidate their power.
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So far, they have not paid much of a political price. To change that, we need an opposition capable of making Republicans own their complicity.
A week after the election, we published Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink, an open-source handbook for building nationwide opposition to the coming authoritarian takeover. The first step: total opposition to Trump’s Project 2025.
Congressional Democrats should lead this charge, but so far, their response has been sluggish, unimaginative, ineffective, and—an absolutely killer liability in our algorithmically driven world—boring. Senate Democrats embraced “strategic silence” on Trump’s nominees. Many House Democrats have focused on professing powerlessness and voicing an interest in reasonable-sounding bipartisan compromise. It hasn’t worked. Even before Trump’s inauguration, too many Democrats helped expedite a MAGA immigration bill to his desk. Democrats have provided votes for almost all of Trump’s cabinet nominees. There have been moments of fight—but they haven’t been linked to an overarching strategy to make Democrats an effective opposition party.
Democrats seem to be waiting for Trump, Musk, and MAGA to naturally become unpopular, instead of working overtime to make them unpopular. We can’t wait. We need a unified, aggressive, and creative opposition in this country. Here’s what that federal opposition could look like in practice:
Slow the Senate. Lawmakers in the upper chamber of Congress don’t have a big red “stop everything” button—but the Democratic Senate minority can slow business as usual and dramatize its opposition. One expert in congressional procedure, Norm Ornstein, has detailed these tactics—-from the famous filibuster to simply forcing Senate leaders to read the daily journal prior to conducting legislative business. One concrete example: Senator Brian Schatz has placed a “hold” on all State Department appointees—a major obstacle to Senate Republicans who want to speed through diplomatic confirmations. Senate Democrats should do this for all nominees, of which there are hundreds.
Make congressional Republicans work for Democratic votes. When their votes are not just symbolic, Democrats should filibuster where they can, force Republicans to squirm for as many hours as possible, and extract a serious political price for standing down. The next obvious leverage point for Democrats here is the March 14 funding deadline. Republicans will inevitably fail to pull their majority together to fund the government on their own, and Democrats should extract what they can when Speaker Mike Johnson comes begging for votes.
Break the norms around congressional collegiality. It’s typically considered rude for one member of Congress to confront another in public. But these aren’t typical times. The complicity of congressional Republicans in the trashing of our democracy cries out for the kind of loud and frequent confrontation that will cause members of the Washington Post editorial board to clutch their pearls. For those Republicans who refuse to face their constituents, Democrats should travel to their districts or states in order to publicize the real costs of MAGA appeasement to working families there. For those members who share concerns privately while declining to say anything publicly, congressional Democrats should expose them for the cowards they are. Get creative—and give protesters and activists a morally righteous conflict to rally around.
Work with the new surge in anti-Musk, anti-Trump grassroots energy. Congressional Democrats should treat the current historic popular protests against the Trump-Musk putsch like an opportunity rather than a threat. Since November, we’ve seen record-breaking numbers of new local Indivisible groups forming and new members. These local volunteer groups are focusing on their own elected officials—Democrats, independents, and Republicans. They’re making calls, protesting, showing up at congressional offices, attending town halls, and demanding accountability from their representatives.
This is, as they say, what democracy looks like. And the only pro-democracy party in the country ought to tap into that energy with enthusiasm.
We’re under no illusion that any senator or representative can summon forth the opposition on their own. It’s up to each of us to try, and learn, and improve, and build. Constituents should be organizing in their own communities as engaged neighbors, pro-democracy volunteers, and educators. Rank-and-file Democrats should be feeding off that energy and harnessing its power. And Democrats in leadership should be corralling their caucuses to produce a unified front with aggressive, creative tactics and messaging. Nobody has all the answers, and we’re all going to have to try, fail, go back to the drawing board, and try again.
These are frightening times, and frightening times call for active, courageous leadership. Musk and Trump are really seeking to annex the operations of the state to their pet vanity projects, bigotries, and conspiracy theories , but our enemy is not one or two men. Our enemy is apathy, cynicism, and fatalism; the pernicious, authoritarian-friendly belief that we are merely victims of world events rather than active participants in a global struggle for freedom and justice. Every time one of us—a family member, a community organizer, a representative, a senator—takes a step forward in this fight, a thousand pairs of eyes watch and learn. Courage is contagious.
Take that step, and steel yourself with the knowledge that you are the defender of a 250-year experiment in self-governance—a real-life pluralistic democracy, imperfect as it is, striving to be more perfect. Our predecessors deposed a brain-addled king; they crushed the violent insurrectionists of a slaveholding confederacy; they forced the robber barons to contend with workers and unions; they kicked the Nazis’ asses throughout Europe; they broke the back of the southern segregationist political bloc; they fought back against the terrorizing forces at Stonewall. We have planted ourselves in stubborn opposition to monomaniacal fascists of one form or another for a quarter of a millennium. No entitled reality-TV has-been backed by an addle-brained billionaire who cheats at video games is going to roll over us now.
We will not finish this fight, but we can each be damn sure to do our part while we’re here. Together, we are the opposition, and this is our republic—if we can keep it. This is the part where we keep it.
