As the scope of the incoming Trump Administration becomes clear, I want to remind you that two things can be true at the same time: The second Trump Administration will be an absolute calamity, an unmaking of the 20ᵗʰ century, a loss to democracy and autonomy like we have never witnessed; and we will survive it anyway.
The survival will not be easy; it will not be simple or straightforward. It is unlikely that we will exit the next four years unscathed or that we will emerge better or stronger. Our current environment is difficult enough to survive within, and the federal government is nominally on our side. This Trump Administration will make it significantly harder to live in every way, handing power and authority over everything from employment law to citizenship to our food and medicine to the absolutely worst people to oversee it. But it is not the circumstances that will let us endure; it is that we will find in each other the strength to persist.
Instead of focusing on national politics beyond calling our representatives and demanding more from them, we will get local and put pressure from the bottom up. We will learn about politics close to us, and meet people where they are. The more we embed in our communities and tackle issues on the local level, the more we will realize that perspectives on local politics are less polarized along traditional political lines, and that minds are easier to change. For those of us who don’t already know, we will see how the system works close up and personal, from the ground up, and give ourselves the chance to grab smaller but much more tangible victories that make life better in an immediate way.
Ahead of Congressional midterms in 2026, our 250th national anniversary, we can learn from our political ancestors: the resistance against terrorism and systemic apathy developed during Reconstruction; the tireless commitment to big political goals from the Progressive Era of the early 20th century; the organizing and tactics of the suffrage movement in connecting women across class (with updated awareness of how important it is to connect across race), and the endurance against the loss and horror of the AIDS crisis that transformed into activism that brought coordinated federal attention to turn a death sentence into lives lived freely. While no moment is ever the same as it was, there are important lessons about resilience, dedication, organizing, and the pursuit of political goals against seemingly impossible odds. We can also learn the methods and tactics of the opposition, and see how history echoes, even if it doesn’t repeat.
And we can make the most difficult leap: transforming ourselves. We can decide to become ungovernable in a system that wants our compliance more than anything. In a republic, our politics are built on shared rules and government by consensus; in order to keep it, we must deny ours. We will learn how to reject authority that operates without the legitimacy of our consent; we will never obey in advance, and always challenge the demands of a government that denies our fundamental and natural rights. When they target one of us, we will rally to protect all of us. When they flout our rules, we will hold fast to our principles. And we will never forget, no matter what they say or do, that we always have the human right to self-govern.
This administration is prepared to act beyond authority, with impunity, regardless of what we say or do. They will break laws, shatter what is left of our institutions, ignore the Constitution and flout the rights it guarantees. Or, at least, they will try. The first Trump Administration saw us resist through the system. The second will see us learn a new kind of resistance, one that seeps down to our very bones. And every time they come for something precious— a rule, a law, a group, any of us or all of us — we will force them to earn it.
