How to Fight Back

Regime Change, Part 3

This is the battle that could turn the tide.

I’ve been describing over the past few weeks the substance of the regime change Donald Trump has imposed on America in his first two and a half months in office. It is a “regime change” in the technical sense of a being an alteration of our basic system of government and of the citizens’ relationship to their government.

We have been moving from a democracy to an autocracy, and there are two key elements in this transition.

First, DOGE seized control over the federal payments system and took the power of the purse away from Congress. A small cabal within the executive now makes all the decisions about what the government spends and therefore what it can do—usurping that power from the representatives of the people.

Second, Trump took advantage of a longstanding corruption of constitutional law as applied to immigrants and has asserted the power to arrest people and deport them to a foreign prison with no due process whatsoever.

Taken together, these are the basic element of dictatorship: absolute power for the president and his minions, unchecked by the legislature or the courts. This has gone beyond being a threat or a constitutional crisis. It is the actual reality of how our government works now. The Trump administration is merely trying to button down the details, consolidate power, and break down the last elements of administrative and judicial resistance.

That defines the problem. The question that follows is: What is to be done? How can we restore representative government and the rule of law?

The Capitulation of the Elites

The problem is further compounded by the widespread capitulation of the elites. People at top levels in the media, in the universities, and in the legal profession—all of them important reserves for the countervailing power of “civil society”—have folded at the slightest touch of pressure.

See an overview of the contortions the media have gone through to avoid saying “Gulf of Mexico” because they don’t want to defy Donald Trump’s diktat to rename it the “Gulf of America.” Or see how other media outlets abandoned the Associated Press for refusing to give in on this issue—and how the White House Correspondents’ Association is rapidly expunging itself in deference to the man in the Oval Office.

Universities targeted by Trump through the withdrawal of federal funds have been scrambling to cut deals by giving the White House a veto over their policies and in some cases over whole academic departments.

The most stunning example continues to be the legal profession. A few big institutions have stood firm. But I linked last time to Walter Olson’s article on the surrender of many Big Law firms, and you can listen to a very interesting follow-up interview I did with him for The UnPopulist’s Executive Watch.

Trump Wants to Deny Legal Representation to Opponents He Targets: A Conversation with Walter Olson

You can criticize the leaders of these firms for being cowards—and I do—while also recognizing that the rest of the profession didn’t exactly have their backs. I was struck by this passage from a long excuse by Brad Karp of Paul, Weiss on why he knuckled under.

We were hopeful that the legal industry would rally to our side, even though it had not done so in response to executive orders targeting other firms. We had tried to persuade other firms to come out in public support of Covington and Perkins Coie. And we waited for firms to support us in the wake of the president’s executive order targeting Paul, Weiss. Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.

It goes beyond these institutions. Liberal donors to political causes have been holding back cash, partly out of fear of reprisals and partly because they don’t know what to do. As the New York Times put it, “People Are Going Silent,” and Democrats in Congress, who shouted their “resistance” in 2017, have so far seemed peculiarly listless.

Partly this is the normal and temporary effect of an election, in which the losing side feels that the vox populi has been rendered against them. More deeply, though, what we’re seeing is what happens to all big institutions that survive well beyond their founding. The people who rise to the top of institutions in normal times are gladhanders who are good at making compromises and accommodations and getting along with everybody. So that’s what they try to do now, when the proper course is to stand and fight.

So in any era of conflict, when bold deeds are required, the first phase is simply to shake out the hesitant and indecisive leaders—to work through the Meades and McClellans until we find the Grants and Shermans.

For the opposition political party, this has taken the form of an upsurge of anger against ineffectual congressional figureheads like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and a search for new leaders who will take a stand and do something.

But what would such leaders do? What can they do?

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May You Live in Interesting Times

I will suggest one specific issue, one campaign that has the potential to be highly effective. You may have seen in my header image above. But before I get to that, I want to be clear that I am not advocating that we fight on just one issue. I am advocating that we fight on all the issues.

Let’s describe accurately the general conditions in which we are acting. The current regime change is moving fast, and Trump and his gang are determined to take things as far as they can. They mean to have a dictatorship—not a “hybrid regime” or some kind of soft authoritarianism, but a full-blown dictatorship complete with the disappearing of dissidents. And they are moving toward it.

We have to realize that Trump is not joking about any of this. He’s not joking about invading Greenland, and he’s not joking about running for a third term. He’s as serious about all of this as he was about the tariffs. The evidence indicates that he will do it all, whatever he can get away with.

