We need a weapon Trump can’t turn against us.
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With President Donald Trump now rolling out the militarized police state that has long been a gleam in his tyrannical eye, the question has arisen with sudden urgency: How should that half (at least) of We the People who are committed to resisting Trump’s tyranny go about expressing their defiance?
When former Labor Secretary and Berkeley professor Robert Reich polled his Substack readers with that question earlier this week, the choices he offered were:
- Do nothing; play dead. Reflecting the James Carville-promoted idea of letting Trump doom himself with his own overreaching.
- Protest peacefully but in large numbers. Showing the rest of America, especially Republican lawmakers, our overwhelming numbers, and therefore our potential political power, then building on these demonstrations to create a network ready for state and local elections later this year and for the 2026 midterms.
- Engage in massive civil disobedience. For example, linking arms around courthouses and around Trump’s troops, sitting in strategic places, wearing Trump masks during his military parade, blocking bridges and intersections — forcing Trump’s troops to arrest us and haul us off.
- Let all hell break loose. Deliberately escalating the conflict, not recoiling from violence, making Trump’s troops use overwhelming force — enlarging the conflict so much that it consumes America, necessitating that Americans take sides for or against the regime.
It is not surprising that, of the over 7,500 Reich readers who answered his poll — a pretty reliable sampling of the motivated resistance — the first and fourth options received negligible support, while over 90 percent chose either civil disobedience (40 percent) or peaceful protest (51 percent).
The majority preference for peaceful protest is telling. As the Comments section made clear, the vast majority of these readers are both fearful and angry. They recognize that Trump, in sending 4,000 California National Guard and 700 Marine troops to Los Angeles, is gleefully exploiting a manufactured “crisis” to project his power, break through long-established guardrails, and normalize yet another step of our descent into tyranny.
But the majority who chose peaceful protest are also aware that anything more provocative — even the tried and true civil disobedience used to such profound effect by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi — would play straight into Trump’s hands by giving him the excuse he seeks to respond with, as he put it, “very big force” and foment yet a higher level of the conflict and chaos on which he thrives.
Unfortunately, however, such an exercise of seeming restraint and common sense betrays a stunning naivete.
The problem is that we can remain 100 percent peaceful at every one of the 2,100 scheduled “No Kings” protests this Saturday, but, since Trump wants violence and conflict, it is all but certain that there will be provocateurs on hand to provide it.
These agents might be contracted outright (not exactly unheard of as a tactic employed both internationally and domestically by the US government), or some Proud Boys intuiting their role in this, or even just a handful of idiots out of our control.
It is virtually impossible to stage thousands of mass demonstrations without providing at least a few opportunities for those few who are tasked with, or see value in, escalation. It will be a major miracle if all the thousands of demonstrations, involving millions of people, fail to provide Trump with the B-roll video of violence or confrontation he is hoping to provoke.
So the odds are very strong that, one way or another, Trump will get to use his “very big force,” whether in D.C. — where organizers have made the strategic decision not to protest at or near the site of his massive birthday bash military parade with, as Trump put it, its “tanks all over the place” and “thousands and thousands of soldiers going to bravely march down the streets” — or in Philadelphia, where the “lead” demonstration is planned; or in California, or out in the heartland somewhere.
It’s critical to understand just how relentless Trump and his army of sycophants will be. NYU professor and expert on authoritarian movements Ruth Ben-Ghiat put it very well:
We can expect that this constructed crisis will continue, because authoritarian history teaches that the emergency must never be over, the adversary is never defeated, and the number of enemies is always expanding. [Emphasis added.]
Because Trump is at heart a rapist who will not be content until he can exercise his military power on all who resist, we should not be lulled into thinking that our staying peaceful will preserve the peace or stop his push for ever more power.
In that sense, Professor Reich’s question is moot. We are almost certainly headed toward violent conflict no matter how we choose to manifest our defiance.
Except for one possibility.
The option missing from Reich’s choices — and I think by far the best course — is economic action: A massive, sustained general strike and consumer boycott (buy only essentials, not just for a day, but for a month or indefinitely) would force the issue without violence and without giving Trump the opportunity to create and exploit violence.
I have written about this previously in relation to the one-day No-Shop Blackout back in February. But a single day was never going to do much, and the February action did not include any call for work stoppages or slowdowns, let alone a full-on general strike.
That was then, before Trump’s march to dictatorship had hit full stride.
It was before the arrests of student activist Mahmoud Khalil; before the abduction of student dissident Rümeysa Öztürk; before Trump’s launching of his vengeful war on Harvard, other institutions of higher education, and various law firms; before his “Liberation Day” tariffs shocked the markets and economy; before he humiliated allied heads of state in Oval Office ambushes; before he began ignoring court orders; and before his regime’s arrests of two judges, a big-city mayor, a congresswoman, and now a US senator.
And, of course, before he ramped up his deportation game by sending, at the loathsome Stephen Miller’s prompting, teams of ICE agents into a Los Angeles Home Depot to nab non-criminal immigrants waiting to be hired for work that few US citizens, especially white ones, would take on — thereby sparking the protests that gave him the excuse he was looking for to send in the troops.
And, finally, before his “Happy Birthday” tank-rolling military parade, worthy of dictatorships past and present.
Now is now, and, as Trump shows every sign of taking it to and past the limit, even relatively disengaged Americans can now finally sense the urgency of this moment. And perhaps recognize that symbolic gestures — even massive ones like one-day boycotts or millions in the streets, as the Iraq War protests proved — are insufficient.
There will have to be real, practical impact — and that means, unfortunately, throwing sand in the gears of the economy on which we all, to one degree or another, depend.
A sustained economic action — preferably a general strike paired with a consumer boycott — would turn much if not all of the corporate world against Trump, and the political pressure they would exert on lawmakers would be overwhelming.
Nothing short of that will alter the political balance. Our numbers as “protesters” don’t really matter — because neither Trump nor anyone in his cult gives a good god damn what we think — and, paradoxically, protest itself will just become normalized.
If, on the other hand, we band together to stop working and buying, it will cripple the economy and force the reckoning that civil disobedience is intended to bring about — but crucially without giving Trump a target to shoot at.
That is the whole game right there: using the immense latent power we have, collectively, as workers and consumers, to break this dictatorial regime and bring this mad king to heel without the terrible bloodshed of a revolution or civil war.
To do this successfully will require organization and commitment on a scale surpassing anything attempted in this country in living memory, more even than the anti-war and civil rights movements of the last century. And given the growing reach of the MAGA surveillance state, the planning and coordination will entail substantial risks and require extra care.
It need not, however, require assembly. Rather it will depend on effective leadership, messaging, and exploitation of the modes of communication of the internet age — some of the very tools that the far right has relied on to plunge us into the Age of Trump.
Wherever and however we demonstrate on No Kings Day tomorrow, this powerful economic weapon — complementary to our voices, signs, and marches — must be part of the discussion. Barring cosmic intervention, we will need it to stand any realistic chance of stopping Trump and saving our democracy.
