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Would Donald Trump follow through on his more extravagant anti-democratic fantasies? His rhetoric certainly suggests so, but with Trump you never know.
If Trump does carry out his threats, we are likely to see something unlike anything America has lived through: an incipient dictatorship that invites massive resistance. What would that look like? Could it restrain Trump? Would it lead to mass arrests? What would blue-state governors and mayors do? And how should citizens be preparing?
To take just one example, Stephen Miller, Trump’s czar on immigration policy, has called for rounding up some ten million undocumented residents and putting them in concentration camps until they can be deported. He plans to use federalized National Guard troops to do the job, including sending troops from red states into blue ones.
“If President Trump gets re-elected,” Miller said on a February 5 podcast interview with right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, “the border’s going to be sealed, the military will be deployed, the National Guard will be activated, and the illegals are going home.”
Many undocumented immigrants have been here for decades, are married to citizens or to permanent legal residents, have children who are citizens, and have unblemished records. Many are valued employees of corporations that are short of workers.
So imagine the scene in L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, or New York, all cities with large immigrant communities, strong unions, and mostly progressive mayors and governors. (Give New York an asterisk here.) Federalized National Guardsmen from, say, Alabama and Florida are arriving by the planeload with instructions to work with the Department of Homeland Security to identify and arrest undocumented residents. The DHS already knows the identity of some seven million of them, according to The Washington Post.
Another example of likely Trump actions is in the area of reproductive rights. Texas has asserted jurisdiction to arrest and punish women who travel to states where abortion is legal and has even deputized private citizens to track down offenders. Many blue states, in turn, have passed laws to protect both providers and women seeking treatment.
Trump might well try to use federal power to support extraterritorial red-state efforts to track down women who cross state lines seeking abortions. Here again, leaders and citizens of states where abortion is legal would likely provide sanctuary, actions that Trump could point to as acts of civil disobedience.
It’s not too soon to take stock of a potential resistance movement’s strengths and weaknesses.
What would massive resistance look like? It would not look like, say, the campus demonstrations against Israel’s Gaza slaughter, or even like the mass anti-war protests of the 1960s, where gestures to shut down the Pentagon were symbolic and not literal. The Occupy Wall Street sit-ins were metaphoric, not an actual occupation.
In this case, the effort to shut down a government action would be massive and real. It might involve millions of American citizens sitting down in front of buses and overwhelming the state’s capacity to fill prisons.
With respect to immigration, a key question is what city and state governments would do. For instance, should local police be directed to help DHS and federalized National Guard troops arrest sit-down resisters, or should they join the effort to block out-of-state troops? What if Trump got injunctions to order blue-state officials to cooperate, and arrest them if they refused?
This is completely uncharted territory. If Democratic governors, National Guard forces, and police in blue states were to resist rather than comply with Trump’s orders, it starts literally feeling like the onset of civil war. At Fort Sumter in 1860-1861, Union and Confederate troops were in a close-range armed standoff for six months before the overwhelmed federal garrison surrendered without a shot being fired. The carnage came later.
The premise of this scale of massive resistance is that the state can’t arrest everyone. It also evokes guerrilla warfare, where the invaders find themselves trying to operate in hostile territory, and perhaps back off.
THE CLOSEST THING TO A PRECEDENT in the modern American experience (not counting the American Revolution and the Civil War) is the civil rights movement of the 1950s in the Deep South. In that decade, before the U.S. government began forcefully intervening with federal marshals, protesters were on their own and were horribly exposed to retribution.
A very young Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rosa Parks and organizers of the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott, and countless others were doing nothing less than seeking to overturn the entire racial order of the former Confederacy. They were up against state police power, backed by vigilantes from the Klan and White Citizens’ Councils. All they had was the power of peaceful protest and sometimes civil disobedience.
Given the stakes for white supremacy and the whole history of lynching and racial violence, it’s a miracle that more people weren’t killed, more churches weren’t burned, more livelihoods weren’t destroyed. But the movement had the power of numbers.
In the case of the Montgomery bus boycott, there was near-unanimous Black support for it. Ridership was normally about 75 percent Black. That fell to almost zero. The boycott did serious damage to the bus company. In the end, however, it was not economic pressure but a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in December 1956 that ended segregation on Southern buses. It would take the better part of another decade for the full force of the federal executive branch to powerfully support enforcement of civil rights with state power.
But under a second Trump administration, the full powers of the federal executive branch and the federal courts would be on the side of enforcement of despotic orders. It would be a reverse image of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, where local Southern mayors and governors eventually had to accede to federal court orders and later federal executive power.
The one constructive similarity to the early civil rights movement is the sheer power of numbers. How many people can the government feasibly arrest, prosecute, and jail?
Should Trump be the next president, he will decide when and how far to pursue the instruments of outright dictatorship.
However, this would take a citizen mobilization for civil disobedience on a scale that we’ve never seen. And the resistance would have to be organized in such a way that if leaders were targeted and arrested, others unknown to the authorities would emerge to take their place. It would require real courage on the part of blue-state public officials.
For the most part, other historical parallels are not reassuring. In Nazi Germany, once Hitler made clear that he was willing to ruthlessly use state power to destroy his enemies, the opposition largely folded. There was a small German resistance, but it was riddled with spies and accomplished little.