See an excellent overview of why a third term is unconstitutional, despite some logic-chopping arguments to the contrary. But such arguments are probably immaterial, because the only relevant question is whether Trump will still have the influence and popularity two to three years from now to get away with it. If he is not removed from office before then, or at least completely defanged, no legal arguments will matter. He will already have dictatorial power, and the Constitution will bend and break to accommodate him.

The failure to grasp this, by the way, is the reason Democrats have been so ineffective. Tom Nichols identified it when he complained that “Democrats Are Acting Too Normal.” They know Trump’s policies will be unpopular and provoke a backlash, so they expect to win back the House and maybe the Senate in 2026. But events are moving much faster than that, and they can’t afford to just sit back and wait. We live in interesting times, not normal times.

So if we understand the conditions, the focus of our political activism should not be the midterm elections. It should be about shifting and harnessing public opinion now. It’s about rallying enough public anger to get our political leaders running scared and limit the administration’s ability to consolidate dictatorial control. After all, even dictators and would-be dictators are afraid of public opinion. They’re terrified of it, which is why they work so hard to suppress it.

For example, there was a string of protests planned for this last Saturday. It’s hard to estimate turnout, but it seems to have been at least in the hundreds of thousands. Just anecdotally, people were protesting at the Louisa County Courthouse not too far from me in deep-red Central Virginia—not a lot of people, yet, but I wouldn’t have expected any. You can easily get people to turn out in a university town like Charlottesville, but not in Louisa. Trust me on that.

This is a good start, but we’re not there yet. Check out an article summarizing the work of political scientist Erica Chenoweth.

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change….

Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable.“There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,” says Chenoweth—a phenomenon she has called the “3.5% rule”.

In the US, that means we need to mobilize at least 12 million people actively protesting and campaigning against our regime change.

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We Must All Hang Together

A little while ago, Jonathan Last identified what I think is the relevant framework: we have to think like a dissident movement. Dissidents have to operate in the face of a hostile and oppressive government and without the support of big social institutions, which have been suppressed or coopted by the ruling power. That exactly describes our current conditions.

He also identified mass popular opposition as the key, but he drew one further implication: we need a form a broad united front.

This is another big lesson from dissident and anti-authoritarian movements. A strongman can usually achieve only a plurality of power but not an overwhelming majority, so his survival depends on the opposition being fragmented and unable to unite to form a majority. The far left thinks the liberals are squishy moderates and won’t cooperate with them, but the center right hates the far left, so it also won’t cooperate—and so the strongman can divide and conquer.

But it’s hard forming a united front. Last raised points to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez role as a leading spokesman for resistance to Trump. And deservedly so—she’s been good on this issue! But that means we’re going to have to set aside (for now) some of our prior criticisms of her. Or consider Saturday’s protests, which were done under the banner of “Hands Off.” Sounds great, right? Hands Off! Laissez-faire! But no, what they mean is for Trump to take his hands off of Social Security and the welfare state.

We’re going to have to heave a big sigh and still go out and march with these people, because that’s what will be necessary to protect our right to march for anything in the future.

This definitely does not mean that we have to agree with fellow protesters on everything or that we won’t fight each other afterward. This is a long tradition. The Founding Fathers stood together to fight British despotism—Jefferson side by side with Adams, Madison with Hamilton. Then, after the Revolution, they went hammer and tongs against each other. But before we get to that point, we should remember Franklin’s advice: We must all hang together, or we shall, most assuredly, all hang separately.

We can share a place in the front lines of anti-Trump protests—or we can share a cell at CECOT in El Salvador.

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The Five Rules of Fight Club

While we prepare a mass movement—and Donald Trump crashing the economy with the world’s stupidest tariffs will help us a great deal—we need to fight everything. What that will specifically mean is that we have to fight a lot of losing battles.

That’s the other mistake Chuck Schumer has been making, particularly in his cave-in on a continuing resolution that extends spending authority for an administration that is stealing the power of the purse. Democratic leaders in Congress are waiting for a fight they know they can win—and in the meantime, they’re doing nothing. They are ignoring all the advantages of fighting losing battles.

I was just talking about the American Revolution, so the best inspiration is probably Nathanael Greene, the American general who fought a famous Southern Campaign against the British in which he lost almost every engagement but wore down the Redcoats so much that he forced them to withdraw—to Yorktown, where they were defeated by Washington.

There are five reasons to fight early and often, no matter the odds of winning any one fight.

1. It lays down a marker. When Democrats vote for a funding bill while the administration is blatantly violating all previous funding bills, it sends the message that they don’t really think the issue is important. Sometimes, you fight a losing battle just to establish that it is worth fighting—so when the public turns against the administration, you are already in position as the leader who tried to stop them.

