For Mahatma Gandhi, violent resistance is never justified. “If there ever could be a justifiable war, in the name of and for humanity,” he wrote November 1938, “war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war.”
German philosopher Martin Buber disagreed, as he told Gandhi in an open letter published two months later:
In the five years I myself spent under the present regime, I observed many instances of genuine satyagraha among the Jews, instances showing a strength of spirit in which there was no question of bartering their rights or of being bowed down, and where neither force nor cunning was used to escape the consequences of their behaviour. Such actions, however, exerted apparently not the slightest influence on their opponents.
On the question of the Nazis, most of us, regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum (at least short of wishing for the Fourth Reich), stand with Buber: violent resistance against government can be justified; the only question is where to draw the line.
Let me preface this discussion by saying that not only am I not an advocate for violence, I’m about 14% hippie, have been to Burning Man four times, and am firmly libertarian (n.b. lowercase L) when it comes to use of force. I begrudgingly accept the need for military and police only because it is an unfortunate fact of human existence that there are some among us who will use brute force to get their way if left unchecked.
But just such people now hold the reins of power in the United States, and they are actively working to dismantle all of our republic’s systemic checks on tyranny, disregarding the Constitution and even basic human rights in order to impose their amoral will. And because sometimes in the course of human events such people do not relinquish that power unless physically forced to do so, the rest of us would do well to discuss and prepare for worst-case what-ifs.
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Whatever false narratives and demagoguery were employed to obtain the end result, Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2024. I did not advocate violence to obstruct the peaceful transition of power; I had to sit and take it. That’s what nonviolent people do in a democratic republic when their fellow citizens choose their leader, however stupid and dangerous the choice.
But otherwise nonviolent people may choose to defend themselves when attacked. Even limiting the definition of “attacked” to direct and illegal assaults on a person’s body and/or liberty, we might consider hundreds of such attacks by the Trump regime since the beginning of his second term, including the deportation of at least two children under age 11 despite their being U.S. citizens in the midst of cancer treatment on this side of the border. But narrowing the focus to just two provides a completely unambiguous view of the regime’s willingness to persecute us at the individual level in the effort to suppress peaceful dissent.
In April, former FBI Director James Comey was, in effect, arrested for an Instagram post showing two numbers, “86” and “47,” spelled out in seashells. It is alleged by Trump’s Department of Justice that Comey was threatening Trump’s life, despite the fact that a) there is no direct evidence that Comey arranged the seashells (however much we might presume otherwise, the caption of his post implies he did not: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk”); and b) it is long established that photography — including the dissemination of such — is protected First Amendment activity. (Not to mention that anyone who bothers to consult a dictionary will see that “86” means “eject,” “reject,” “discard,” “cancel,” etc., with no reference to (as the DOJ claims) “an intent to do harm.”)
Although this may seem like an isolated incident because of Trump’s long-standing fixation on Comey, Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche made it clear that the regime “will never tolerate and [… will] regularly prosecute” such “conduct.”
So we have a regime that is willing to deprive citizens of liberty simply because its apparatchiks don’t like them. And we know from the case of Alex Pretti that when their agents commit murder (however much it may have come about from poor training and overly aggressive leadership), the regime is willing to lie about the circumstances and defame the victim, as then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem did when she falsely claimed that Pretti “reacted violently” to ICE officers in Minneapolis and “committed an act of domestic terrorism, [… intending] to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” So even if we allow for the sake of argument that the regime has not (yet) intentionally carried out extrajudicial killings of U.S. citizens, they have proven willing to justify the practice. Needless to say, this is a small step away from committing such murders with malice of forethought.
Are such acts direct attacks enough to merit violent resistance? If not, is there an increase in their frequency and/or intensity that would? What about if the intended victims are you or your loved ones?
