Donald Trump is getting busy, and we need to as well. Unfortunately, Trump’s second term might meet with less resistance than his first, when there were massive street protests in favor of women’s rights and against Trump’s separation of immigrant families. We are seeing a softening of attitudes toward Trump. It’s possible that, early on at least, Trump will be unexpectedly popular and even receive favorable coverage in the New York Times. (The paper is already misleadingly suggesting that Trump’s agenda is popular and giving space to horrific reactionary thinkers to pontificate.) I once warned that Trump could undergo a respectability shift similar to that of Ronald Reagan, who was once treated as an airheaded entertainer but is now honored as a statesman. I don’t think we are there yet, but I am quite concerned that even as Trump enacts an extreme, cruel, destructive agenda, there will not be nearly the kind of focused critical opposition that is necessary. 

One of the problems with Trump’s opponents has long been that they have failed to focus on the right things. January 6, for instance, was an alarming attempt to subvert democracy, but Democrats were far too fixated on it, and Americans proved to be more interested in the cost of living. What we need is to apply a clear set of moral priorities so that we focus on the issues where Trump really is going to cause a lot of harm. 

First and foremost has to be climate. We are seeing the beginning of the effects of a climate catastrophe that is going to get worse and worse. And yet Trump not only denies that there is a problem, he has committed himself to actions that will severely worsen the situation. Just on the first day, Trump has withdrawn the United States (again) from the Paris Agreement. The White House website immediately replaced mentions of “tackling the climate crisis” with a promise to end “policies of climate extremism” (by which Trump means any policies to deal with climate change). In anticipation of Trump’s return to office, banks have been pulling out of climate programs, and the Federal Reserve “withdrew from a network of regulators that studied climate change risk.” Trump is planning a “bonfire of climate regulations,” which will be gradually succeeded by more literal bonfires as climate change sparks new infernos. The right is even trying to take legal action against companies that show any commitment to addressing climate change, the idea being that a corporation must be pathologically committed to making money even at the expense of destroying the habitability of the world. 

The urgency of climate change cannot be overstated. This should be the exact time when we are working together with the rest of the world to try to mitigate the worst effects, complete a full transition away from fossil fuels, and stay within planetary boundaries. It is beyond madness to have a president who actually wants to escalate the crisis by producing and using even more fossil fuels than we do already. We need a climate movement that is working around the clock to convey to Americans exactly how dangerous their situation is and what the impacts of their president’s actions are going to be. Trump may get a popularity boost early in his term from appearing to save TikTok, engineering dubious peace deals abroad, and claiming credit for positive economic indicators that predated his ascension to office. But we need to be drawing attention to the fact that his aggressive push to destroy climate policies is wrecking our chance for a livable future. We have to fight hard on this. Climate is an issue Democrats aren’t nearly aggressive enough about, in part because they are in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry themselves. But it’s one of the most critical and urgent threats facing the world today, and it’s the responsibility of those who understand what is going on to keep attention focused on it.

Perhaps the next most important immediate near-term issue is immigration. If Donald Trump follows through on his pledges on mass deportation, he will have to heavily militarize the United States by building a vast network of detention facilities and creating a “papers, please” police state. It is unclear to what extent he will succeed at this, but Trump promises to take radical and unprecedented actions, including stripping the constitutionally-guaranteed right of citizenship from those born on U.S. soil to unauthorized immigrant parents. If it succeeds, this effort would be the second time reactionaries have stripped Americans of a core constitutional right under Trump (the first, of course, was the end of Roe v. Wade’s constitutional guarantee of a right to an abortion). The right believes in a notion of citizenship more grounded in loyalty and blood than in where you are from and whose laws you are subject to, and that conception of citizenship can take things in all kinds of disturbing directions. We’ve already seen prominent MAGA conservatives like Vivek Ramaswamy proposing things like voter qualification tests and Trump proposing the deportation of “pro-Hamas radicals.” I would not be surprised if things turned in the direction they did during the First Red Scare, when communists, anarchists, and socialists were expelled from the country. It has happened before, and it could happen again. 

But explicitly political tests for citizenship and deportations are probably a few steps away. For now, we are likely to see a lot of ordinary undocumented people having their lives uprooted and their families torn apart. It’s going to be ugly. What we need is a popular uprising like what happened in the case of the 2017 airport protests, with people shielding their neighbors. We need, essentially, solidarity. For an example of what the opposite looks like, see what recently happened when a pro-Palestine journalist was dragged out of the State Department’s briefing room, and his journalist colleagues sat silently and did not protest. That? That’s what not to do. 

We need to continue aggressively making the moral case for immigration, pointing out that there is no reason to deport people when we could instead offer them a path to citizenship. We need to aggressively fight right-wing propaganda about legendary pet-snatching Haitians. We need to expose the Democrats who will sacrifice basic due process because they read in the New York Times that immigration is unpopular now. (In fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans believe unauthorized immigrants should be allowed to become citizens if they meet certain requirements.) As I say, there is a general mood of fatigue and disinterest in politics in the country, which creates a climate in which it will be easier for Trump to ram through extreme measures, the consequences of which are only dimly appreciated at first.

What are the other issues that we need to keep laser-focused on? Well, we can expect to see a rollback of workers’ rights, as we did in the first term. The Trump administration is anti-regulation, anti-minimum wage, and in favor of bosses over workers. Lee Fang observes that while “Trump surrounded himself at his rallies with everyday Americans, coal miners, police officers, teachers, factory workers,” at his inauguration there were only “politicians and billionaires.” That really tells you all you need to know about what a fraud “right-wing populism” is. (Trump has even launched an outright scam—a Trump-themed memecoin—designed to swindle money from his supporters.) As Trump fails to address poverty or hunger and fails to make people better off, we need to ruthlessly expose the fraud and begin to demonstrate what an alternative politics that is neither faux-populist right-wing nativism nor neoliberal centrism might look like. (See my recent article on FDR and the New Deal for an exploration of the historical precedent for a social democratic politics in the United States.) 

Abortion rights, the threat of great power conflict, the cruelty of the healthcare system, educational inequality, animal welfare: there is no shortage of issues on which the Trump administration will have dreadful stances that worsen existing injustices. We cannot rely on corporate media to draw attention to these injustices. We can expect that much of the American population will, as usual, not be given any useful information on the most pressing issues of the era. They will read on “X” (Twitter) that the natural disasters being worsened by climate change are instead the result of DEI. They will be told that President Trump cares about them and is making America great again, while he and his rich friends pillage the country. We must keep our heads, stay focused, expose the true workings of power, and continue the hard work of building a humanistic, solidaristic alternative.