We’re entering a new phase of the resistance

This article We’re entering a new phase of the resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article is adapted from a Choose Democracy newsletter email.

The news is moving so fast that it’s hard to make meaning out of each twist and turn. In a 24-hour span, Border Patrol turned tail and left Charlotte, Marjorie Taylor Greene announced she was quitting, and Mamdani both called Trump a fascist to his face and got Trump to say he would happily live in a New York City under his mayorship.

We’re indeed in a new phase of the struggle against authoritarianism in the U.S. — and it’s helpful to step back to track where we are and adjust our bearings accordingly. We’ve shaken off the early months of shock and the steamrolled losses. Now we’re showing we can sometimes defend and even get on the offensive.

To a tiny degree, this shift is being tracked in legacy media. They are noting that we have finally found some upper limits to the Republican party blindly following Donald Trump. Indiana Republicans are holding against his demand for redistricting. The Epstein files have broken wide open, forcing Trump into a public retreat and “allowing” votes for the release of the files — something he had adamantly fought against.

As usual, the media traces the causes of all of this very poorly. They talk about election results, and how the landslide win for the Democratic Party revealed a dramatic shift that can be read as a popular referendum on Trump. But they largely miss how much the elections benefited from arguably the largest single protest in U.S. history, the No Kings protest. Or the fact that the resistance is spreading deep into so-called Trump country.

This new phase is positive news. It also presents new struggles and will likely increase levels of violence as the opposition fears its side is weakening. 

Using a framework from Freedom Trainers, a network teaching folks across America about collective noncompliance and mass noncooperation, here’s a hot take on where we are on the “phases of anti-authoritarian struggle.”

Phase 0: Shock and chaos

We remember this painful phase. Organizations went into retreat or fell into disarray. Individuals turned off the news or felt paralyzed when they did take it in. It was chaotic as attacks came from everywhere.

In that phase, the dictator‐in‐chief asserted powers seemingly unopposed. Federal agencies including the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services and the Border Patrol were taken over with bureaucratic whimpers but no coordinated, sustained push-back. We saw early capitulations: several law firms surrendered rather than risk fighting the administration, and campuses quietly ceded ground in the face of pressure.

This phase brought devastating losses: the death of the U.S. Agency for International Development; the massive funding surge toward ICE, acting as a new paramilitary force; funding cuts from school lunch programs, roll-backs on climate protections; firings of scientists and researchers tracking things like infectious diseases, weather patterns and the labor market; and open violence against trans people. Choose Democracy released a conservative estimate of more than 600,000 deaths around the world resulting from policies set in motion during those early months.

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Resistance to Trump is everywhere — inside the first 50 days of mass protest

But the shock wasn’t the whole story. Yes, there were no giant street marches. But people were shaking off shock in a myriad of resistance strategies — from federal bureaucrats refusing Musk’s five-line email, to the Feb. 28 economic blackout, to thwarting ICE raids, to politicians refusing Trump’s renaming of Denali Mountain. The chaos made it hard to observe, discern and track these trends.

People were just starting to understand the extremes of the authoritarian overreach — from tariff edicts, to agency seizures, to brazen power grabs.

But inside the movement, we were beginning to not only act, but to build our collective power.

Phase 1: Gathering strength

By March, some of us were beginning to move out of the chaos to come together. Tesla protests — which had started in random showrooms in February and individual acts of selling their cars — were organized into a national campaign under Tesla Takedown. By March the campaign had a website, coordinating actions in 250 cities globally.

In this phase the movement gets more connected, organized and tests different approaches and tactics.

March was also when Rachel Cohen publicly resigned from her law firm, which had capitulated to Trump’s demands. That would have been just another small move among many chaotic acts of resistance, except she then organized — getting a list of lawyers to publicly object to Trump. Firms that caved lost significant clients, talent and credibility. In the ensuing months, law firms stopped their shameless capitulations.

A similar dynamic unfolded with universities — which was organized, like many other institutions, from below. Todd Wolfson, the president of American Association of University Professors, explained that they built an “aligned table” with students and alumni to mobilize colleagues around free speech and institutional integrity. Students likewise pushed back with walkouts organized by the Sunrise Movement.

We can feel the strength they built because, like law firms, university administrators and  boards are, to varying degrees, no longer reflexively capitulating. Remember, Harvard first ran straight to the negotiating table, hiring one of the first firms that had caved to represent them. Harvard only ended up resisting because the Trump regime’s demands became too extreme and in response to organized pressure from within. Their resistance against Trump’s pressure campaign has remained.

All this work doesn’t mean huge losses aren’t still accruing, but the organizing is gaining strength, whereas before it was nothing but losses.

Most of this phase goes unreported by legacy media. They ignored all the nightly pots-and-pans protests organized by Free DC. In federally occupied cities like LA and Memphis, they looked for any whiff of violence by protesters to spin a narrative, but ignored the extent of community resistance to state violence ripping families apart. They overlooked jurors quietly handing “not-guilty” verdicts to anti-ICE protesters. And they missed nurses standing on the frontlines with trans folks and refusing to normalize laws that institutionalize transphobia. 

For the most part, the gathering phase is the “quiet build” stage. One of its hallmarks is an openness to building new coalitions. Movement groups and insiders found common cause in new ways. Institutionalists and revolutionaries understood they are part of a bigger movement. 

Phase 2: Handling cycles of attack

Where Trump was met with pressure, he pivoted to other areas. He militarized cities. He relentlessly signed racist, sexist, transphobic, classist, hateful, shameful executive orders. His regime took greater control of Washington D.C., gutted the National Institutes of Health and Environmental Protection Agency, and obtained control of the Department of Justice.

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Then there were frog costumes. And the Disney boycott in solidarity against Jimmy Kimmel’s censorship.

We didn’t just stop capitulating and obeying in advance — we entered Phase 2 of handling the cycles of attack. Handling here doesn’t quite mean winning on defense — because our communities suffered greatly. 

Sometimes we stopped bad things. Disney’s reversal on Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension followed a rapid boycott by 1.7 million people. Tesla Takedown cleaved Elon Musk out of government. Backed by movement lawyers, courts showed they were able to slow or stop many of the worst excesses.

Sometimes we changed the narrative: After the intense militarization of multiple cities, Portland undermined Trump’s frame of dangerous antifa and rapist illegals with frog costumes.

Sometimes we couldn’t stop the harm, but we could muster a meaningful defense. Community and immigrant groups ramped up resistance to ICE raids. Politicians got arrested alongside protesters, giving national credence to movement efforts.

In that sense we were proving to our people and our community we could handle the attacks. 

But that’s different from stopping the attacks. It’s still defensive.

A key part of handling an attack is learning to make it backfire. Trump’s ruthless efforts may have won him the government shutdown, but it also lost him considerable support. He showed he would rather make people starve and stunt travel infrastructure rather than agree to lower health care premiums for most Americans. 

Another way to track the changes is by looking at how much more activity there is. After the first No Kings march in June, lots of people asked, “What do we do next?” After the second No Kings march in October, lots of people produced lists, suggested actions and urged various tactics. We’ve shaken off the shock. We’re scheming and fighting back.

The chaotic days of steamrolling are over. Every organization and institution across the country has a Plan A and Plan B for when the goons come knocking. Not all tactics and efforts will work, of course. Some are inherently flawed, too cautious or operating from an outdated playbook. 

As groups make plans, a challenge they face is maintaining the early openness they had in earlier phases — the “beginner’s mindset” of “we don’t know how to solve this.” That allowed Tesla Takedown to weave together various peoples: rich Tesla owners with anti-capitalists, pissed-off working class folks who knew they’d been exploited with polite middle-class sign holders. 

It’s worth pointing out that for some groups there’s been seemingly no relief. There are so many frontlines and it’s hard to hold them all in our hearts and show solidarity everywhere. In Memphis, 1,500 National Guard troops are integrated into the city’s violent police forces. Immigrants face unrelenting ICE raids, detentions and deportations. Trans folks have borne disproportionate impact: threats of passport-removal threats, institutional abandonment by allies, and a fully hostile federal government. Farming communities have been crushed by crashing prices and shifting exports. 

So this model doesn’t assume we are all in the exact same phase at the same time. Some of us will experience relief as others experience greater hardship. Staying in rhythm with solidarity remains a challenge. It’s helpful if we can remember that whenever we feel some relief it’s likely at another group’s back-breaking moment — and vice versa.

In fact, the Freedom Trainer’s model prepares folks by showing how there’s not a singular line of progression. Instead, there’s a lot of cycling between Phase 1 and Phase 2, as our opponents see us building and growing power, feel threatened by it and retaliate. Phase 2 is handling these cycles of attack that have different targets and use escalated violence. 

But we are moving in some better formations and moving towards more offense — and that’s when we tip-toe into mass action.

Phase 3: Mass action

While we will continue to gather strength and handle attacks — we are also now building for the next phase. There won’t be one singular moment of all-out pushback or one decisive mass action. Like the other stages, it will be iterative. 

Nadine Bloch laid out different mass noncooperation tactics that we might use: economic boycotts, worker/mass strikes, tax resistance, social noncooperation, opposition fraternization, building alternative structures/institutions/support, jury nullification and civil servant/internal regime noncooperation. 

We have now occasionally dipped into this phase of mass action. Seven million activated protesters is nothing to sneeze at. And it is well documented by researchers that protests translate into greater fundraising, voter turnout and public activation.

Protests this year have already helped inspire people to vote against Trump’s authoritarianism. The resounding losses in recent elections are accentuating fissures in the MAGA coalition. As could be seen with Mamdani’s victory, the elections also allowed movement forces to advance an offensive framework on affordability.

To reach the more muscular tactics en masse that Nadine writes about, we need to find our offensive footing. “No Kings” is the “no” message. We need to find the “positive” articulation of our demands.

I suspect we’ll land close to a message that’s like “freedom for all.” We need to assure each other that we are not leaving each other behind — that it’s all of us, or none. We’ll likely find mass action around issues that impact everyone: health care for all, housing for all, security for all, affordability for all.

Finding unified demands organically will help us move towards mass collective action. Developing new skills will also be critical. We need strike schools, jury nullification trainings, election protection operations and mutual aid. 

And organizing is critical too. A mass action doesn’t start on social media alone. It happens when relationships are strengthened and even built with people we haven’t organized with yet. Trust must grow and people need to be ready to improvise. Major strikes don’t happen because they are planned, per se — they respond to unanticipated moments. 

Last, we must stay ready and not assume that because Democrats won the elections this time, we’re safe. Trump has made clear his plan to tilt elections until Republican control is inevitable. We have to stay on our game.

So let’s look out for each other. Let’s care for each other. Let’s fight with everything we’ve got. We can get through this — and we can build something better.

This article We’re entering a new phase of the resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/11/we-are-entering-new-phase-resistance-trump-authoritarianism/