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But the Trump regime has far bigger fish to fry than squelching your First Amendment rights or murdering you for protesting: they aim at nothing less than to remake our Constitutional republic in their fascist image. As Bernie Sanders notes, “the modern Republican Party is an authoritarian cult.” The Atlantic’s David Brooks (a lifelong Republican, btw) neatly summarizes the current state of the Union:
The second Trump administration has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations.
Indeed, Trump has expressed admiration for many of the planet’s autocrats: Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Kim Jong Un . . . you’d be hard-pressed to find a dictator he hasn’t praised. Meanwhile, he has used the epithet ‘dictator’ on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while literally rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin, the architect of Russia’s attempt to wipe Ukraine off the face of the Earth. (And that’s to say nothing of Putin’s renowned willingness to assassinate political foes — a tactic that Trump does not condemn.)
Trump has gone so far as to employ some of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric, from repeatedly demonizing minority groups (e.g., from a 2024 campaign stop: “they’re poisoning the blood of our country”) to tirelessly trying to convince his followers that the press cannot be trusted. (No surprise that Trump, whom Vice President J.D. Vance once speculated might turn out to be “America’s Hitler,” is known to have owned a book of Hitler’s collected speeches and has copped to owning a copy of Mein Kampf.) And according to John Kelly, a retired four-star general and Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff to date, Trump commented that “Hitler did some good things, too” and expressed a desire to have the same sort of blindly loyal military commanders that were part of the Third Reich. Two other White House insiders have reported hearing the same sentiment: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
And embedded in a video posted to Truth Social in May 2024, beneath faux headlines celebrating a second Trump term, underneath the words “WHAT’S NEXT FOR AMERICA?” and “MAGA!!”, we find a singular phrase: “THE CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH”. Whatever the origin of the graphic, its coming out of Trump’s megaphone fits his pattern of using White supremacist dog whistles to appeal to his radical base.
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In the 2024 film Civil War, writer/director Alex Garland imagines a United States where a populist demagogue has refused to step down after serving two terms as president, at which point the people — including parts of the military — take up arms to wrest their democratic republic back from the authoritarians that were abusing the power they had been foolishly handed by the electorate.
If that is the only point at which violent resistance to an American presidential regime is justified, then obviously January 2029 would be the terminus a quo for violent resistance (which is not to say that would be the point to start planning such an eventuality). But if direct interference in our electoral process is the red line, we may have cause sooner. As ProPublica noted in April, “In advance of this year’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished federal guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 election.”
Trump himself has been largely open about his intentions. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said in February. This statement came less than a month after he expressed regret at not seizing voting machines after his 2020 election loss. (Trump attempted to pardon convicted “fake electors” from around the country, as well as Tina Peters, the Mesa, Colorado county clerk whose crimes included a security breach of voting machines.)
In the longer term, Trump appears to have a third term on the brain — and at least some Republicans want him to have it. As soon as Trump was elected for the second time, Congressman Andy Ogles introduced a joint resolution that would, in effect, repeal the 22nd Amendment and allow the president to serve a third term. But even if that goes nowhere, the 22nd Amendment by itself cannot stop Trump.
“States each decide who gets on their presidential ballots, not the federal government,” Baltimore University Law Professor Kimberly Wehle told Newsweek in October. “Ultimately, it’s the party that makes the nomination. If enough states put him on the ballot, the GOP will obviously nominate him. It has put no checks on his illegal behavior whatsoever this far, so it cannot be expected to choose the 22nd Amendment over him.”
However much the Republican Party is a criminal gang, that would be the technically legal way to get Trump a third term. But it would be surprising if this is the only route Trump & co. are weighing. We would do well to take seriously the asseveration of Trump puppetmaster Steve Bannon: “Trump is going to be president in ‘28, and people ought to just get accommodated to that.”
Ironically (though not surprisingly), being that Trump regarded those jailed for the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol as “hostages” and “political prisoners” and pardoned over 1,500 of them on the first day of his current term, clearly our president endorses violent resistance to election interference (at least were we to give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually believes his claims of ballot-fixing and voter fraud).
