Unless you’ve been living on the Sentinel Islands for the past week, you’ve seen who the next American president will be. Donald Trump is back, and he sounds more vengeful and authoritarian than ever before. He’s been ranting about immigrants carrying “bad genes” into the country, he promises to “root out” political opponents he deems “vermin,” and he wants to let police off the leash to be even more violent. Soon, he will be the most powerful person in the country, if not the world. One of the few things Kamala Harris, in the course of an otherwise disastrous campaign, got right was that Trump sounds like a fascist. J.D. Vance, too, has blurbed a book that praises historical dictators like Franco and Pinochet, which isn’t exactly encouraging news. When January comes, we will be living under a far-right government that intends to do serious harm to millions of people. It will likely be much worse than the first Trump administration, since Trump will now be surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, with no one to veto his worst impulses (like, say, invading Venezuela or shooting protesters in the street). So the critical questions are these: what exactly do we plan to do about it? And are American liberals really prepared for what lies ahead? 

Obviously, there is an urgent need to resist Trump and his agenda. When you know that someone plans to harm others, you have a responsibility to do everything in your power to stop them. (This should go without saying, but apparently a lot of people have badly broken moral compasses these days.) But we’ve lived through a Trump government before, from 2017 to 2021, and liberals didn’t exactly distinguish themselves with the strength of their opposition. In fact, they were pathetic. 

Back then, a movement of anti-Trump liberals dubbed themselves the “#Resistance,” but very little actual resistance went on among them. Instead, what we got was performative nonsense, worship of institutions and procedures for their own sake, and a lot of impotent whining. There was the “pussy hat” march in Washington D.C.; the safety pins on people’s lapels; the wave of social media accounts like “Alternative National Park Service” that claimed to be resisting Trump’s appointees by making snide posts; people like the Krassenstein brothers, who claimed to be resisting Trump himself by making snide posts; the “In This House We Believe” yard signs; the much-hyped Mueller Report, which landed with a wet plop and accomplished nothing; the impeachments, narrow as they were; Nancy Pelosi’s sassy clap; the endless “orange” and “Drumpf” jokes. None of it did anything in particular, besides making the #Resisters feel good about themselves. The hats did not protect women’s reproductive rights from Trump and his Supreme Court nominees. Trump was not removed from office by Robert Mueller, impeachment, or any of the institutions liberals turned to for salvation. He was not cowed by all the mean tweets; he wasn’t even reading them. He just forged ahead, doing enormous damage everywhere he turned. By its own terms, the whole #Resistance movement was a failure. 

Now, signs of the same weakness are starting to re-emerge, and they’re coming directly from the same Democratic leadership that just face-planted in the election. In a public statement on November 6, Barack Obama said that Trump’s victory was “obviously not the outcome we had hoped for, given our profound disagreements,” but that he and Michelle Obama nevertheless “want to congratulate President Trump and Senator Vance,” since “democracy is about recognizing that our point of view won't always win out.” Likewise, President Biden (remember that guy?) has reportedly called Trump to congratulate him and promise him a “smooth transition” into the White House. The Clintons said of Trump and Vance that “we wish them well.” This is a baffling way to treat someone Democrats have spent months describing as a would-be dictator. If Obama, Biden, and the Clintons genuinely believed Trump was a Hitler-esque threat to democracy, they would not be congratulating him, even as a formality. They would be telling their considerable audience to prepare for a hard fight, and to use every tool at their disposal to prevent Trump’s policies from being carried out. But none of these lofty-minded Democrats said a word about real resistance. Instead, Obama told everyone to “abide by the core constitutional principles and democratic norms that made this country great.” He was significantly more forceful about trying to stop Bernie Sanders in 2020, or about breaking an NBA strike in the same year, than he is about stopping Trump today. 

Already, these Democratic (mis)leaders are policing the bounds of acceptable dissent. Obama’s message is that you may have “disagreements” with Trump over little things like violent mass deportation, but you have to respect the fact that he is president and treat his government as a legitimate one. You must “respect the office, if not the man,” as the phrase goes. Through his actions, Biden sends the same message. Trump is to be considered an opponent, but not an outright enemy. You may march in your hats and make your jokes, and above all you may vote for Democrats and donate money to their so-called “fight fund.” But you have to accept that your “point of view won’t always win out.” You may not challenge the “norms” that make up the Way Things Are, even though Trump is gleefully trampling them every day. It’s a perfect example of what former Bernie Sanders advisor David Sirota calls the “tyranny of decorum,” and it’s a recipe for a second #Resistance that’s just as feckless as the first. 