In occupied France, the Maquis can be credited with heroic exploits. But in the end, it was the Normandy invasion, not the underground, that pushed Hitler out of France. The passive and sometimes active resistance of the Danish population to Hitler’s efforts to isolate and destroy Danish Jews is a slightly more hopeful case. But in today’s Russia, Putin has demonstrated all too well how a determined dictator can use state power to crush any semblance of opposition.
Perhaps the best historical lessons are found in the case of South Africa. Though the government arrested, imprisoned, and assassinated leaders of the anti-apartheid cause, by the 1970s and 1980s the resistance had spread to much of the Black population. It took killing of many thousands in several massacres and the imprisonment of tens of thousands before the government gave it up and made secret plans to free Nelson Mandela and permit him to win a free election as South Africa’s first majority president in 1994.
Corporate interests were hurt by the increasingly effective economic boycott, and many favored a settlement. The split among whites between hardline Boers and not-quite-so-vicious English-speaking South Africans also helped. Among whites, at least, South Africa had some semblance of parliamentary democracy, so there were constraints on Afrikaner dictatorship. Blacks had only their own courage and the sheer power of numbers, since they outnumbered the total white population by more than 3 to 1.
The key difference, of course, between South Africa in the 1980s and America in 2025 is that in South Africa the anti-apartheid movement was seeking to overthrow an illegitimate regime. In 2025, should Trump be fairly elected and take power in America, the anti-Trump movement will be seeking to limit excesses, and to preserve elements of democracy pending the next elections, not a revolution. The parallel, however, is that a Trump invasion of Los Angeles or Brooklyn would be operating in hostile territory, like Afrikaner police in Soweto.
THE KEY LESSON IS THAT THE ANTI-TRUMP RESISTANCE needs to be a majoritarian one. In the past, American radicals who have used civil disobedience to shift power relations have been determined minorities, from early trade unionists to radical feminists to civil rights protesters. The power of an anti-Trump resistance will depend on its engaging tens of millions of Americans in actions that Trump will brand as illegal—and simply overwhelming the machinery of repression.
It’s not too soon to take stock of a potential resistance movement’s strengths and weaknesses. One strength is the capacity for mass organization. After Trump was elected, the great women’s marches of January 2017 were organized in a matter of weeks and led to grassroots electoral efforts that led to the midterm electoral successes of 2022. Other institutions of civil society are alive and well, and will be energized by a Trump presidency.
One possible ally for resistance is corporate America. For the most part, big corporations after Trump’s election in 2016 were just fine with his destruction of democracy as long as they got their tax cuts and deregulation. But the kind of massive economic dislocation caused by a Trump immigrant roundup, and large-scale resistance to it, might well cause corporate and Wall Street leaders to press Trump to desist.
Massive resistance could help slow down Trump’s march to despotism.
However, the American left is notoriously fractious and sometimes irresponsibly adventurous. The Weather Underground of the late 1960s used deliberate violence, without a clear view of how individual acts of terror could possibly lead to a shift in power.
The opposition above all needs a coherent strategy that compels Trump to back off. Arrest for the sake of arrest, much less violence, is not a coherent strategy.
PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM ADDRESSING only a few of several actions that Trump is likely to take. Mass deportation is one of the most vivid, and it sets the stage for massive resistance.
But Trump would also pursue more insidious strategies. He has vowed to bring criminal charges against a broad array of enemies, especially those who served in his administration and worked to restrain him, such as retired Gen. Mark Milley and former Attorney General Bill Barr, as well as leading Democrats such as President Biden and his family. He would have control of the Justice Department and the courts. How would massive resistance resist that?
On immigration, Trump might also shift to more narrowly targeted arrest and deportation, focusing on places where undocumented workers are allied with unions. The resistance to selective ICE raids to date has been largely ineffective.
Another worrisome area is the destruction of the free press. This could take two forms: weakening the current libel shield that dates to the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in the 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan, and enacting an official secrets act that would subject publishers and reporters to criminal penalties for publishing classified information.
In Times v. Sullivan, the Court held that to win a defamation case against a publishing company, a plaintiff would have to show “actual malice” or knowledge that a statement made “was false or with reckless disregard for the truth.”
Right-wing jurists such as Clarence Thomas have called for the overturning of Times v. Sullivan. The defamation rules could also be changed by statute if Republicans gain control of both houses of Congress. A change in press libel protections and an official secrets act could intimidate the free press and, more seriously, could bankrupt major newspapers by subjecting them to endless and costly litigation.
One of Trump’s underrated strengths is that he knows when to make tactical adjustments. His rhetoric suggests full-on fascism, but he has lately been willing to alienate some of his hardcore base by moderating the long-standing Republican position on a national abortion ban. He has implausibly denied knowing anything about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint.
Weirdly, Trump is posing as a force for moderation, restraining many of his own most ferocious supporters. But there is little doubt that immigrants are a special object of Trump’s wrath.
Should Trump be the next president, he will decide when and how far to pursue the instruments of outright dictatorship, and when to be more sly in his tactics. Massive resistance could help slow down Trump’s march to despotism. But does it even need saying that the better course is to keep him far from power in the first place?
This is still a democracy and Trump is still beatable. Whether the nominee is Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or a fresh face chosen at an open convention, the Democrats had better get their act together, and fast.
