Think for a moment: what if, in response to all that the Trumpists starting doing after taking office 20 months ago, small groups of angry and pissed off leftist activists had engaged in repeated, explicitly violent acts of street fighting or similar action as ICE continued to assault our neighbors and friends and communities in cities and town across the country? Or what if, rather than millions of people five different times in every state and Congressional District all over the country taking part in explicitly nonviolent No Kings and other actions, something else had happened? What if even just 10-20 of those actions had involved overt property destruction of symbols of repressive government or billionaire takeover, or attacks on police?
History teaches us that if things had been like that, the Trumpfascists, Fox News, Republicans in Congress and other rightists would have used these actions to attack our entire pro-democracy movement as violent and destructive. The odds of that making it harder, possibly much harder, to win the on-the-defensive political and legal victories which we have won would certainly have gone up. Instead of the Trump gang being way down in every national poll, even those by Republican-leaning pollsters, it could be significantly different. Overall, and to an impressive degree, our multi-racial, multi-tactical, multi-issue, pro-democracy and -justice movement has accomplished a lot since Trump and his cronies took office. That is why, less than a month and a half from the huge national election, the “billionaires uber alles” government is in such deep trouble.
It hasn’t always been this way in this country. It was particularly NOT this way in the late 1960’s as anger and frustration over the Vietnam War and racism led to resistance movements against them which were multi-tactical and multi-issue, yes, but which were not consistently nonviolent. Because of this fact, it made it easier for Richard Nixon, J Edgar Hoover and their teams to divide and undercut that peace and justice movement. It is well-known, for example, that a key tactic of FBI and other federal agencies and local police was to implant people into groups to play an “agent provocateur” role, stir up internal division and push for very aggressive and violent tactics. One big example of these government tactics was the use in 1969 of such agents to eventually assassinate Illinois Black Panther Party and unifying Chicago Rainbow Coalition leader Fred Hampton.
To the extent that similar government tactics have been attempted this time around, they’ve had very little effect. Over the last 50 years, particularly since at least the global justice movement of the early 2000’s, organized progressive activism has been much more resistant to and knowledgeable about ways to prevent the success of these government or corporate efforts, like organized de-escalation training and conscious community building.
I write all this not from a pacifist perspective; that doesn’t describe me. I AM a believer in nonviolent tactics and the importance of each of us trying to live as lovingly and nonviolently as we can on a day-to-day basis, but in conditions of very brutal and totalitarian government repression, I could see tactics needing to be sometimes different.
That is not our situation right now in the USA. As bad as the MAGA government is, they have been thrown off by both the breadth and the staying power of our movement, as well as their own incompetence. They are in big trouble politically 45 days before the November 3 election. They are internally divided with past MAGA leaders, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, breaking publicly with Trump. And in the Trump of 2026 the MAGA’s have a leader, THE leader, who has shown himself to be a bumbling, idiotic, narcissistic fool.
Let’s keep up the nonviolent public pressure and activism, combined with massive voter turnout efforts, up to November 3. And afterwards, if needed, let’s hit the streets in numbers so large that the Trumpfascist efforts to derail the democratic will of the people are soundly defeated.
Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.
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