America Fights Back Against A Flailing Would-Be Dictator
“Strong leaders don’t bring the full might and power of the United States of America to fire comedians, to terrorize little girls. These are the moves of a leader who fears his people.” — Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible.
As the lawlessness of the Trump administration reaches new heights, millions of Americans are preparing to take to the streets in protest on Oct. 18. Over 5 million turned out for the first No Kings protest on June 14, in more than 2,100 locations nationwide and overseas, dwarfing the meager crowds for the military parade Trump ordered on his birthday. Here in LA, it took the wind out of Trump’s first attempt at a militarized takeover of an American city.
“We were entirely peaceful,” recalled Hunter Dunn, 50501’s Southern California spokesman, a lead organizer of the Downtown LA march and protest. “But it was very clear that there was no way for the federal government to keep control of Los Angeles and that the rest of the country stood with them. So the occupation basically just slowly declined after that,” he said. “But… in other ways, the Trump administration has only gotten worse and more dangerous and more offensive to the American way of life. Right now, Portland is under attack from the Trump administration, as is Chicago. DC is still under occupation.”
But opposition has intensified, too, he noted, in all those cities and more, as well as in the backlash that put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air, despite not-so-veiled threats from Trump’s FCC.
And so No Kings 2 looks to be even larger. Here in the Southland alone — from Avalon to Joshua Tree, Dana Point to Oxnard, and Palmdale to Palm Springs — more than 60 local protests have been planned more than two weeks in advance. That’s in addition to the main Downtown LA march and demonstration, which starts at 2 p.m., timed so that people attend after local events, Dunn explained. Torrance and Long Beach events run from 10 to 2, while Lakewood runs 12 to 2.
“It’s shaping up to be even larger than the one we had in June, which was huge,” said Heather Rodriguez, with Lakewood Indivisible. “The resistance just keeps growing, and the more the Trump administration tips their hand towards fascism, the more obvious it is that this isn’t something you can just kick down the road till later,” she said. “It’s something that we need to oppose as strongly and peacefully as we can right now.”
“We’ve seen continuing authoritarianism, continuing breaking of the law and unconstitutionality, especially in like bigger cities like LA where we have masked, armed, masked men who don’t identify themselves and are kidnapping our neighbors off the streets,” said Kenny Johnson with Indivisible South Bay. “People are not okay with this.”
“What citizens have is their numbers and their voice. Those are our tools. So you’ve gotta employ those numbers and that voice,” said Melanie Jones with San Pedro Indivisible. “Courage begets courage, and we need a lot of courage right now. People need to push back. It’s essential.”
“Amongst all of this chaos and anxiety, it’s great to be able to give people an opportunity to do something that feels productive, and that is in community, and gives them an opportunity to express themselves in whatever way they want,” said Ashley Craig, with Indivisible Long Beach. “It can be a sign with lots of expletives, or it can be a peace sign, and they can hand out stickers and flowers to people in the crowd.”
“We’re going to include speeches, singing, a food drive to help benefit people [who] would have been impacted by ICE,” said Rodriguez. “And we’re going to have a rendition of the famous protesting anthem Bread and Roses, which is about the fight against injustice, and for a better quality of life. There’s some really amazing lines in that poem that have been applicable since the early 1900s. We’re going to have a coordinated visibility action spelling out ‘No King’ and rallying along Park Avenue.”
While a broad show of strength on Oct. 18 is important, continuing to build the underlying long-term organized resistance is what matters most. Johnson in particular cited the work of Erica Chenoweth, who found that nearly every nonviolent protest movement with active participation from at least 3.5% of the population succeeded in driving the government from power. “I don’t think that’s like a magic thing, if all of a sudden we get 3.5% out on No Kings Two,” he said. But it’s a way of seeing things in a broader perspective, which in turn underscores the role of a broader culture of resisting authoritarianism.
Along those lines, all the Indivisible chapters contacted have had some involvement, direct or indirect, in anti-ICE activism. Indivisible South Bay works with “a lot of different organizations,” Johnson said, including the Hill Network, which does day labor outreach, including care packages, and “South Bay for All,” which “has been doing like rental aid for vendors shut down” for fear of ICE raids.
“The smaller daily ongoing protests or the small disobediences, the small resistances are so important,” Hernandez said. “With our group, we do a lot of mutual aid. We have a lot of people that are working directly with impacted community members, like day laborers [who have] been contacted by ICE or are concerned about getting contacted by ICE, and we do what we can to try to keep everyone safe and fed and access to the resources that they need.”