Likewise, the liberal press is already starting to make its peace with a second Trump administration. In the worst magazine in America, staff writer Conor Friedersdorf says there’s a “case for treating Donald Trump like a normal president.” He argues that even though Trump is likely to engage in “cruelty toward immigrants” (now there’s an understatement), we should “normalize Trump” and even “praise him” if he does something good, in hopes that he’ll respond in kind and moderate his policies. Friedersdorf’s idea of resistance is to “be the John Boehner to his Obama” within the “normal” processes of government, a kind of obstruction only politicians are in a position to carry out. For ordinary people, he offers nothing—not even a suggestion to call your representative and demand they Boehnerize. His colleague at the Atlantic, David Frum, sounds downright depressed, saying that we’ll just have to “prepare to live in a different America” and “find new ways to champion wobbling institutions.” On MSNBC, Joy Reid brought on a psychiatrist to suggest that people should refuse to visit MAGA-voting family members for the holidays, presumably to teach them some kind of lesson. That’s the extent of her agenda for opposing Trump—interpersonal drama that won’t do anything in terms of actual political outcomes. 

Democratic establishment figures like Obama and the Clintons—or tenured pundits at the Atlantic and MSNBC, for that matter—can afford to take this kind of stance. They’re wealthy, well-connected, and insulated from the real-world consequences of politics. They won’t face the immediate brunt of Trump’s violence. Trans teenagers in Florida and Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, will, and they don’t cut big checks to Democratic campaigns, so establishment Democrats and their hangers-on don’t really care that much what happens to them.

The rest of us, though, don’t have the same luxury. Trump is threatening to send ICE stormtroopers after our immigrant neighbors—aka those who cook food in restaurants, work in home health, and make deliveries, among other important work—round up anyone who finds themself homeless into detention camps, destroy our health and education resources and our labor rights, and God knows what else. He has stated in no uncertain terms that he means to hurt us, and so we have to fight him, using whatever tools are most effective. “Norms” be damned. We cannot afford to wait for impeachment or some other official process to work itself out, or rely on a Democratic Party whose weakness is the whole reason we have a President Trump in the first place. We cannot just post anti-Trump memes, watch Colbert and Kimmel jeer at him for being orange, and call it a day. We have to make this country ungovernable for the Right, and give Donald Trump the most disastrous term an American president has ever had. He needs to be met with defiance, failure, and humiliation wherever he turns.

Real resistance is not #Resistance. It’s much more than that. If you truly want to stop Trump, you’ll have to go outside, talk to other people, and do hard work. You’ll have to intervene in political events yourself, not wait for someone else to do it for you, because no politician is going to swoop in and save the day. (No, not even Bernie, or AOC, or whoever your favorite is.) You’ll have to help the people Trump targets avoid the violence he wants to inflict, and get them the resources he wants to deny them. You’ll need to throw a big rusty wrench in the machinery of the state. 

None of this is new. America has had grotesque right-wing presidents before, and people have banded together against them. In the Nixon years, the Black Panther Party fought racism and deprivation by running extensive mutual aid programs that gave free meals to schoolchildren living in poverty and free medical care to people who couldn’t get it any other way. The Young Lords, a group of militant Puerto Rican and Latino activists who really ought to be studied more, occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to demand better healthcare for their community and launched a “Garbage Offensive” to protest the lack of sanitation services. César Chávez and the United Farm Workers led strikes and marches across the American Southwest for more than a decade, and successfully pressured California’s Governor Jerry Brown into signing the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975. In particular, the legacy of the Panthers runs deep. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, it was former Panther Malik Rahim and his comrades who organized the Common Ground Collective and once again held free health clinics for the people George W. Bush was busy neglecting. There’s no reason we can’t have a new generation of Panthers, Lords, and labor leaders taking the same kind of action against Trump and his agenda today.

Even in the first Trump presidency, there were people who took more direct—and more effective—countermeasures than the #Resistance libs. The uprisings against police brutality after George Floyd’s murder were some of the largest and most impressive in American history, and the protesters didn’t just walk in a circle waving signs. They drove the police out of Minneapolis’s 3rd Precinct building and turned it into an unusable, burned-out husk, to the extent that city officials were still debating “whether the police should have a presence in the area again” two years later. (Because Minneapolis police are the fourth most violent in the country, this may well have saved lives by decreasing contact between the public and the cops.) More recently, people have been making life hell for Republican school administrators by dumping memes and gibberish into the “snitch line” websites they build to report “wokeness” in schools. There are the Democratic Socialists of America’s famous brake light clinics, which take away one of the most common excuses cops use to pull people over and harass them. For my money, those are a lot more useful than many of the DSA’s forays into Democratic Party electioneering—and they’re definitely more useful than any amount of liberal “Drumpf” posts.

We can look to other countries for examples, too. Around the world, one of the figures who resembles Trump most is Argentina’s President Javier Milei—a right-wing demagogue who’s been rolling back women’s rights and demolishing public services at a frenzied pace since he got elected last year. In response, the Argentinian labor movement has launched nationwide strikes that shut the entire country down for 24 hours. Local officials, too, have refused to go along with Milei’s agenda. In the province of La Rioja, the regional government has responded to Milei’s austerity cuts by creating a whole new currency, the “chacho,” to fund state services and jobs that Milei refused to provide for. If Trump really does appoint Elon Musk to eliminate as much government spending as possible, a strategy like La Rioja’s might be necessary. 

Latin America has a long and honorable record of resisting dictators, which Americans could learn from. The people of Chile fought Pinochet tooth and nail, and finally overthrew him. In Argentina, when President Fernando de la Rúa ordered people to stay in their homes during a 2001 financial crisis, they defied him en masse, showing up to his speeches and drowning out his voice with the sound of banging pots and pans. Today, they’re doing the same to Milei. Elsewhere, there are nonprofits like Women on Waves in the Netherlands—together with more secretive and unofficial networks based in Mexico—that smuggle abortion pills into countries that ban them, providing a lifeline when right-wing misogynists get into government. In Britain, activists for Palestine successfully shut down an Elbit weapons factory in Tamworth this March. Effective resistance takes many forms, some more risky than others, but there is always something available to do. If everyone who hates Trump did something practical, instead of something performative, the results would be dramatic.

It is likely, though, that resisting Trump will mean breaking the law in some cases. Liberals are often squeamish about that idea, since they believe laws, “norms”, and institutions are inherently good, and should always be respected. Kamala Harris, for instance, said that “we should follow the law” on transgender healthcare, even though several states have banned it in various forms. That’s just cowardice. In reality, there is nothing sacred about laws. They’re just tools that allow whoever holds power to reward behavior they like and punish behavior they dislike—and they’re always applied selectively, punishing and controlling those without power while rich men like Donald Trump can flout them openly and suffer no consequence. Many of the greatest social movements in American history involved civil disobedience and illegal acts: think of Rosa Parks at the front of the bus, or the Stonewall riots, or the Flint sit-down strike of the 1930s. Unjust laws have to be defied, not followed. (This principle applies when Democrats are in power, too. I still maintain that the railway workers in 2022 should have gone on strike even after Joe Biden signed a law ordering them not to.) 

When Trump holds power, many of the laws he creates will come straight from the Heritage Foundation’s loathsome Project 2025, which allies like Steve Bannon have now admitted was the Republican playbook all along. They will violate people’s basic human rights and threaten their lives, and defending those people will require breaking Trump’s laws (along with those put in place by Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Jeff Landry, at the state level.) Will American liberals do it? Will doctors, for instance, continue to provide forms of healthcare that Trump forbids, or refuse to hand over information about trans patients or abortions to the federal government? Will teachers discuss subjects like racial injustice in America if Trump deems them off-limits? If it comes to that, will middle-class liberals with “No One is Illegal” signs in their yards actually shelter undocumented immigrants from being arrested and thrown into military camps? I fear they won’t—that they’ll prove just as useless as their leaders, and shy away from real conflict, risk, and sacrifice. Some may assume they’re safe from Trump if they just stay quiet, but that would be a fatal mistake. If he really does deport millions of people or impose his ridiculous tariff plan, the whole country’s economy could collapse, and the people who sit by and let him do it in 2025 could become the poor and desperate in 2026. Unless everyone is protected, nobody is. 

There is a famous quote, often attributed to Leon Trotsky, that runs like this: You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. We are now on the edge of a terrible political conflict against Donald Trump and the GOP, whether liberals are ready or not. If there is going to be an effective resistance, it will not come in the form of empty symbolic gestures, and it will not come from the Democratic Party leadership. That style of politics has failed. We have to build a fighting left-wing movement in this country, one that’s capable not only of beating Trump and his billionaire allies, but making life better for millions of Americans, so demagogues like him have no more fear and desperation to prey on. Now is the moment to find a socialist, anarchist, green, mutual aid, or anti-war group near you, or to start one. They will be badly needed. Now is the time to unionize your workplace, so you and your fellow workers will have the power to say no to exploitation and abuse. Now is the time to reach out to your friend, classmate, or relative who was deceived into voting for Trump, and help them see through his lies. (Current Affairs can help with that part!) Now is the moment to think about what you can do in your neighborhood to thwart Trump’s plans, and to build community and solidarity with the people around you. He may be the president, but ultimately he’s just one man—and a spoiled rich man who’s never truly had to struggle for anything, at that. There’s millions of us. We’re stronger than he is, and we can defeat him.