OSLO, NORWAY – I’m feeling a little sheepish taking a short vacation here while America is becoming a full-on dictatorship. But I needed a break—to clear my head and to spend a little time in a sane, normal country. Norway is better than normal. It’s seriously green and getting greener. Central Oslo is mostly free of cars because the public transit is so good, and cars are seriously taxed. Some 92 percent of new cars sold last year were electric.
But the most inspiring thing I’ve seen here in Norway is not the amazing Edvard Munch museum, nor Oslo’s superb tram system, nor the pristine natural beauty mercifully free of gasoline fumes. It’s the Museum of the National Resistance.
In April 1940, Norway fell to the Nazis. The small Norwegian army held off the invasion just long enough for King Haakon and the cabinet to escape to the north and then to London for the duration, on a British warship. The prime minister, elected in Norway’s last prewar free election in 1936, headed a Labor Party government, which built the modern Norwegian welfare state.
In 1940, the Germans installed Vidkun Quisling as Norway’s leader, though his far-right party won just 2.2 percent of the vote in 1936. Quisling became a synonym for traitors who collaborated with invaders everywhere. After the war, he was tried and executed for treason, just a few steps from the building that is now the Museum of the Resistance.
During the five years of occupation, Norwegians sabotaged Nazi rule in ways large and small. About 7,000 died in combat. Some 10,000 were sent to concentration camps. At least 1,433 members of the resistance were executed or killed in action. Some took immense risks. The common trait was courage.
In 1940 and 1941, it took special courage to resist the Nazis. In those years, before the U.S. entered the war while a vulnerable Britain stood alone, it looked as if Hitler had won and that Germany would dominate the new order in Europe. However loathsome the Nazis, for some it seemed better to accommodate and make a deal for limited autonomy, as Vichy France did. And also, of course, it took special courage because the Nazi occupiers were ruthless and sadistic. The penalty for resisting and getting caught could be torture and death.
Historians will scratch their heads when they ask why more Republicans in 2025 did not resist a madman.
You could tell a similar resistance story in France, or Denmark, or the Netherlands. Even Germany has a war resistance museum, the German Resistance Memorial Center, located in the former headquarters of the German General Staff, where Claus von Stauffenberg was executed for his part in the failed July 1944 generals’ plot against Hitler. The street has been renamed Stauffenbergstrasse in his honor.
In Norway, one of the most courageous and consequential acts of resistance and sabotage was the series of commando raids in February 1943 that destroyed the Nazi plant in Norway’s far north for producing heavy water, which was a key ingredient in Germany’s version of an atomic bomb. All five Norwegian commandos escaped by skiing the 200 kilometers to the Swedish border.
In addition to sabotage, there was widespread civil disobedience. Norwegian schoolteachers refused to adopt pro-Nazi curricula. At least a thousand were fired. Dozens of clandestine newspapers were published and hundreds of illegal shortwave radios hidden. Refugees were smuggled overland to neutral Sweden and on fishing boats to Scotland.
Among acts of passive resistance, civilians maintained an “ice front” against German soldiers and occupation officials. This involved pretending to speak no German (though it was then almost as widespread in Norway as English is now) and refusing to sit beside a German on buses and trams. This so annoyed the occupying German authorities that they made it a crime to stand on a bus or tram if seats were available.
In the Norwegian Museum of the National Resistance, there are entire rooms and exhibits honoring these heroic acts.
I AM IMAGINING THAT SOMEDAY, in America, there will be a Museum of the Resistance to Donald Trump. But while there have been some scattered acts of resistance, courage is in far too short supply. For now, it would be a very small museum.
Republicans who should know better are concluding, as did the Vichy French, that Trump’s dictatorship is the new order, and it’s best to get on board. But while we still have some semblance of democracy, their cowardice helps bring Trump’s tyranny about.
The conscience of just two Republicans in 2020, Brad Raffensperger and Mike Pence, was enough to spare the country a coup d’état. Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, did not mind suppressing the right to vote but he would not rig the count. He refused Trump’s demand to steal exactly 11,780 votes so that Trump could carry Georgia. And Vice President Pence, in the face of the violent occupation of Congress, refused Trump’s direct order to reject the electoral count.
Historians will scratch their heads when they ask why more Republicans in 2025 did not resist a madman. Surely, few of them believe that Trump is good for America.
Today, if just five Republicans in the House and Senate, not to mention two Supreme Court justices, were to resist, Trump could still be stopped in his tracks.
But time is running out. And the deeper the Trump dictatorship becomes, the more the resistance will need to become something like resistance in wartime. What does defiance of the law even mean when Trump has trampled elementary due process and the Supreme Court has let him do it? Who is following the law and who is breaking it?
The eventual museum that I imagine will honor the Americans who hid immigrants at risk of illegal deportation and in some cases torture. It will honor mayors and governors and local police who refused to cooperate with ICE. It will honor college presidents who refused to be played off against each other. We need far more solidarity among leaders of institutions. As of now, too many are eager to cut deals, Vichy-style.
We also have to think really hard about what sort of civil disobedience makes tactical and ethical sense. If it is impulsive and scattershot, Trump will only fill the jails with his opponents.
Resisters still need to pay attention to public opinion, which exists even in an incipient dictatorship. And public opinion is increasingly turning against Trump.
We have a narrowing window when Trump can still be stopped and constitutional democracy restored. There are no museums to the resistance in nations where tyrants prevailed.