They’ve also been involved in voter outreach and registration in support of Prop. 50, the Election Rigging Response Act, which will allow California to offset the Trump-ordered Texas gerrymander — perhaps the most blatant admission of how unpopular his policies have become.
Long Beach Indivisible has been involved with both sorts of activism as well. “We have this Harbor Peace Patrol thing happening here in San Pedro, which is the most visible and organized pushback against ICE that I know of,” Jones said. “We are offering advertising support through Indivisible San Pedro and encouraging anybody who wants to get involved.”
They’re also involved in a campaign called “Signs of Solidarity,” which encourages business owners to display signs in their windows that read, “Immigrants are welcome” and “We don’t support what’s happening.”
And with Prop. 50, “The nice thing about this statewide proposition is that a vote here in San Pedro is going to be just as meaningful as a vote anywhere else in the state, so we don’t have to go to Orange County or the Valley to feel like we’re making a difference,” she said. So they’re canvassing on foot on Sundays as well as phone-banking more widely on Fridays. [See Community Alerts.]
“Jimmy Kimmel was definitely a line in the sand. … It was so much more overt than Stephen Colbert,” said Craig. “Disney is actually my former employer,” so it struck close to home. As a retired finance and audit professional, she was both heartened by the response that saved Kimmel’s job and disheartened by the relative silence in response to the firing of Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“That was like a ‘holy crap this is like the world is burning down!’” Craig said. “What is going to happen to U.S. financial markets if the head of the BLS can just be fired if the regime doesn’t like the numbers? To me, that was a huge deal, but it seemed just to be shrugged off.”
Autocrats controlling information and undermining the rule of law pose severe threats to businesses as well as individuals, but businesses often realize that too late. Craig herself has had first-hand experience. In 2016, “I spent three weeks in Moscow working on a project” and more time thereafter. “It was really difficult,” she said. “ I said I don’t understand why Disney is here, and I think we should close the office. … It’s not a good work environment. It’s not. There’s very little trust.” At the time, “The director that I was working for kind of laughed me off,” she said, but “Disney subsequently closed their office and closed all of their operations in Russia.”
The same dynamic could play out here, as well. The U.S. is a huge part of the global economy, far larger than Russia. But with no way of knowing how the rules might change overnight, confidence in the U.S. could crumble, too.
“Americans seem to think that, you know, that we own exceptionalism, and that we’re special,” Craig said. “We’re not special. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time “
Trump’s tariff wars could be only the beginning. His approval on the economy has plunged by more than 30 points in multiple polls since he took office in January. Nothing he is doing has majority support. Corporate leaders, law firms, and other wealthy elites who gave in to him early created a false sense of momentum that’s rapidly unraveling. His rants about non-existent war zones only make him seem increasingly unhinged.
There are two contrasting perspectives on Trump’s trajectory in international terms. Compared to regimes like Russia, Hungary, and Poland, Trump is moving much faster to try to consolidate power, bending universities to his will, destroying popular programs, and putting allied oligarchs in control of major media. But compared to his black-and-white extremist rhetoric and the conspiracy-fueled beliefs of his base, Trump’s actions seem woefully weak, Dunn pointed out.
“There’s an extreme level of cowardice,” Dunn said. “The administration is run by incredibly cowardly and incompetent people. They completely failed at having any sort of moment that would be that total control-grabbing. They tried that. They’ve been trying with the occupation of LA and DC and Portland, Chicago, and each one of those has completely failed in that goal.”
“They tried on Jan. 6,” he added. “But they were too cowardly to actually even take credit for it. They’re still trying to convince us to this day that it was an FBI inside job.”
So, without the courage to seize power completely and totally, despite Trump’s rhetoric, “They’re trying to do it slowly, incrementally, and it just doesn’t work that way, because every step of the way we can challenge them, and we can win. With Jimmy Kimmel, we won. With LA, we won.” Other fights are ongoing, but again, in Portland, a Trump-appointed judge has repeatedly ruled against his efforts to bring in troops. “This is not a good model of dictatorship,” Dunn said. “This is a very weak group of people, and they can be defeated and they can be defeated peacefully,” simply by refusing to go along.
“During Jan. 6, Trump tried to take charge, and the Secret Service restrained him to stop him from doing whatever he wanted to do. We need that again en masse. We’re pushing for it.”
“It’s important that people not be afraid,” Johnson said.
“Everybody can push back a little bit,” Jones added. “Everybody can do something. And we have to. If we want to keep our democracy, we have to.”
“I think more and more people are starting to appreciate how the authoritarianism that’s here now — it’s not something that could happen, it is actually happening, how it’s impacting their lives,” said Craig, which will mean even bigger crowds for No Kings Two.