Above photo: Day Without a Woman San Francisco attendees stand on the steps of City Hall, holding various signs and a banner reading “Resist”. Pax Ahimsa Gethen / Wikimedia Commons.
Trump’s MAGA juggernaut has many vulnerabilities.
But these will not automatically lead to its downfall. That will require an active struggle to defend society against the MAGA assault — it will require in short, “social self-defense.” How can MAGA’s vulnerabilities be utilized to defend society, terminate Trump’s rule, and in the meantime limit the damage he can do?
French Prime Minister George Clemenceau once warned that “generals always prepare to fight the last war, especially if they won it.” Conditions in 2025 differ in many ways from those of 2017. Social Self-Defense against Trumpian autocracy in the new MAGA era will fail if it is simply a rerun of the first Trump Resistance. Its strategy will have to pay continuous attention to what the Trump regime is doing, how people are reacting, and what opportunities for action those developments open or close.
Trump’s actions and popular response are highly unpredictable, so his opponent’s strategies will have to be highly flexible. Further, Social Self-Defense will unfold in the context of the global polycrisis, which is likely to be marked by “unknown unknowns” like unanticipated wars, pandemics, and climate catastrophes. We can, however, look back at past experiences and see what examples might be worth drawing on and what pitfalls need to be avoided.
The first Trump Resistance was not based on an overall plan or strategy for the anti-MAGA movement as a whole. It largely grew out of diverse responses to what was happening – people’s immediate feelings and needs. With benefit of hindsight, we may be able to be more intentional today, but we still must recognize the importance of how people respond to their lived reality.
Social Self-Defense against today’s MAGA assault is already emerging in many forms, from organizing to protect immigrants from deportation raids, to noncooperation by government employees with DOGE commands, to daily lawsuit planning Zooms by Democratic state Attorneys-General, to raucous confrontations at politicians’ town meetings. Such pushback has already slowed or halted some early Trump initiatives, such as the freeze on government grant payments. How can these beginnings develop into an effective strategy for defending society against the MAGA onslaught?
The Unfolding Of Social Self-Defense
It is possible that Trump’s actions and the broader MAGA agenda, despite the harm they are doing to individuals, constituencies, and society as a whole, will not provoke sufficient opposition to significantly undermine MAGA power. Induced fear and helplessness, combined with entertaining circuses and the promise of bread “just around the corner,” may demobilize even a population being ravaged by Trumpian devastation. Other factors, known and unknown, may further help Trump to perpetuate his rule.
Trump’s greatest vulnerability is the harm he is doing to individuals, groups, the American people, and the global future. The cold reality of harm is the chink in the MAGA armor. In the abyss of Nazi rule, the exiled German writer Bertolt Brecht wrote the poem “In Times of Extreme Persecution”:
Once you’ve been beaten
What will remain?
Hunger and sleet and
Driving rain.
“Who’ll point the lesson?
Just as of old
Hunger and cold
Will point the lesson.[1]
It is up to those harmed by MAGA to create the means for translating the experience of harm to people and society into Social Self-Defense. Defeating Trump requires a shift in power away from him and his supporters to his opponents. That process depends on cumulative disillusion and repudiation. Social Self-Defense can play midwife to that process.
Social Self-Defense is not an organization – it is a set of practices to be engaged in by myriad organizations, hopefully in close cooperation with each other. It can draw on both established and newly emerging organizations, as the first Trump Resistance incorporated thousands of local self-organized groups, newly emerging national networks, and long-established national organizations. Social Self-Defense need not become a single organization or umbrella group. But it requires that issue- and constituency-based groups expand beyond siloed practices to act in concert with each other to resist the Trump agenda.
The success of Social Self-Defense will depend on combining civil resistance in social institutions and the streets with political resistance in the institutions of governance. It will take months or years for the Trump regime to eviscerate, coopt, or eliminate all the institutions that might resist it. There are still courts, legislatures, local and state governments, legal, medical, educational, labor, media, and other civil society institutions. Social Self-Defense can be pursued in part through supporting and strengthening those institutions willing and able to resist Trumpian tyranny. While there is at present little opportunity for an “inside game” that attempts to influence the Trump administration from within, cooperation with anti-Trump politicians and institutional leaders where they exist is essential to the success of Social Self-Defense.
The Trump regime started with a furious flurry of actions designed to provide red meat to followers and put opponents off-balance. Social Self-Defense needs to respond in ways that make it clear that Trump cannot simply have his way unopposed. Even if many of his initial moves can’t be halted, it is important to show that they cannot be imposed without opposition. As his intentions become manifested in actions, it is necessary to oppose them and show the harm they are wreaking, by means of legislative action where possible and through action in the streets. It is necessary to pressure Democrats to expose and fight MAGA policies and to present an alternative to Trumpism that has wide popular appeal rather than just representing the interests of a different faction of the plutocratic class. Opponents based in civil society outside the electoral system can strengthen their performance of these tasks by drawing together a non-electoral opposition, the subject of a later Commentary in this series.
MAGA forces will undoubtedly continue and expand their longstanding efforts to cripple opposition in the electoral system through voter suppression, intimidation, gerrymandering, and similar anti-democratic techniques. These efforts will continue to be challenged in the electoral system, in the courts, and by direct action. The success of the two sides will be hanging in the balance. The result of successful resistance may be a period of dual power, in which Trump remains in office but is unable to implement his agenda because of popular opposition.
In the event that the electoral system is still functioning as more than a rubber stamp for MAGA power, the 2026 elections will provide a major opportunity to end MAGA hegemony, as I will discuss in a later Commentary in this series. Both direct and electoral action should aim to dramatize the harm MAGA is doing, expose the illusion of its invincibility, and project a positive alternative. The aim is a massive repudiation of Trump and the MAGA agenda. If the Republican Party loses control of one or both houses of Congress, that will put a powerful brake on the MAGA juggernaut.
Conversely, if the Republican Party remains in control of the presidency, the Supreme Court, and both houses of Congress, it may be well on its way to establishing a long-lasting authoritarian para-fascist regime led by an autocratic dictator. Under those circumstances, Social Self-Defense will depend primarily on action taken outside the electoral arena.
Sometimes those in power come to be despised by a large proportion of the population, but political repression and the gutting of the institutions of democracy make elections and other normal democratic procedures ineffective as vehicles for eliminating them. Under such conditions, people in many parts of the world have turned to mass nonviolent popular uprisings, sometimes referred to as “people power” or “social strikes,” as I will discuss in a later commentary. Such mobilizations have removed authoritarian regimes in such countries as Poland, the Philippines, Serbia, and most recently South Korea. They represent the ultimate power of Social Self-Defense, with an entire society withdrawing cooperation and support from a regime and making its continued rule impossible. They often grow out of previous forms of Social Self-Defense. The developing resistance to MAGA para-fascism should aim to lay the groundwork for such action should it ultimately become necessary.
The end-game? Sooner or later replacement of para-fascism by democracy will need to be ratified by free elections.
The next commentary in this series will discuss strategic guidelines for Social Self-Defense.
[1] Bertolt Brecht, “In Times of Extreme Persecution,” in Poems 1913-1956. Methuen New York:, 1976. https://threefoldpress.org/booksandquotations