And from his recent efforts to use $1.776 billions of taxpayer money (the ironically named “Anti-Weaponization Fund”) to give payouts to any of his supporters claiming to be persecuted by the Biden administration, he is apparently suborning future such acts of violence, as the funds would be potentially available to January 6 insurrectionists. As stated in a lawsuit brought by two Capitol police officers assaulted by the mob, “by its very existence, the Fund encourages those who enacted violence in the President’s name to continue to do so” and would “finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.”
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As a faithful pragmatist, it would be remiss for me to consider violent resistance even for the sake of argument without paying due attention to whether such resistance is generally more or less successful than nonviolent resistance.
A 2008 study of “all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns [for regime change] from 1900 to 2006” — total number: 323 — posited that nonviolent campaigns were more effective. According to NPR, the researchers “found that major nonviolent campaigns are successful 53% of the time, while violent campaigns are successful only 26% of the time.”
But NPR got it wrong, because the research tells us only what was successful, not what is or will be successful — or for that matter, whether any of the 47% of nonviolent campaigns that failed might have succeeded had violence been applied.
All that matters is the given case — and here we are talking about resistance to the Trump regime. We have (in theory) a nonviolent system of government, with its “checks and balances,” etc., and it is failing. People have taken to the streets, including what may be the largest single day of protests in U.S. history, and yet the regime’s authoritarian trajectory is unchanged. And their tireless efforts to interfere at the ballot box continue unabated, with the latest sally being delivered by Trump loyalist Postmaster General David Steiner’s announced intention to not to deliver mail-in ballots in states that refuse to turn over their absentee voter lists to the regime.
This is not to say that all that is left to us is violence. By all means, give peace a chance! But is there a point after which it’s still not working that you’ll try something else?
We need to be asking such questions, and we need to be asking them now, because thus far it appears there is no line that the Trump regime is unwilling to cross to get their way. Their only consideration seems to be what they can get away with.
Considering that there are no U.S. militias so well regulated as to include attack helicopters and missile batteries, we need to be having these conversations with our friends and loved ones who are serving or have served in law enforcement and the military. Because as we have seen numerous times throughout history, many an authoritarian regime has been toppled only when police and military join the revolt. (Moreover, many such regime changes have succeeded because the percentage of police/military defectors became significant enough that the viable threat of violent resistance was enough for the autocrats to abdicate.)
How far will the Trump regime go if left unchecked? Well, if we take him at his word, Trump (like Hitler) is willing to exterminate entire civilizations. Compared to that, disregarding the Constitution and establishing martial law is small potatoes.
Martin Luther King, Jr. tells us that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But despite his framing this as an ontological law, the truth is that he simply cannot know; he — and we — can only hope.
But allowing such hope to limit our considerations of the scenarios and ways in which we might defend ourselves against tyranny may be unpragmatic, even detrimental to our ends. The arc of the moral universe may bend only in whatever way we bend it — and if force starts bending it toward what we believe is unjust, a counterforce may be the only way to bend it back toward justice. Can King or Gandhi truly say that the Third Reich would have fallen by now had violent resistance not been employed against Nazi Germany? Or would they say that, because “the arc of the moral universe is long,” we ought to have been satisfied to let the Third Reich last a thousand years before being eroded by nonviolent protest (presuming such a thing would even exist after a hundred generations indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda)?
I, for one, would not be satisfied with that. I — hopefully with many others — would endorse toppling such tyranny by any means necessary on a far shorter timeline. That would be a terrible thing; violence is always a terrible thing. But there may be unfortunate junctures in which the lesser of two evils is the morally or existentially necessary choice.
When asked what kind of government the Founding Fathers had created, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
As the United States of America turns 250, it is not obvious that the center will hold. It may be the case that keeping our republic is possible only by the same means through which it was forged: violent resistance to our oppressors.
