What if Trump Wins: How We Have Responded

To recap What if Trump Wins?, the authors recommend four main categories of actions:

• Protecting people being targeted
• Defending existing institutions
• Visualizing what happens after Trump and
• Strategizing forms of resistance

Within each category, they recommend two or three (usually three) courses of action, although these are presumably not intended to be exhaustive.

Protect people being targeted:

• Mutual aid society
• Joint emergency fundraising for non-profits
• Underground railroad

Defend exhibiting institutions:

• Work with veterans and their families to encourage the military to stay out of politics
• Citizen scientists supplementing the EPA with environmental testing
• Find grants to strengthen elections.*

Visualizing what comes after Trump:

• Give cultural and psychological grounding to the movement
• Constitutional convention to propose amendments

Resistance:

• Paperclip movement.  Originally introduced as a symbol of resistance, later appears to be a movement in the civil service parallel to the military movement to refuse unlawful orders.
• Strikes
• Tax resistance

Another way to categorize these activities is as legal, semi-legal, and illegal.

Legal:

• Mutual aid society
• Joint emergency fundraising for non-profits
• Citizen scientists supplementing the EPA
• Grants to strengthen elections
• Cultural grounding for movement
• Constitutional convention
• Strikes**

Semi-legal:

• Underground railroad
• Outreach to military 
• Paperclip movement
• Strikes**

Illegal:  Tax resistance.  In fact, the book shows non-resistance groups being reluctant to work with the tax resistance precisely because it is illegal.

One of the really notable things here as that all iterations assume that our basic civil society continues to flourish enough to allow these organizations to operate more or less in the open.  Of course, the openness varies.  Mutual aid groups and joint emergency fundraising operate in the open and often attract adherents widely across the political spectrum.  Indeed, the authors envision some members quitting in protest when these organizations become too overtly political.  But they never envision any sort of danger to these groups.  Nor do they envision danger to groups offering cultural grounding and psychological support, even though these groups are sometimes portrayed as coordinating action among other groups.  And the constitutional convention operates in the open, drawing in large numbers of participants, and not being harassed by either the government or private militias.  

Thus far, at least, this prediction appears to be accurate.

Not everyone is quite as open.  Naturally the underground railroad has to maintain operational security, but is open about its existence and has at least some members who are open about belonging.  This is apparently based on the experience of the historical Underground Railroad and (the authors comment) is necessary for people to know where to go for help.  But electronic security is essential and the fear of infiltration is constant.  The authors also envision that the protecting institutions people will have to watch their electronic security if they want to scale up.  This certainly seems true for anyone reaching out to the military to encourage them to resist being politicized.  But the authors see the need for at least some digital security for citizen scientists assisting the EPA and people finding grants for election workers.  Those seem a lot less dangerous, but who knows.  

As for the resistance wing, the authors can imagine Trump either allowing them to operate at first or cracking down, but do assume that sooner or later he will crack down if the resistance does not join forces with the others.  That is when the non-resistance -- mutual aid societies, fundraisers for non-profits, people giving cultural grounding, members of the constitutional convention, citizen scientists, grant finders for elections, and even members of the underground railroad and people reaching out to the military -- go on openly and peacefully with their activities and are celebrating the semi-quincentennial when they learn that the resistance has been crushed.  Whether they are eventually targeted is not addressed.

Again, the semi-quincentennial is less than a month away and I do not anticipate any major crackdown between now and then, although I suppose anything can happen.  

How realistic is this?  Well, it depends.  First and obviously, incipient dictatorships don't destroy civil society immediately or all at once.  Under Orban, all these groups continued throughout, though not without being pressure.  Under Hitler, all were destroyed in a matter of months.  Then again, we know now that when Orban lost, he actually stepped down.  Trump did not go so quietly.  But he falls far short of Hitler.  If we put incipient dictatorship on a spectrum with Orban as the mildest and Hitler as the harshest, Trump has already proven himself harsher than Orban.  But he still falls well short of Hitler.  And second, Trump still has a long way to go.  We don't know how it will end up.

So how do these activities stack up to what is actually happening?  The honest answer has to be that I don't know.  In a country of over 300 million people, it is not possible to know everything that is happening.  I know that a lot of opposition is taking place through conventional government channels -- litigation in the courts, state and local government, pressure on Congress, filibusters, a surge of new candidates for office, and so forth -- all of which the authors neglected altogether.  I also know that there have been a lot of street protests, and that groups like Indivisibles are probably putting more stock in street protests than the authors recommend.  

I know that when SNAP benefits fell short during the shutdown, out state legislature attempted to fill in the gap.  I know that in our local community food banks and food pantries also stepped up.  Restaurants offered free meals to families with children who lost their benefits.  And many individual citizens made donations to food banks, pantries, and participating restaurants.  Other businesses donated bulk purchases of food to participating restaurants, and people ate there as a gesture of solidarity.  The crisis passed.  The authors would undoubtedly approve.  Whether we will pull together so well when SNAP benefits are permanently cut remains to be seen.  

There has not been a large-scale constitutional convention or anything like the proposed resistance movements.  What there has been, and what confirms the view that these four activities are not altogether distinct, is a strong resistance to Trump's policies of mass deportation.  The part that has drawn the most attention are the ICE watchers -- people who film ICE in action, people track ICE and know where they are going, people who honk horns and blow whistles to warn that ICE is present, and protesters outside ICE facilities, including ones who try to obstruct access.  Such activities have been most visible in cities experiencing a major ICE blitz, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, or Minneapolis, but they happen on a smaller scale everywhere.  And they are backed by quieter, assistance-minded members -- mutual aid societies, people who escort children to school, people who shop and deliver groceries and take trash out and so forth.  Attempts to maintain sanctuary areas such as churches, schools, medical facilities, and government offices might be seen as attempts to protect existing institutions.  And any number of plans are circulating on what to do when Trump is gone.  In Minneapolis, ICE harassment of anyone who was not white and anti-ICE resisters co-existed with huge, open protests.  There was even a general strike in Minneapolis, with smaller solidarity actions across the country.  And, after all, Team Trump ultimately backed down from its most extreme measures and dismissed Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem, replacing them with people who kept a lower profile.  And the number of arrests appears to have modestly declined -- at least for now.

Next:  What the book got right, what it got wrong, and what it overlooked entirely.

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*Probably what I would do if these were my options.

 **There are laws governing when strike are and are not allowed and how they may be conducted.  I am not familiar with these laws and (unsurprisingly, the book does not address them).