Coming Unglued: Week Eight of the Stupid Coup (and the Stalwart Resistance)

 Spring is here and so is authoritarianism, and I recommend your serious attention to both. We may be at this resistance business for a while, so take care of yourself so you can keep taking care of human rights, truth, justice, and the natural world. What that means for each of us varies – for me it definitely mean spending as much time as possible in natural landscapes, among the fleeting green of Bay Area hills, the deciduous oak trees just budding out, the wildflowers beginning to appear. But you may also find fortitude in solidarity at protests, or who knows what, because while our politics are of necessity shared, our pleasures are individual. So wander, botanize, bake cakes, watch birds, play with kids, stand together – and read on. 

Virtually every Cybertruck — those freaky Tesla vehicles made to look like aggression incarnate – has been recalled, because, literally, they come unglued. They're shoddily made, with panels glued rather than bolted on, and when the glue deteriorates, the panels fall off.  What a metaphor for this regime: a weak vehicle trying to look tough, a victim of its own cheapness, an ugly toy falling apart. Authoritarians are obsessed with looking strong, but they are weak in that they must use brutality as a substitute for the more stable and legitimate power that comes from support from the public, the civil service, and the law. 

They  must bully and extort, threaten and undermine, seek to quash the will of the people, since the people are not with them, at least in the USA in 2025. Not with them and, right now in the USA, increasingly against them. In other times and places, dictators may have had majority support (though Hitler and Mussolini had to seize power they did not get through elections), and a little further back in time there's absolutist monarchy supposedly by divine right. But then came the guillotine – and perhaps I should remind you that Trump won by 1.3% of the vote, garnering only 31% of the electorate's total votes, since 39% or so stayed home? This administration has no mandate. 

But what is their power? Their power is to command. Ours is to refuse to obey. They do almost nothing themselves; they need others to carry out their orders. For DOGE to break into and shut down the US Institute of Peace, a nonprofit that is not part of the federal government,  they somehow managed to get the Washington D.C. police on board. Ed Martin, the appalling new head of the Department of Justice, insisted that the Institute's director had been fired and staff was there illegally--but   NPR reports, "The organization has sued the Trump administration, maintaining that it is an independent nonprofit established by Congress, and that the administration did not follow the proper steps to remove its leadership."  

We have the power to refuse to cooperate, including by insisting on obeying the law rather than illegal orders, to obey our conscience or respect our own humanity and that of others rather than carry out amoral and cruel orders. And to reach out to convince our fellow citizens and residents to disobey with us and to support those under attack and to stand with them. One thing I think about a lot is who might be trying to reach those who, like the D.C. police, are most directly getting illegal and amoral orders.

Who might influence the military, the national guard, ICE, local law enforcement and others whose jobs include or may include the use of force against us? How do we convince them to support the law and human rights rather than illegal orders? Convincing the enforcers to side with the people against a dictator has been crucial in country after country. I think of the Philippines, where in 1986 the end of the Marcos dictatorship came about through a largely nonviolent mass uprising – and the military taking the people's side by refusing to repress what's known as the People Power Revolution. 

 I also wonder, in this era of really poor reporting about crucial parts of the situation, should an illegal order have consequences? If someone gives an order they don't have the power to give, isn't it meaningless as in not in effect, not to be followed? The courts have been reinstating a lot of federal jobs for which the firings were illegal, but could the people in these workplaces simply regard the order as powerless? The same with their cutting off or spending money it's not theirs to control – where is that money actually situated, and who should be controlling its flow? Can Congress cut off the administrative branch from federal funds?  It would be helpful if that was part of the reporting going on (and perhaps it is, but I haven't seen anything on it).

I get that the titanic power of the president and federal government bears down on us all as threat and intimidation, but aren't we in a Great Oz and Emperor's New Clothes situation? Their strength depends on convincing us of our weakness. Our strength demonstrates their weakness, because they have set themselves up as our enemy, as the destroyer of the institutions that serve us (funded by the taxes we pay, which should indeed be spent on us and the well-being of the world around us) and the laws that protect us. 

 And yeah, protect us imperfectly. We know that the law is imperfect, applied unequally, that prisons abound with the unjustly accused, that often it's the best law money can buy when it comes to who wins in court – the terrible recent verdict in favor of the fossil fuel corporation blaming Greenpeace USA for the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline is a brand-new example (may it be overturned on appeal). There is something better than the legal system as it stood until January 20, 2025. But there's also something worse. 

 Journalist Amanda Taub talked to Harvard political science professor Steven Levitsky, who's the coauthor of How Democracies Die, and paraphrases him thus (gift link):    "There are many examples of autocratic leaders constraining the power of the judiciary by packing courts with compliant judges, or by changing the laws that give them authority, he said. But it is extremely rare for leaders to simply claim the power to disregard or override court orders directly, especially so immediately after taking office."

In other words, this is extreme even as authoritarianism goes, and the more swiftly and effectively we can counter it, the more we can limit the damage, and every day we see damage. As lawlessness and as the attempt to destroy or actual destruction of crucial parts of this government and undermine the rule of law. Law journalist Liz Dye writes of the deportation – or rather extraordinary rendition, to revive a term from the Bush era – of immigrant men to El Salvador after a judge barred the flights. "At bottom," she declares, "this is a dispute about whether the president can define reality by executive fiat and force the legal system to treat his fantastical pronouncements as fact."

When I hear people complain that no one's doing anything or nothing's happening, I tend to think they're not scrutinizing the news carefully enough or going out to their local protests (and one of the lasting mottos for my life, and epigraph for my  book Hope in the Dark, is Wes Nisker's sign-off line for his KSAN rock-and-roll radio station news program in the 1970s: "if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own). But some of it must be invisible by design – a federal worker announcing that she's disobeying or organizing opposition would just be painting a target on her back. A lot of aid for immigrants threatened with deportation is low-visibility by design. But also, the mainstream news industry is not reporting well enough on what's happening, and it's not aggregating all the individual things happening into a big picture of resistance. 

 Some of it appears in places we might not always look – a lawyer friend just steered me to something I would've missed otherwise. She sent me the link to a legal news site that led me to a young lawyer named Rachel Cohen, who's not only taking a stand (she resigned from but urging her fellow workers in the big law firms to do so with a petition that declares, "When we are united, we cannot be intimidated. These tactics only work if the majority does not speak up. Our hope was that our employers, some of the most profitable law firms in the world, would lead the way. That has not yet been the case, but it still very much can be. It is easy to be afraid of being the first to speak. We are removing that barrier; we are speaking. Now it is our employers’ turn." The news story I read said it had almost 300 signatures, but when I checked it had 781. Then I went back and it had 964.

Yesterday the Guardian told us that "Donald Trump rescinded an executive order targeting a prominent Democratic-leaning law firm after it agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support his administration’s goals." That's a shockingly corrupt piece of mob enforcement, in a month of shocking (but not surprising) corruption, including outrageous support for the neverless sinking Tesla brand. I wonder about that law firm's decision: it has avoided the wrath of the regime, at the cost of its respect and reputation and probably the trust of some of its junior staff.

Some cave in. Some resist. Actually, a lot resist. Republican congressmen continue to hide from their angry constituents, while Tim Walz, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Bernie Sanders are on tour to focus that anger into something effective. I wish every Democrat in Congress was doing what they are – they are not alone, but they are standing out from a mostly unbearably quiet party. Scholar of nonviolent resistance Erica Chenoweth, with Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hamman, has put out a report on (the highly recommended site) Waging Nonviolence that adds up all the action to reach a rousing conclusion.

Their essay declares: “'Where is the resistance?' is a common refrain. Our research affirms that resistance is alive and well. Many underestimate resistance to the current Republican administration because they view resistance through a narrow lens. The 2017 Women’s March in particular — immediate in its response, massive in its scope and size — may inform collective imaginations about what the beginning of a resistance movement should look like during Trump 2.0. In fact, our research shows that street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest. Although it is true that the reconfigured Peoples’ March of 2025 — held on Jan. 18 — saw lower turnout than the 2017 Women’s March, that date also saw the most protests in a single day for over a year. And since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago." 

In other words, it is happening, but it's not always visible the way the Women's March was, but also it's persistent – those Tesla showroom protests! – while the women's march was a one-time event. If all goes as planned, April 5th – a national day of action in Washington D.C., state capitals, and many towns and cities, orchestrated by the newly created 50501 and by Hands Off 2025 and Indivisible, among other groups, including the Women's March – will be that big day a lot of you have wanted to see (and you can find out what's happening in your vicinity by clicking the links with those names in this sentence). These events matter, as demonstrations of widespread opposition to the government (both those who should represent us and those who are trying to strip away our right to representation), and to the public and the media. 

 Chenoweth, Pressman, and Hamman's report in Waging Nonviolence continues, "Historically, street protest and legal challenges are common avenues for popular opposition to governments, but economic noncooperation — such as strikes, boycotts and buycotts — is what often gets the goods. Individual participation is deliberately obscure, and targeted companies may have little interest in releasing internal data. Only the aggregate impacts are measurable — and in the case of Tesla, Target and other companies, the impacts so far have been measurable indeed."

I hope to make it to a Tesla protest Saturday, and I glory in how these and consumers' refusal to buy Teslas across the world has demonstrated to Musk and his sagging shrinking company that, as Patti Smith sings, "people have the power." (You can find out where they're happening at TeslaTakedown.com or organize one yourself.) Here's what I think is true but only our actions can prove: the Trump regime is a Cybertruck, meant to look aggressive and intimidating, a bully car, but also one sloppily made to low standards, one that falls apart as it goes, with pieces that can be yanked off by hand. It shouts that it's strong, but it's weak. It shouts that we're weak but we can be strong, together.

p.s. I reached 24,000 subscribers this week! Thank you hugely to everyone who signed up.

Some good stuff: 

Third Act (on whose board I sit, because I think it's a fantastic climate-and-democracy group) is giving Part Two of a training on how to be an organizer on March 25, at 5pm eastern, 2pm Pacific. Part One is here.

 Congressman (and former Constitutional law professor) Jamie Raskin has asked us all to "to join him this week in filing formal demands for access to their personal data obtained by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk."

 Jessica Craven's newsletter Chop Wood, Carry Water will give you daily democracy-defense tasks.

And if your hope is flagging, here's three encouraging resistance newsletters I recommend:

Anand Giridharadas's The Ink, which features essays by him and others, as well as live conversations with important political observers of this crisis. His recent "The Opposite of Fascism" was a beautiful encouragement to live well and love well as part of being not just the opposition but the opposite of those miserable MAGA/DOGE creatures. 

Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles. 

Robert Hubbell's newsletter. Here's a sample: "Can you feel it? Like an undertow in the shallows, the currents beneath the surface are reversing direction. The upstart waves divert our attention with spray and noise. But the undertow exerts a silent force, restoring equilibrium, settling nature’s accounts by subsuming the momentary turbulence of breakers into the stillness of deep oceans." 

Anand agrees that this coup is stupid. From The Ink: