My Weekend of Anti-Trump, Anti-Musk “Defiance”

A woman of my demographic then sat down next to me, taking a short break for a moment. Retiree Linda Stevens said it was her first anti-Trump protest of any kind this time around. “I felt like I needed to take some kind of action instead of reading The New York Times and deploring things,” she told me. “All rationality has been thrown to the wind.” She marveled at the range of protest signs and T-shirts, ranging from “Beto for Senate” to “Park Rangers United” to “Third Act” to many different labor unions. “There’s just so much to protest,” she marveled. Then she got up to rejoin the crowd.

The two most visible signs, banners hoisted by multiple people, included a popular one reading “Would Have Fought The Nazis? Now’s Your Chance.” More divisive was “Burn a Tesla. Save Democracy.” That kind of rhetoric, backed by very rare vandalism against Tesla, have led whiny man-baby Musk to call such moves “domestic terrorism.” Backed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, that could lead even to peaceful protests, conceivably, being criminalized. But there was no vandalism on Saturday. (A few people were arrested at this site for property damage two weeks ago.) The only slightly divisive moment came when a contingent began adding “Free, Free, Free Palestine” to other chants. A group of four older people filed past me to leave at that point. “You just lost me,” one man said. “Me too,” said a female companion.

That was the only topic debated on a #TeslaTakedown message board that I saw after the group dispersed. Most of the 10 people (only 10) writing about it on the message board complained about adding that demand to the demonstration; one argued that with Trump snatching pro-Palestinian protesters off the streets without due process, a robust anti-Trump movement can’t ignore the issue. I’m just the reporter here.

Despite reports of DOGE counterprotests planned for the day, I only saw a handful of isolated counterprotesters in Manhattan. (In Idaho, Oregon and Fresno, California, an assortment of Proud Boys, militia members, and one guy dressed like Hitler showed up, but they were outnumbered by takedown supporters.) In Manhattan, a fashed-up, bulked-up guy in tight black clothing, taking photos of the crowd on his iPhone, clashed with an older anti-Trump protester, but both police and other members of the crowd separated them quickly. An earnest teen in a Green Bay Packers cap accosted someone carrying a pro-trans-rights sign, telling him that “most” trans people regret transitioning (it’s a tiny but well-documented minority), so he’s actually the one championing trans rights. Remarkably, people in the crowd argued rationally with the child. They’re better than me.

Given the rise and spread of anti-Trump, anti-Musk protest, as well as the attacks on those who resist, Representative. Pramila Jayapal designed a “Resistance Lab,” to train people in the principles of nonviolent resistance, as we see institutions from universities to giant law firms to mainstream media companies capitulate to Trump’s threats, while Democrats dither in Congress, and Republicans continue selling their souls to Trump.

I attended the Zoom meeting on Sunday, where I was joined by at least 1,300 attendees from 31 states and three countries (Canada and Austria). That number far exceeded the 500 people who showed up in person in Seattle on March 22.

“We want to help you seed and coordinate these nonviolent resistance actions,” Jayapal told Zoom, “And to be able to understand your risk tolerance,” as the risk of Trump cracking down on other forms of protest escalates.

She introduced Erica Chenoweth, whose research into the surprisingly robust anti-Trump defiance I noted above has helped people feel their own power, Jayapal said. “I wake up every morning with the same anxiety you do,” Chenoweth confessed. But the growing activism she sees steels her spine. Nevertheless, what she called “a global democratic recession” every year for the last 17 years has been weakening democracy worldwide, reducing the number of countries that are democratic and elevating autocracy. In 2024 that trend accelerated with the anti-incumbent wave that gave us Trump 2.0. In March, Monty Marshall of the Polity Project downgraded the United States from a democracy to a “non-democracy,” due to what he called an “executive coup,” and a “total lack of checks and balances of the executive.” Examples range from dismantling congressionally mandated agencies like USAID, attacks on science and universities, attempts to erase civil rights with anti-DEI measures, and the accelerating arrests and deportations of non-U.S. citizens either allegedly here illegally or here legally but who have exercised their civil rights in ways that Trump deplores, such as pro-Palestinian students Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.

The lesson from struggles elsewhere, she said, is that “institutions alone don’t save us.” From Poland to South Africa to Chile to the Jim Crow South to 2024 South Korea, Chenoweth said, “successful pro-democracy movements have relied on “strong and sustained grassroots and grasstops mobilization,” adding “every tyrant is dependent on the cooperation and obedience and help of thousands of people…autocratic power is extremely fragile.” She outlined the five-segment spectrum of political opinion in the US from “active opposition” to the anti-Trump movement to “active allies,” with passive and neutral folks in between, and said the secret to building a successful resistance is to nudge each group a little bit to the left, a little bit away from the autocrat. But to do that, she said, these movements need to get pretty big and develop momentum. Still, global studies show that mobilizing just 3.5 percent of the population against the authoritarian leader, in this case Trump, can topple the regime.

Movements have to maintain “resilience and discipline,” she warned, in the face of violence, which she predicted will escalate here. “That means having a plan for nonviolent resistance as well as noncooperation.” Chenoweth ended by pointing to the emotions that mobilize people (“anger and hope, together”) and those that demobilize people (“fear and a sense of powerlessness,” in particular), and closed with: “You’re not alone, and you don’t need to do anything alone.”

Jayapal then walked through the principles of nonviolence, heavily based on the US civil rights movement, and how to deploy it against a rising tide of repression that is only certain to grow. She outlined ways of “raising the costs on perpetrators” of anti-resistance violence that can ultimately backfire on autocrats.

You can find Chenoweth and Jayapal’s talks and slide presentations here; they’re incredibly useful whether you want to just watch, to read through, or to get organized. To me, the most important stuff came out of the small focus groups. People began planning “die-ins” at their local Social Security offices, posting billboards in red areas educating people about Social Security and Medicare cuts (again, a lot of seniors here), and expanding messaging to convince Americans that “this is about all of us,” as in almost every American except the super-wealthy will be hurt by the Trump-Musk autocracy.

Is this enough “defiance”? Of course not. But Jayapal and Sifry agree that it will not be enough to rely on the courts, or to channel people exclusively toward, say, the 2026 midterms (although if you’re in a state with an election this year, get out and vote; there’s the April 1 Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, as well as special elections in Florida). Damage, even death, is occurring in our names right now. The lack of USAID support is killing victims of the Myanmar earthquake as I write. The HIV/AIDS drugs withdrawn by the PEPFAR shuttering is killing sick people in Africa.

The rise in local, distributed protests, from #TeslaTakedowns to GOP town halls, is encouraging, but participants also need tools, ideas, inspiration and, as Chenoweth put it, the sense that “you’re not alone, and you don’t need to do anything alone.” The enthusiasm both at my local Tesla protest and the Resistance Lab Zoom buoyed my languishing optimism that we can wake ourselves up from this nightmare, together.