People will rally around a dissident. They won’t rally around a collaborator.

2. It mobilizes others to fight. Nothing demoralizes your side more than inaction. If nobody is sticking their necks out, other people will regard the fight as hopeless and stay home. Someone has to stand up first and make it easier for others to join in.

Speak up wherever possible. A strongman relies on fear and timidity to suppress opposition and makes him seem more powerful than he is. When you speak up and resist, you shatter that illusion.

Of course, everyone has to make judgments about how much risk they can bear. Some people are going to stand out and take extra risks and make themselves targets. Find ways to support them, even if you can’t take the same risks yourself.

3. It delays and exhausts the strongman. Timothy Snyder has compiled a set of rules for fighting authoritarianism, and you should definitely check them out, especially because you can hear them read by John Lithgow. But the most important rule is the first one: Don’t comply in advance.

For example, there have been too many people in the government who have resigned in the face of assaults from the top of the administration, and only few who have said, “No, you’re going to have to fire me, and then I’m not going to accept that and challenge it in court.” Make them work for everything. Give them no easy wins.

We get corroboration of that from one of the Trump’s worst advisors, Stephen Miller: “The most important commodity in the executive branch is time.” He said that as a way of complaining about judges ruling against the administration—which is why we should be filing more lawsuits and getting more such rulings.

When one person or institution caves in, that gives the strongman more time to go after somebody else. Every minute of fighting is time you buy to give a better chance to the next victim. And every battle you fight now is more effective than a battle you fight a year from now, when the strongman will have more resources and fewer opponents.

4. Sometimes you win. Every defeat you can give the strongman limits the scope of his power and sets a precedent for another victory in the future. And that leads me to the final reason to fight everything.

5. You find out what works and who fights. Remember what I said about how the institutions are filled with time-servers who have never had to stick their necks out. We should view this moment not just as a crisis but as an opportunity—an opportunity to find out who is strong and effective, and to build new institutions around those people.

You also find out what issues are the strongman’s weak points, what issues undermine his support with the public, and the places where you can mount effective resistance.

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Bring Kilmar Home

This bring me to what I think is currently the most effective fight. I’m adapting this slightly from a Bluesky thread that I tapped out Saturday morning that has gone semi-viral.

People are looking for a way to fight Trump, and I have it for you in one name: Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He’s the poor guy who got pulled off the street, declared a gang member for no reason, then sent off to that hell-hole in El Salvador. Fight for him because this case will unravel everything.

First of all, the case is not merely unjust but so obviously unjust that nobody is really disputing it. The administration’s lawyers admitted it was an error. Joe Rogan thinks it’s horrific. And handful of other conservatives are expressing their reservations.

“60 Minutes” did a segment last night on the unjustly imprisoned deportees and the brutal CECOT prison where they are being held. This is a case that is already breaking through, and we can bring this to the American people.

Here’s a case in point: My dad told me that in church on Sunday, when they ask for people who need prayers, he was planning to ask people to pray for Kilmar Abrego Garcia—and he didn’t hear about the case from me. He told me yesterday that several other people came up to him afterward to thank him for mentioning the case. This is not an ultra-conservative church—they’re mainline Protestants—but then again, it’s also not that lefty church in Charlottesville with all the rainbow flags out front. So yes, this case is definitely breaking through.

I keep talking about “breaking through.” One of the problems we face is that a lot of the things Trump is doing right now are well known to those of us who follow politics obsessively, but the “normies,” average people going about their lives, don’t know what’s happening. That’s especially true when things move this quickly. But Kilmar’s case is starting to break through to the normies.

What’s worse for the administration is that they deported a union man. Abrego Garcia is an apprentice with the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, who have issued a statement in defense of “Brother Kilmar.” I have often been cynical about unions, but this is exactly the sort of thing they’re good for.

This is a case in which the administration is doing something manifestly unjust and cruel. They admit it is unjust, and their supporters know it’s unjust. And yet they refuse to do anything about it. Here’s a little scene from an exchange in court between the judge in this case and the lawyer representing the government.

“Why can’t the United States get Mr. Abrego García back?” Xinis later asked.

“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question,” Reuveni said. “To date, I have not received an answer that is satisfactory.”

You may not be surprised that this lawyer, Erez Reuveni, was promptly fired.

Mr. Reuveni, a respected 15-year veteran of the immigration division, asked the judge for 24 hours to persuade his “client,” the Trump administration, to begin the process of retrieving and repatriating Mr. Abrego Garcia.

Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Blanche, President Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, accused Mr. Reuveni of “engaging in conduct prejudicial to your client.” Mr. Blanche suspended Mr. Reuveni with pay, cut off access to his work email and blocked him from performing any duties related to his job.

You see what I mean about the value of fighting? Trump’s people are rapidly running out of lawyers willing to blatantly lie and obstruct justice on their behalf. The more cases we bring, the more we overwhelm the hacks who remain.

The judge has given the administration until midnight on Monday—tonight—to bring Kilmar back so his case can be reviewed in American courts. The government appealed to the Fourth Circuit, and just a few hours ago, the panel unanimously refused to overturn the order. The court’s conclusion was succinct:

The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.

Yet the administration is likely to refuse. And they’re refusing for a reason.

They’re refusing to bring Kilmar home because they don’t want to admit that they can bring him back. (They definitely can. The US government routinely arranges for the return of wrongly deported people.) And they don’t want to concede that a judge can order them to do it. Why?

They don't want to admit this, because if they bring back this one man, they will have to bring back others. Kilmar is not the only one who can show he was wrongly deported and imprisoned. He’s just the only one the government has admitted to so far. Return him, and you have to return more, probably most of them. The “60 Minutes” report said that three quarters of the men sent off to the CECOT prison have no criminal records.

Once the government starts returning people, they will be in our system where they will have access to lawyers, their families, and the media. They will talk about what happened to them and the brutality of the gulag where we sent them. This will then become the story.

That’s important for a couple of reasons. One is that Donald Trump is already sinking in the polls, but the one issue that is still keeping him slightly afloat—believe or not—is immigration. About half of Americans like that he is “getting tough on immigrants.” This is not to his supporters’ credit, to be sure, but many of them still have in their heads the fantasy version of Trump, the pop culture image they’ve been sold. In that image, he is only targeting immigrant criminals, vicious “monsters.” But this case shows that his administration are the monsters.

They’re the monsters who grabbed an innocent father off the streets while he was caring for his 5-year-old autistic son. They sent a makeup artist to a prison for hard-core gangsters. They sent another guy because he has an autism awareness tattoo. The people who did this are the monsters.

So as this breaks through to the public, it has the potential to take one of the issues where Trump still has support and turn it into a liability.

There’s something else substantive that this will accomplish, because what Trump has really been trying to destroy is habeas corpus and due process. He has been trying to overturn more than a thousand years of the Anglo-American legal tradition and set the precedent that he can arrest you and whisk you off to the gulag on his whim. And that’s not just about immigrants.

If they can disappear immigrants, eventually they will disappear critics. The Abrego Garcia case is really about whether we have a police state for everyone. Ever since these arrests and deportations, I have just been assuming that if this isn’t stopped, eventually I’m going to end up in one of Nayib Bukele’s gulags. So forcing the administration to back down from these claims will be a substantive and essential victory. It forecloses the worst outcomes for the US.

And there is more potential. If we push this case, if we get people mad enough about it, Republicans could be forced to agree to congressional hearings that break the story open further. The best outcome is that we could force Trump to throw Homeland Security head Kristi Noem under the bus. Then he would have to nominate someone else to Homeland Security, and there’s a chance of requiring the administration to appoint someone who won’t just be less objectionable, but who will promise to clean house.

Of course, that outcome depends on enough Republicans in the House and Senate defecting from blind loyalty to Trump. That’s why driving public opinion—which this case can do—is so important. We need to make Republican politicians more afraid of the voters than they are of Trump.

Finally, this case could also break our current wave of irrational hatred for immigrants. America has gone through waves of prejudice and racism before, and we’re always ashamed of them afterwards, once we see the awful things we did. I hope we can move on to being ashamed of this one before it gets any worse.

So this is a central battle that’s worth fighting, and it is reaching a critical point now. We will know by tomorrow morning whether the government complies with the court’s orders or openly defies them.

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“The Timid Have Become Bold”

We know this kind of battle can be won, because we’ve done it before.

I recently came across a fascinating blog post about George Dale, a crusading newspaper editor in Indiana who took on the Ku Klux Klan at the height of its power in the 1920s. He would eventually be elected mayor of Muncie, Indiana. Toward the end of this battle, he wrote a letter in which this passage stands out.

The storm has passed and the timid have become bold and recovered their voices, but no shell-shocked victim of the great war wears more wound-stripes than the editor who refused to surrender his convictions, renounce his Americanism, and bend the pregnant hinges of the knee.

At some point, the timid will become bold and recover their voices. But they will do it only because those of us who refused to bend the pregnant hinges of the knee fought early and fought often.