America’s version of Fascism is arriving far faster than we ever expected. Yesterday, deportations to El Salvador and South Sudan; today, masked ICE agents grabbing people off the streets of Los Angeles, backed up by Humvees full of National Guard troops; tomorrow, unprecedented Medicaid cuts leaving millions without care. What can we do to fight back, throw sand in the gears, make clear that this is not the country we want?
All of us should feel proud that so many Americans took part in the peaceful “No Kings” marches and rallies, on June 14. The American Civil Liberties Union, a co-sponsor, estimated a total turnout of five million people in 2,100 separate locations. And not just in blue-state big cities but deep in Trump country, too: in towns such as Summerville, South Carolina, 13 communities in Nebraska, and at least 24 across Alaska. More than 1,500 people turned out in Mobile, Alabama. By scheduling the protests when they did, organizers cleverly overshadowed Trump’s long-sought military parade, in Washington, D.C. The demonstrations marked the end of five months of shock and paralysis at watching the federal government fall victim to Elon Musk’s chain saw, but they were only a start.
Even in polarized times, massive demonstrations can have a powerful effect. The rally at the Lincoln Memorial of 250,000 people, Black and white, in August 1963, where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, was the largest civil-rights demonstration the country had yet seen, and was a key stepping stone on the road to passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Another set of anti-Trump protests across the country occurred earlier this week. It will take far more to turn aside the MAGA juggernaut, but such occasions are important for another reason: they show Americans who want a different, fairer country that we are not alone.
Even though Trump and Musk are now at odds, Musk remains another facet of the kleptocracy that has seized control of this country, and so we can take satisfaction in the boycott of his flagship company, Tesla. It erupted after he started his mad campaign of dismantling key federal agencies. Compared to the same month last year, Tesla sales in the United States dropped 10.6 percent in May. The company took an even greater hit in Europe, where May sales dropped 27.9 percent year over year—despite rapidly rising use of electric vehicles. Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 Seconds, read one anti-Tesla sign in London. Another: Now with White Power Steering.
This is not the first time a boycott has leapt boundaries between continents. In 1791, an estimated 400,000 people in Britain stopped buying sugar because it was grown on Caribbean plantations worked by slaves. “There was no town, through which I passed,” wrote abolitionist organizer Thomas Clarkson of traveling through England and Wales, “in which there was not some one individual who had left off the use of sugar. In the smaller towns there were from ten to fifty … and in the larger from two to five hundred.... They were of all ranks and parties. Rich and poor, churchmen and dissenters.” In Britain, the sale of sugar from India, which did not use slave labor, increased tenfold. The boycott was one of the multiple forms of popular pressure that forced the British government to finally end slavery in its empire—a full quarter-century before it ended in the United States.
Another successful such international effort was the worldwide boycott, embargo, and divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa. It gathered force throughout the 1970s and 1980s and was a powerful impetus behind the negotiations beginning in 1991 that finally led to a democratic regime under Nelson Mandela.
Tesla has been the perfect target for a boycott because its electric cars are exactly the kind of product used by so many Americans horrified by Trump. That is not so, unfortunately, for so many sources of wealth for the president’s family, from golf courses to crypto-currency to seaside resorts in Albania. But it raises the question of what might be other promising targets for boycotts.
In a sense, some are already happening. Few anti-Trump Americans, for instance, are going to take any legal business to the nine Big Law firms who made craven deals with the administration, promising to do pro bono work for the president’s pet causes. Some partners and associates from several of these firms have already left to practice elsewhere. But we must keep our eyes peeled for other possibilities, perhaps a key product of states or congressional districts whose representatives in Congress have been conspicuous Trump enablers. In 1990, a threat of a national boycott of Idaho potatoes helped pressure the state’s governor to veto a highly restrictive anti-abortion bill. Could we do the same with Florida oranges?
There’s another front on which we need to act. An astonishing 47 Social Security offices around the country have closed or are slated for closing—victims of DOGE and the omnibus bill that just passed into law. A high proportion of them are in rural and Southern states that voted for Trump. Those Social Security offices still open have seen layoffs and long lines of frustrated people waiting for help. Why can’t activists chat with people in those lines, or set up a table on the sidewalk or in an adjacent park? They could give advice about how to claim the benefits you’re entitled to—and about how to write or call key Republican senators and members of Congress who voted for these cuts.
Down the line, there will be closures of, or patients turned away at, hundreds of rural or low-income hospitals and health clinics as the vast Medicaid cuts take effect. We need to do something similar when that happens, so that every person who fails to see a nurse or doctor because of the cuts knows that it’s a result of Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
Another casualty of the bill is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. An estimated 22.3 million families—and that’s not 22.3 million individuals, but entire families—will lose some or all of their benefits. Whatever protests we organize to dramatize this have to be done outside grocery stores and supermarkets while people see what food they can no longer obtain.
Notably, the Department of Veterans Affairs was also scheduled for a drastic cutback in Trump’s bill, of 83,000 employees. But veterans—far better organized into lobbying groups than recipients of Social Security, Medicaid, or food stamps—made their voices heard. The staff cuts were reduced to only 30,000 workers. “The announcement marks a significant reversal for the Trump administration,” reported The Washington Post, and it came after hundreds of veterans’ rallies in dozens of states. The rest of us should take note.
Finally, don’t underestimate the power of ridicule. After Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker archly proclaimed that Lake Michigan was now “Lake Illinois.” With Trump renaming army bases to restore the names of Confederate generals, what other targets are there for our own renaming?
How about a mobile exhibition of artifacts from the age of Trump? Picture a gold toilet seat from Air Force One, a representation of the value of a Trump crypto coin (an empty box), a degree from Trump University (value: the paper it’s printed on), a sniff of Trump perfume (“Normally $500 a bottle—smell it here for free!”), and much more. Like a traveling guerrilla-theater performance, the exhibition could roam the country. If it gets shut down, that’s all the more publicity.
“Dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are,” said the late Gene Sharp, an influential theorist of nonviolence, “and people are never as weak as they think they are.” Sharp’s ideas had enormous influence on those who carried out the “color revolutions” of the early 21st century, which challenged, and in many cases defeated, autocratic governments in Serbia, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and elsewhere. Like those brave activists, we must remain peaceful and nonviolent. Trump has already called out troops before any violence took place; let’s not give him the slightest excuse to declare martial law and become the dictator he would so love to be.
Adam Hochschild, a prize-winning historian, is the author of numerous books, including Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, and American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis
