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Trump’s Everywhere War: An Insurrection Against the Constitution

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

When the government can label anyone or anything an enemy in order to wage war, we are all in danger.

That danger is no longer theoretical.

In the same breath that the administration touts lethal military strikes against Venezuelan boats in Caribbean waters, federal agents are conducting coordinated militarized raids on homes in Chicago, rappelling down on apartment buildings from Black Hawk helicopters, dragging families out of their homes, separating children from their parents, and using zip ties to immobilize them—even citizens.

The message—spoken and unspoken—is that the government is on a war footing everywhere: abroad, at sea, and now at our front doors.

This “everywhere war” depends on a simple redefinition: call it a war, and the target becomes a combatant. Call the city a battlespace, and its residents become suspects.

What the White House is doing overseas to vessels it deems part of a terrorist network (without any credible proof or due process), it is now mimicking at home with door-kicking raids, mass surveillance, and ideological watchlists.

With the stroke of a pen, President Trump continues to set aside the constitutional safeguards meant to restrain exactly this kind of mission creep, handing himself and his agencies sweeping authority to disregard the very principles on which this nation was founded—principles intended to serve as constitutional safeguards against tyranny, corruption, abuse and overreach put in place by America’s founding fathers.

Take National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), for example.

NSPM-7 directs a government-wide campaign to “investigate,” “disrupt,” and “dismantle” so-called domestic threats, ordering agencies to pool their data, resources, and operations in service of this agenda.

What makes NSPM-7 so dangerous is not only its declared purpose but its breadth and secrecy. There are no clearly defined standards, no meaningful transparency, and no external oversight. The public is told only that the government will protect them—by watching them.

Yet the danger is not only in what the government hides, but in what it chooses to see.

Even more troubling is the way “threats” are defined.

What is being sold as a campaign to disrupt left-wing conspiracies has expanded to include ideology, rhetoric, and belief.

Clearly, this is not just another surveillance program.

NSPM-7 is a framework for rebranding dissent as a danger to be quashed.

The government has a long history of using vague definitions of “extremism” to justify ever-expanding control. Once dissent is rebranded as danger, every act of resistance can be swept into the government’s dragnet.

NSPM-7 merely formalizes this cycle of suspicion.

It also resurrects an old playbook with new machinery—COINTELPRO, digitized and centralized. The tools may be different, but the logic—neutralize dissent—is the same, now scaled up with modern surveillance and stitched together under executive direction. From there, the apparatus needs only a pretext—a checklist of behaviors, viewpoints, associations and beliefs—to justify recasting citizens as suspects.

For years now, the government has flagged certain viewpoints and phrases as potential markers of extremism.

To that list, you can now add “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-American,” among others.

In practice, sermons, protests, blog posts, or donor lists could all be flagged as precursors to terrorism.

Under this policy, America’s founders would be terrorists. Jesus himself would be blacklisted as “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist.”

Anything can be declared a war, and anyone can be redefined as an enemy combatant.

The definition shifts with political convenience, but the result is always the same: unchecked executive power.

The president has already labeled drug cartels “unlawful combatants” and insists the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict.”

The raids in Chicago and the White House’s evolving attitude towards surveillance confirm what follows from that logic: this war footing is not confined to foreign shores. It is being turned inward—toward journalists, political opponents, and ordinary citizens whose beliefs or associations are deemed “anti-American.”

By anti-American, this administration really means anti-government, especially when Trump is calling the shots.

This is how dissent gets relabeled as danger: by surrounding every American with the presumption of guilt first, and constitutional safeguards—if any—much later.

When merely looking a certain way or talking a certain way or voting a certain way is enough to get you singled out and subjected to dehumanizing, cruel treatment by government agents, we are all in danger.

When the president of the United States and his agents threaten to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the government’s demands, we are all in danger.

When the police state has a growing list of innocuous terms and behaviors that are suspicious enough to classify someone a terrorist, we are all in danger.

Today it is drug cartels. Yesterday it was immigrants. Tomorrow it could be journalists, political opponents, or ordinary citizens who express views deemed “anti-American.”

With NSPM-7, the Trump White House is not merely amplifying surveillance power—it is institutionalizing a regime in which thought, dissent, and ideological posture become the raw material for domestic investigations and suppression.

Make no mistake: this is an unprecedented escalation in the government’s war on privacy, dissent, and constitutional limits.

For decades, presidents of both parties have waged a steady assault on the Constitution. Each crisis became an excuse to concentrate more power in the executive branch.

The Patriot Act normalized warrantless surveillance. The FISA courts gave secret cover for dragnet spying. The NSA’s metadata sweeps exposed millions of Americans’ phone records. Predictive policing and geofencing warrants turned smartphones into government informants.

Each measure, we were told, was temporary, limited, and necessary. None were rolled back. Each became the foundation for the next expansion.

Against this backdrop, NSPM-7 emerges as the next, more dangerous iteration.

This is how liberties die: not with a sudden coup, but with the gradual normalization of extraordinary powers until they are no longer extraordinary at all.

It is the embodiment of James Madison’s nightmare: the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same hands.

Unless “we the people” demand accountability, NSPM-7 will become the new normal, entrenched in the machinery of government long after this administration has passed.

A government that answers only to itself is not a constitutional republic—it is a rogue state. And NSPM-7, far from securing our freedoms, threatens to extinguish them.

Unchecked power is unconstitutional power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the hard work of defending freedom rests as always with “we the people.”

Let’s get to it.

[Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books The Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield America: The War on the American People are available at www.amazon.com. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]

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Trump Wants Martial Law: A Report and Reflections from Chicago

Paul Street

People ask me all the time, “Kamau, things are so bad, what do we do, what do we do? Things are so bad!” First of all, there’s a lot of things you can do. But the very first thing you can do is Call it Fascism. Don’t say “Trump’s gone too far.” Don’t say “he’s overstepping.” Don’t say “we’ve never seen this before.” Nope, it’s fascism. Call it fascism.”

– Comedian W. Kamau Bell

Chicago is now ground zero in the Trump fascist regime’s assault on democracy, the rule of law, social justice, decency, and the common good. Recent events here (I am writing from the Loop) include a horrifying militarized ICE, FBI, and Border Patrol attack on an apartment complex in the predominantly Black South Side neighborhood of South Shore. Last week, just after 2 a.m., military Black Hawk Attack Helicopters descended on an apartment complex in the Black South Side Chicago neighborhood of South Shore:

“Federal agents rappelled onto the roof while U-Hauls and Budget rental vans unloaded hundreds of gendarmes in combat gear. They carried military-grade rifles fitted with mounted flashlights designed to disorient enemy combatants. They kicked in doors, shattered windows, and ransacked apartments. Inside were Black Chicagoans, Latino migrants, U.S. citizens, elders, and terrified children. Everyone, including a naked baby, was dragged into the night. Residents described being zip-tied and herded into vans where they were detained for hours while agents checked IDs, citizenship status, and for arrest-warrants. ‘They just treated us like we were nothing,’ said resident Pertissue Fisher, speaking to CBS News.”

Following this terrifying event, the so-called Department of Homeland Security sent out a slick action video celebrating the savage racist attack.

That’s just the most graphic and terrible example of the racist terror the Trump regime and its masked gendarmes are unleashing across the Chicago area. Other recent incidents:

• The shooting of a woman by ICE in the Southwest Side neighborhood of Brighton Park, followed by a protest that ICE attacked with tear gas and tactical military vehicles.
• The unprovoked tear-gassing of residents in the North Side neighborhood of Logan Square, sending a two-year-old child to the hospital in respiratory distress.
• The brutal handcuffing of 26th Ward Chicago alderperson Jessie Fuentes after she asked to see a warrant for the arrest of a hospitalized man injured by ICE agents
• The ongoing violent ICE and Border Patrol attacks on protesters at ICE’s immigrant “processing” (really detention and torture) center in the predominantly Black western Broadview.
• A chemical attack on a Chicago CBS2 reporter while she sat in her car near the Broadview facility.

Now Trump and his fellow fascist “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth have sent hundreds of Texas National Guard troops for deployment in and around Chicago, falsely claiming that Chicago is a “war zone.” Trump is doing this over and against the protests of Illinois governor JB Pritzker and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, both of whom Mein Trumpf says, “belong in jail.”

Think about the dark neo-Confederate symbolism of dispatching troops from Republifascist-ruled former slave state of Texas to Chicago, the city where Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president in 1860 and a leading stronghold of the Union during the Civil War. Fifty thousand people lined the streets of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue to mourn Lincoln following his assassination by a Confederate sympathizer six days after the Slave Confederacy surrendered and six weeks after Lincoln said this in his second Inaugural Address:

“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Make no mistake: the virulent white supremacists Trump and Hegseth would love to see the re-establishment of Black chattel slavery in the United States.

In a preliminary ruling that attempts to temporarily restrain Trump’s military occupation of Portland, Oregon, federal district Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, found that protests outside the ICE facility there failed to meet the definition of a “rebellion against the federal government” and pose no “danger of a rebellion.

“This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Immergut wrote in her opinion. “Defendants [the Trump administration] have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of this nation.”

Immergut was right to suggest that Trump’s hoped-for destination is martial law. Two weeks ago, Trump told 800 generals and admirals he called into Virginia from across the world that American cities should become “training grounds for our military.”

Between Hegseth and Trump’s speeches to the stone-faced brass in Quantico, Virginia, the message was clear: American troops should be “unleashed” (top fascist White House operative Stephen Miller’s term) to kill what Trump calls “the enemy within,” including American citizens, on American soil.

Trump responded to Immergut’s initial ruling by sending 101 California National Guard members to Oregon – an action Immergut called unconstitutional and contrary to existing federal statutes. The judge has also temporarily blocked this action.

Like his counterpart in Oregon, Illinois governor JB Pritzker is suing the Trump administration in federal district court to block the military invasion of his state and Chicago.

As I write on Thursday afternoon (October 9, 2025), Oregon’s suit is being heard by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Two of the three judges on this panel are Trump appointees. The Illinois hearing is ongoing in a federal district court in Chicago.

If Trump does not get what he wants he will “if necessary” take his case to the far-right US Supreme Court, which has become a blunt instrument of fascist power that routinely cancels well-reasoned lower federal rulings with unexplained “shadow docket” judgements that do not bother to substantively engage the legal/constitutional issues at question.

In an afternoon press conference last Monday, Pritzker said that the White House’s “plan all along has been to cause chaos, and then they can use that chaos to consolidate Donald Trump’s power.” Pritzker also thinks Trump’s real destination is martial law across the nation.

In other fascist news, US government phone systems and websites have been enlisted in open violation of the Hatch Act by blaming the current Trump government shut down on “the Radical Left” Democrats – this despite the facts that (a) there isn’t a single “radical leftist” in the Democratic Party and (b) there’s nothing “radical Left” about the Democrats’ requirements for signing on to a budget deal (keeping alive the health insurance subsidies granted by the Affordable Care Act and blocking massive cuts to Medicaid). The fascist political playbook requires a “radical left” “enemy within” even when no such “enemy” exists.

The antifascist Rutgers history professor Mark Bray is attempting to leave the United States for Spain after receiving numerous death threats in the wake of the assassination of the fascist Amerikaner youth leader Charlie Kirk. The Guardian reports that Bray and his family were prevented from flying out of the country two nights ago:

“Mark Bray, an historian who published the 2017 book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, and has taught courses on anti-fascism at the New Jersey university, was attempting to board a plane at Newark airport bound for Europe when he was informed at the boarding gate that the reservations for him and his family had been cancelled. The professor, nicknamed “Dr Antifa” by a group of students, had said he was moving to Europe after receiving death threats. Turning Point USA activists have claimed he is a “financier” for the leftwing movement. ‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second,’ Bray posted on Bluesky social media. ‘We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation disappeared.’”

Are we moving to a point where dissenters can’t leave, consistent with the practices of the SS in Nazi Germany?

A wise reflection posted on social media by the literature professor Benjamin Balthasar:

“At the peak of the red scare, it was common for radicals to have their passports revoked: most famously Paul Robeson’s career was ended by taking away his ability to travel abroad (and equally famous, his attempt to give a concert over the Canadian border thru a megaphone). Richard Wright who famously said that he left the US to not bring up his daughter in a racist society, also more quietly said he had better leave while he still had a passport. Leonard Bernstein and Herbert Aptheker also had their passports revoked. Many other less famous radicals had their ability to travel taken away (or were deported like CLR James and Claudia Jones). Supposedly this part of the McCarren Walter Act was successfully challenged in court in the late 1950s, ironically by the odious sectarian anti-communist troll Max Shachtman (who notoriously tried to derail the early days of SDS by having the new group ban communists), but who nonetheless was placed on the ‘subversives’ list by the state dept. In any case, as with many things, let us hope the blocking of travel for ‘subversives’ is not coming back. Either way the story is truly alarming.”

Another wise reflection, from the Black comedian W Kamau Bell: “People ask me all the time, ‘Kamau, things are so bad, what do we do, what do we do? Things are so bad. First of all, there’s a lot of things you can do. But the very first thing you can do is Call it Fascism. Don’t say ‘Trump’s gone too far.’ Don’t say ‘he’s overstepping.’ Don’t say ‘we’ve never seen this before.’ Nope, it’s fascism. Call it fascism.”

[Paul Street is an independent journalist, policy adviser and historian. His latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022). Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]

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‘An Egregious Abuse of Power’: Trump Orders Troops to Portland, Ore; OKs ‘Full Force’

Olivia Rosane

In his latest attempt to turn the U.S. military on an American city, President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he was sending troops to Portland, Oregon and had authorized them to use “Full Force, if necessary.”

“At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s announcement follows his deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, as well as his threats to send the military to Chicago and Memphis. These deployments have been widely condemned and legally challenged as a massive overreach of executive authority.

Portland and Oregon leaders were no less vehement in their opposition to Trump’s order for their city.

“President Trump has directed ‘all necessary Troops’ to Portland, Oregon. The number of necessary troops is zero, in Portland and any other American city,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said in a statement on Saturday. “Our nation has a long memory for acts of oppression, and the president will not find lawlessness or violence here unless he plans to perpetrate it.”

Democratic Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said that she had not been informed ahead of time of any reason for the deployment of federal troops.

“In my conversations directly with President Trump and Secretary Noem, I have been abundantly clear that Portland and the State of Oregon believe in the rule of law and can manage our own local public safety needs,” she wrote on social media. “There is no insurrection. There is no threat to national security.”

Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) said in a statement: “The President of the United States is directing his self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of War’ to unleash militarized federal forces in an American city he disagrees with. This is an egregious abuse of power and a betrayal of our most basic American values.”

“Authoritarians rely on fear to divide us,” she continued. “Portland will not give them that. We will not be intimidated. We have prepared for this moment since Trump first took office, and we will meet it with every tool available to us: litigation, legislation, and the power of peaceful public pressure.”

Dexter also posted a photograph of a tranquil park on social media, mocking the idea that Portland was a war zone.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) adopted a similar strategy, posting videos of downtown Portland and of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility that has been the site of protests Trump has characterized as out-of-control.

Dexter and Wyden were among the seven members of Oregon’s congressional delegation who sent a letter to Trump, Noem, and Hegseth on Saturday urging them to reconsider.

“Portland is a vibrant and peaceful city, and does not require any deployment of federal troops or additional federal agents to keep our community safe,” the lawmakers wrote. “This unilateral action represents an abuse of executive authority, seeks to incite violence, and undermines the constitutional balance of power between the federal government and states. We urge you to rescind this decision, and withdraw any military personnel and federal agents you have recently sought to deploy.”

As of Saturday, Oregon National Guard spokesperson Lt. Col. Stephen Bomar told The Associated Press in an email that “no official requests have been received at this time.” However, Oregon officials noted an uptick in the presence of federal agents and armored vehicles in Portland on Friday.

In a press conference Friday evening, Mayor Wilson suggested that the deployment was a “distraction” from the looming GOP-driven government shutdown.

“Imagine if the federal government sent instead 100 teachers or 100 engineers or 100 addiction specialists,” Wilson said.

Earlier in the week, Trump also smeered Portland protesters as “professional agitators and anarchists,” according to the Portland Tribune.

“We’re going to get out there and we’re going to do a pretty big number on those people in Portland,” Trump said.

The federal deployment threatens to reopen wounds from 2020, when Portland was the site of massive protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd and the first Trump administration sent federal and border agents to the city.

As the Oregon lawmakers wrote:

Portland residents experienced the consequences of an unnecessary and outrageous federal deployment five years ago. In summer of 2020, the White House unleashed federal agents on Portland like an occupying army, complete with military-grade equipment and violent tactics that were utterly unacceptable on American soil. A federal agent shot a peaceful protester in the head with a crowd-control munition, sending the man to the hospital with a fractured skull. Federal agents were captured on video jumping out of unmarked vans and grabbing people off the streets without explanation. A county commissioner was tear gassed along with other non-violent protestors. A Navy veteran was filmed being beaten by federal agents after he questioned them about their actions. These examples, and many more that occurred in Portland, demonstrate that the federal agents who were parachuted into Portland incited violence and trampled over the constitutional rights of Americans. There is no question that another deployment by your administration will result in similar abuses.

However, the risks of abuses are perhaps even higher as the second Trump administration has designated “antifa,” which is not an actual, coherent group, as a domestic terrorist organization, a dubious legal move that experts warn is an attempt to restrict the First Amendment rights of leftists and others critical of the administration.

“If ever there was a time not to normalize Trump’s authoritarian fever dreams, this is it,” said journalist Mehdi Hasan on social media. “This should be impeachable. ‘War ravaged’ Portland? He’s insane—& insanely power hungry. The script is set—call an imaginary group a terror group and then send in the troops.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) urged his constituents not to give Trump the confrontation he is clearly seeking.

“Trump is sending troops to Portland with the goal of ‘doing a number’ on the city. We know what this means. He wants to stoke fear and chaos and trigger violent interactions and riots to justify expanded authoritarian control,” he said in a video posted on social media. “Let’s not take the bait! Portland is peaceful and strong and we will take care of each other.”

Other advocates and lawmakers also took issue with Trump’s characterization of Portland.

Human Rights lawyer Qasim Rashid pointed out that Portland had actually experienced the most dramatic drop in homicides among all U.S. cities during the first half of 2025.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said the description of Portland as “war ravaged” was “delusional and dangerous.”

“Sending troops into American cities doesn’t make our communities safer—it just stokes fear and stirs up chaos,” she wrote on social media. “Trump is plunging further into authoritarianism every single day.”

Civil rights lawyer and author Alec Karakatsanis said that the mainstream media needed to reflect on how its reporting had enabled Trump’s false narrative about Portland.

“This kind of outrageous misinformation would not be possible without the culture of fear spread for years by the mainstream media,” Karakatsanis wrote on social media. “He is playing on the prodigious ignorance and irrational fear cultivated by the way the news media distorts our sense of safety.”

“Portland, needless to say, is nothing remotely like what Trump describes,” he continued. “But the mass media has created an entirely delusional public perception of what threats we face and from whom.”

[Olivia Rosane is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Courtesy: Common Dreams, a US non-profit news portal.]

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A Movement-Based Opposition to Trump and MAGA

Jeremy Brecher

As President Donald Trump launches illegal armed attacks against American cities, peaceful civilians, and people in foreign countries that have not attacked the US, it may look like a sign of strength and a harbinger of a future of total domination. But Trump’s turn to such extreme forms of violence is less an expression of growing power than an attempt to distract from the growth of opposition, the loss of public support, and the splits within the ranks of his own supporters. It is a sign not of strength but of weakness. This report lays out a strategy to take advantage of that weakness to defend society against Trump’s MAGA assaults. That strategy is based on the principle of “social self-defense” – that all the people and institutions harmed by Trump’s autocracy can and must come together to protect society against his assault.

Resisting and eventually eliminating Trump and his MAGA tyranny requires more than his loss of popularity. It requires a concerted opposition that can rally powerful social forces to undermine his means of domination. In our two-party system, the responsibility for opposition lies on the opposition party – the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, with a few outstanding exceptions, the leadership of the Democratic Party has so far failed in its duty to oppose Trump’s burgeoning autocracy.

In response to the intensifying attack on democracy, millions of people in thousands of locations have joined actions to oppose his juggernaut. In the absence of adequate resistance in the electoral arena, an alliance of popular movements is functioning as the primary opposition to Trump’s authoritarian rule.

This “movement-based opposition” has emerged rapidly during the first year of Trump’s presidency. It is represented by the mass nonviolent resistance to ICE in Los Angeles and elsewhere and the five million participants in No Kings Day and other national days of action. It is developing significant power as more and more people see and experience the harm the Trump administration and the MAGA Congress are inflicting on individuals, groups, and society as a whole. This movement-based opposition is no longer a marginal force but is now MAGA’s most powerful opponent.

Sometimes called a non-electoral or independent opposition, such a movement-based opposition is a convergence of social movements that performs some of the classic functions of an opposition party without the goal of itself taking power in government. It draws diverse constituencies out of their silos to combine their power, but uses direct action rather than electing candidates as its means to exercise that power. Like a political party, it brings together different constituencies around common interests, exposes the lies of those in power, and wins support for alternatives.

This movement-based opposition can mobilize popular rejection of the MAGA agenda, block Trump’s initiatives, prod Democratic politicians into action, split off Republicans, and help lay the groundwork for “people power” non-violent uprisings – aka “social strikes” — if they prove to be necessary to overcome authoritarian rule.

Trump’s authoritarian juggernaut is currently entering a more violent, militarized phase. At home, this includes the huge expansion of ICE, the military occupation of American cities, and the political repression using the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a pretext. Abroad, it means the bombing of Iran, the illegal, unprovoked attacks on Venezuelan boats, and on-going collusion with genocide in Gaza; who knows what else is in the works.

The opposition is also entering a new phase. This was heralded by the resistance to ICE and military occupation in Los Angeles that included community-based support groups; constant identification, tracking, and filming of ICE agents; mutual aid support for targets of ICE attacks; ongoing opposition from state and city officials; refusal of the Dodgers to let ICE enter their stadium; and refusal of grand juries to indict — out of the 38 felony cases filed by Trump’s U.S. Attorney, only seven have resulted in indictments. Opinion polls indicate that such exposure of ICE abuses had led public opinion in California and nationwide to shift against Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.

Chicago, Washington, DC, New York, Memphis, and other cities are readying for similar resistance. An estimated 25,000 demonstrated in DC against the occupation of the city. The National Guard troops sent into Los Angeles and Washington, DC have been widely reported to be antagonistic to their assignments. The majority of Americans are opposed to Trump’s deployment of troops to American cities and feel their own rights and freedoms would be less secure as a result. The opposition to Trump’s plan to occupy Chicago with the National Guard met so much resistance from Chicago citizens and unions, the mayor of the city, and the governor of Illinois that he suddenly reversed himself and announced that he was not going to send the troops because a railroad executive had advised him, “You’re gonna lose Chicago, sir.”

As RFK, Jr. gutted America’s vaccine programs and other defenses against COVID and other health threats, major medical associations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics denounced the new policies and promulgated their own treatment standards. Top officials in the CDC and other health agencies publicly resigned in protest — and hundreds of CDC employees, including some in full service uniforms, gathered outside the agency, cheering and clapping for the three officials who had quit. Four states, flouting Trumpian policy, announced a “health alliance” that made its own, science-based, standards for vaccination. Florida’s plan to eliminate all vaccine mandates was reversed in just two days following a furious backlash from medical experts and political opponents.

There are three mutually reinforcing strategies for the movement-based opposition’s struggle against Trump’s domination: nullifying his initiatives, voting his supporters out of office, and mass “social strikes” that mobilize enough people to make his continued rule impossible.

The emerging movement-based opposition aims to halt and undo the harm that has been done by the Trump regime, but it is not directed toward returning to the world as it existed before Trump. That is clearly not what the people want, and it offers little hope of solving our real problems. The movement-based opposition includes many different groups with different visions of the future. It is based on agreement about the immediate aim, plus agreement to disagree about other things. It should encourage discussion of areas of disagreement while bracketing them when they might interfere with immediately necessary collaboration. The process of working together and defining common interests itself can help identify new areas of agreement and encourage mutual acceptance of differences. Indeed, Social Self-Defense against the MAGA juggernaut can be the starting point for creating the world we want beyond MAGA. As Abraham Lincoln said of the Civil War, it can become the means for a new birth of freedom.

[Jeremy Brecher is a co-founder and senior strategic advisor for the Labor Network for Sustainability. He is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike!, Common Preservation in a Time of Mutual Destruction, and The Green New Deal from Below. Courtesy: Znetwork, a anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, anarcho-socialist platform, and is heavily influenced by participatory economics.]