Trump’s repression of dissent is backfiring

This article Trump’s repression of dissent is backfiring was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article is adapted from a Choose Democracy newsletter email.

One of the big psychological challenges of this time is: How do we measure progress while an authoritarian remains in power?

I’ve noticed more than a few folks feeling especially underwater recently — understandable given the weight of awful policies and cruelties emerging from the White House and its minions.

For our own health, we cannot let our yardstick be measured by whether we have stopped the authoritarian from doing anything. The reality is, he has the power to wake up and do awful things every day.

As I’ve written before, resistance to an authoritarian regime is measured by greater unity, greater nonviolent discipline in the face of violence, greater numbers and greater ability to provoke defections.

So how are we doing? Allow me to skip around with a few thoughts.

Hands off Ohio

On June 11, in a shameless act of interference with elections, the FBI raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, or OOC. The OOC is a well-respected organization that helps register voters, especially Black and brown voters in this swing state.

Over 100 federal agents descended upon Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and Youngstown, Ohio simultaneously. Agents arrived at the OOC’s northeast Ohio office armed with batons and guns. Agents showed up at the homes of the organization’s leadership and employees, seeking electronic devices and in some cases carrying subpoenas, pressing people about alleged voter fraud — sometimes in front of their children — and following them to work and school.

The scale is staggering. The timing was calculated. And the impact was not at all what they hoped.

The hope, of course, was that this would scare off others from doing voter registration work — and that it would send the work underground. They cannot win the election, so they have to change the rules and tilt the playing field (especially with Ohio’s critical U.S. Senate race).

But it hasn’t worked out.

A national effort coalesced to support Hands Off Ohio. A cross-partisan group of former Ohio Supreme Court justices, former Ohio attorneys general and legal leaders signed a letter condemning the raids as an attack on democracy. These are not people who usually stand together. That they are standing together now is a signal. (Greater defections — a key yardstick!)

To be fair, some people are worried enough that they are training in what to do if the FBI shows up. (Record the interaction, don’t answer questions and don’t assume their warrant — if they have one — is valid without taking a close look.) But a lot of that is not fear — it’s preparation.

And importantly, the OOC didn’t shrink. Board member Prentiss Haney said plainly: “The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is not going to stop its work. If anything, it’s going to continue to build upon this work and make sure that our faith leaders and our community leaders and working-class folks know that we’re going to stand with them and not let them be intimidated by forces who want to use political power to stop them from engaging in fair elections.”

They’ve done what everyone should do when repressed by this government for doing good work — double down on the good work. In response to the raid, they’ve held expanded public voter registration drives across the state. (They’re holding a statewide clergy call this week.)

My mentor used to say there are two motions to the universe: getting smaller or getting bigger. The authoritarian strategy relies on a particular theory: Repress, and people will get smaller. They will hide. They will stop.

That’s not what’s happening here. Folks are getting bigger.

The Minneapolis 15

The same theory — repress, and they’ll collapse — is playing out in Minneapolis, and it is backfiring in real time. If you want to understand the HOPE framework for making repression backfire, read what happened in the Hennepin County jail this week.

The federal government indicted 15 people — including a union carpenter and a Buddhism professor at Macalester College — on conspiracy charges related to the protests against ICE during Operation Metro Surge. Simple acts like posting on Facebook, blowing whistles or identifying ICE vehicles were whipped into a furious frenzied indictment.

MPR News reports that one indictee — an in-home care aide —  had unidentified agents show up at her door. One neighbor explained, “We were on the sidewalk, we had all of our whistles, all of the neighbors came out. And so we were stopping them from taking her because we didn’t know who they were. … They came disguised as work people.” (Greater unity.)

The conspiracy charge is a familiar weapon — we saw it deployed unsuccessfully in Chicago. It’s a legal overreach. In this sense, we could say our authoritarian is less effective than Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Viktor Orbán — all of whom were more successful at putting their opposition into prison.

Of course, as some have pointed out, the process is the punishment — the slow churning of the courts and the criminal justice system’s regular violence. A recent New York Times report illuminates what that isolation looks like for those held in pre-trial detention.

But here is the story that the government cannot control. When Emmett Doyle, a union carpenter and one of the indicted 15, found himself alone in a jail cell, he started singing. Irish rebel songs. Prisoners’ songs. Folk songs from the labor movement. And then something extraordinary happened: A voice from down the hallway shouted a song request, followed by a chorus of laughter and the voices of friends. Suddenly, he wasn’t alone anymore. They sang “Solidarity Forever” in full — the original Industrial Workers of the World version — with increasing gusto. They sang “Bella Ciao” in English, then Italian, then Spanish. They whistled the “Colonel Bogey March” on their way to the hearing. (That’s the yardstick of nonviolent strength in the face of repression.)

Literally through song they found out who else was being held.

As elsewhere, groups unified to condemn the indictment. The next day, people showed up, again, at the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE staged Operation Metro Surge. They faced tear gas again. They remained nonviolent. They kept coming.

Could we do more? Sure.

I’m not attempting to paint a picture of perfection. There are lots of moves not taken and chances to up our acts of solidarity. I keep thinking about dramatic actions that reduce our fear — which I guess is why I keep thinking about Bayard Rustin.

Previous Coverage

Remembering the genius of Bayard Rustin

Rustin arrived in Montgomery, Alabama in February 1956, when the city had dusted off a 1921 anti-boycott law prohibiting conspiracies that interfered with lawful business. The strategy was to scatter the leadership, to make people lay low. The city indicted 89 boycott leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and E.D. Nixon.

Rustin told them: Don’t hide. Move toward the fear. Gandhi had said the same thing — if something frightens you, that’s the direction you should walk. And so E.D. Nixon and dozens of other boycott leaders chose to turn themselves in. Hundreds of supporters gathered outside and cheered leaders who emerged with police citations in hand. Some leaders who arrived discovered they weren’t on the indictment list — and argued to be added. The fear shifted.

What Montgomery’s city government had calculated as a terror became a celebration. The fear inverted. The movement doubled down.

Georgia redistricting

Now let’s talk about Georgia, because what happened there last week is one of the most important things that has happened in months, and it’s not getting nearly enough attention, as with much of the organizing happening in the South right now.

The context: The Supreme Court’s Callais decision earlier this year was devastating. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, resulting in a loss of Black political power comparable only to Reconstruction’s devastating rollback. Southern legislatures rushed to redistrict.

Challenges to the redistricting saw a string of losses: Florida, Tennessee and wild mid-election cancellations in Louisiana and Alabama. And some temporary wins: Mississippi and South Carolina delaying their redistricting for now.

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So Georgia looked like it was going to be a loss. Gov. Brian Kemp called a special session to draw up new districts. And then something remarkable happened. Democrats and civil rights advocates turned the planned special session into a public showdown over minority voting rights. Civil rights organizations, labor unions and community advocates filled the state capitol with chants of “Black voters matter!” (Greater numbers.)

And just hours before the legislature was set to convene, Republican House Speaker Jon Burns announced they would not take up congressional or legislative redistricting.

Let’s pause and assess.

This wasn’t like Indiana’s redistricting, where a few Republicans broke ranks on principle (helped along by protests) — this was a calculation.

When I asked local organizers why they thought Republicans made this call, the answer was plain: Republicans assessed that pushing redistricting would provoke an already-active population into an even greater reaction. They looked at the energy in the streets and decided the political cost of poking the bear was higher than the electoral advantage they’d gain.

They are making an assessment that we are powerful opponents, and they often have a better perception than we do of ourselves. Our opponents are calculating our power and finding it formidable enough to stand down from a fight they wanted to win.

This win emerges largely from the work of Black women organizers and voting rights advocates in the South who have been doing this work for years in a context that has been chronically under-resourced and under-appreciated. (If you’re looking for one place to support, give to Black Voters Matter.) That reckoning deserves to be named.

Fear, not victory

Donald Trump has a fundamental problem: He doesn’t understand humanity. He believes domination results in submission. That’s why he misjudged the Iran war so completely. That’s why he and J.D. Vance entertained doubling down via the Insurrection Act after Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE. That’s why his hoodlums thought they would terrify voter rights groups and citizens standing up for their neighbors.

And that’s why he won’t win — because they fundamentally misunderstand how human nature works.

The UFC cage match theory of political power — that dominance equals effectiveness — is both a moral failure and a strategic one. Their major political prosecutions have collapsed or stalled, and their ability to generate lasting fear has been repeatedly undermined by the courage of ordinary people.

Take heart. This is boldness in many corners.

I’ve said for a long time that in time we’ll learn a bunch of stories of noncooperation happening inside the administration. We just learned a new one: When the Department of Homeland Security and DOGE sent the Social Security Administration a list of 2.7 million citizens and legal residents with instructions to falsely mark them as deceased (destroying lives and opening them to ICE deportations), a career civil servant named Jeremiah Schofield refused the order, and stopped the plan, offering a case study in resisting authoritarian overreach through bureaucratic friction.

And the breadth of public resistance keeps growing. The indefatigable K. Starling reports on the rise of protests in Arkansas — where recently an additional dozen new cities held protests for the first time in the past year.

In Paris, Arkansas, four people protested, including Rev. Dawn Chesser. One lifelong resident of Logan County, Arkansas shared with Chesser that their gathering was the first protest he had ever witnessed in Paris.

“He stated he had been a Trump supporter in 2016, but was no longer because he felt like the current administration is mostly corrupt and in it for financial gain,” Chesser said.

This is a reminder that there are millions of us who are finding ways to resist.

So each of us has a choice right now — do we get smaller, or bigger? More bold, or less?

I think we follow the folks in Ohio, in Minneapolis, in Georgia, in the streets and the jails and the capitol buildings and the Signal group chats.

My encouragement: Keep getting bigger.

This article Trump’s repression of dissent is backfiring was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/06/trump-repression-dissent-backfiring/