In the opening two months of his presidency, Donald Trump has unleashed a historic assault aimed at destroying public services, punishing vulnerable communities and dismantling any semblance of social-democratic governance in the United States. This “flood the zone” onslaught has been designed to overwhelm and disorient opposition, making it hard to keep up with the outrages and easy to fall into a state of “shock and awe” paralysis.
In this situation, it is easy to picture Trump as being all powerful. Those who discourage protests — such as Democratic consultant James Carville, who famously counseled progressives to “roll over and play dead” — imagine that the administration holds all the cards, and that opponents have little leverage to wield against it.
To the contrary, the White House is not unfettered by political constraints, and popular protest can do much to strengthen them. Recent weeks have featured many examples of the Trump administration being compelled to reverse or scale back initial measures. And they have shown why building civil resistance to the administration is an essential task at this moment.
In response to “flood the zone,” our job is to highlight political missteps, heighten public revulsion, and raise the political cost for Republicans seeking to push forward Trump’s radical agenda. Our aim should be to expand the capacity to resist by building movements and increasing participation in them. We cannot assume that public opinion will turn against the administration on its own — or that the public is even aware of the many controversial and potentially unpopular moves the White House is making, especially given that they are accompanied by endless lies and distortions about combating “fraud and waste.” Therefore, we must educate the public about the administration’s attacks on our communities and use the tools of creative resistance to amplify a backlash.
There are a variety of reasons why the Trump administration has had to back off a range of its initial drives in past weeks. In some cases, they have found their actions to be politically unpopular: As Elon Musk has pushed forward with a “move fast and break things” mentality, Republicans have sometimes found that he may have done damage that could cost them politically. Other times their actions have been stopped by the courts, or the administration has discovered that its sloppy implementation has made the measures susceptible to legal challenges. In still other instances, federal cuts are doing harm even in deep red districts — leading state-level Republicans to balk — or are causing economic damage, creating fissures in the business community. At times when particularly clumsy or unpopular maneuvers have been exposed, Trump and his officials have hastily attempted to limit the damage, often denying that they ever took the actions in the first place.
Among the White House’s retreats, amid widespread anger and frustration in January, the new administration rescinded a memo calling for a spending freeze on federal grant and loan programs less than 48 hours after it was issued. In mid-February, as USA Today reported, the Trump administration gave tens of thousands of K-12 schools and colleges until Feb. 28 to comply with a “sweeping and vague” order to root out diversity, equity and inclusion on their campuses. A couple of weeks later, the U.S. Department of Education issued new guidance “softening that mandate and reversing course” on some of its provisions. “Perhaps most notably,” the story remarked, “the Department of Education acknowledged the federal government doesn’t have the power to dictate school curriculum.”
In February, the Trump administration reversed itself days after ordering legal groups that serve migrant children who arrive in America alone to stop their work. Not coincidentally, this happened after members of the public sent more than 15,000 letters to Congress in less than 48 hours demanding that the administration reinstate the program that provides these services. And by the end of the month, Trump had walked back funding and staff cuts to a federal health program for survivors of the 9/11 attacks and reversed its plan to shut down the government website that ships free coronavirus tests.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture backtracked after firing key staffers so haphazardly that the administration’s ability to respond to bird flu outbreaks was compromised. And in March, Trump walked back his order to federal agencies to fire thousands of probationary employees in response to a judge’s ruling. The Office of Personnel Management then claimed it never actually ordered those firings.
Prospective cuts to various social programs hurt people living in red states and have ended up causing problems for Republican lawmakers, with angry constituents voicing their displeasure. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently noted, “At a town hall in rural Kansas… Republican Sen. Roger Marshall shut down the event after participants shouted over each other to express concerns about veterans’ jobs being cut and ask whether Marshall believes Russia invaded Ukraine.” Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that “In Georgia, Representative Rich McCormick struggled to respond as constituents shouted, jeered and booed at his response to questions about Mr. Musk’s access to government data,” while in Wisconsin voters pushed Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald on potential cuts to services. Such unpleasant interactions have become so common that GOP leaders are now actively discouraging Republican lawmakers from holding in-person town halls.
In early March, Elon Musk had several closed-door meetings in which Congressional Republicans expressed frustrations to him directly. “With all due respect to Mr. Musk, he doesn’t have a vote up here,” Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said before one meeting. “[Give] courtesy to the members. They’re the ones that have to go home and defend these decisions, not you. So why don’t you give them a heads-up.” He added, “You are certainly complicating the lives of individual members, and you might be making some mistakes and hurting some innocent individuals in the process.”
Potentially the most politically damaging moves on the horizon for Republicans are cuts to entitlement programs — and here the White House has had to scramble to do damage control. The budget passed by the House of Representatives could impose hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has called social security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Recognizing that attacks on these popular and essential lifelines could create significant political fallout, the White House continues to backpedal and insist that it will not enact cuts: “They’re not going to cut Social Security, they’re not going to cut Medicare, they’re just not. That’s just fearmongering,” said Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita on March 14.
After a report by the Washington Post revealed that Musk’s DOGE team was planning to eliminate phone service for people filling for social security and disability benefits — a move that would affect millions of Americans in claiming what they earned — the administration reversed itself and fought to ward off denunciations from watchdogs and opposition politicians alike.
Trump is also being disciplined by the market. Imposing tariffs has been one of the actions the president has pursued most doggedly. And yet, even here, he has repeatedly wavered, in part because of adverse reaction from Wall Street. As Trump has flipped back and forth between announcing new tariffs and then suspending their implementation, the prospect of trade wars has caused the S&P 500 to fall more than 10 percent below its previous peak, with Reuters reporting “U.S. stock market loses $4 trillion in value.” One major investor told the New York Times that the current stock market is “untradable” due to the unreliability of Trump’s positions.
Of course, the market being able to punish politicians or the possibility of Wall Street exercising an effective veto over public policy is not something that should be uncritically celebrated. Historically speaking, the threat of capital flight and market downturn has far more often been used to constrain the left than the right. Nevertheless, it is notable that Trump’s policies are generating economic repercussions and fueling uncertainty. As Robert Reich noted on March 8, “This week’s data on consumer confidence showed it down to a level last seen in 2021. Data from the Commerce Department, out last Friday, showed consumer spending falling sharply in January, adding to angst about the economy’s prospects. After new data came out this week on trade and consumer spending, the Atlanta Fed is projecting that the U.S. is shrinking at a rate of 1.5 percent in this quarter.”
Whether it is through tariffs, deportations, suspension of services, cutting government contracts, or firing federal employees, the administration is hurting poor people, union workers, immigrant laborers, consumers and business owners alike. This opens the door for broad and possibly unusual alliances to form between and among groups that may not have much in common other than opposition to Trump. Emerging movements should leverage this and encourage everyone who will be harmed by White House policies to join in fighting against them.
While current polls on the administration are not all favorable to the opposition, there are some promising indicators: As during Trump’s first term, the portion of people who strongly disapprove of his performance (now 41 percent) is significantly larger than those who strongly approve (currently 26 percent). As of March 12, CNN reports, “a 56 percent majority of the public disapproves of [Trump’s] handling of the economy, worse than at any point during his first term in office.” Moreover, “Just 35 percent of Americans express a positive view of Musk, with 53 percent rating him negatively and 11 percent offering no opinion.”
Trump has done plenty of horrible things, and the fact that he’s been made to reverse course in some cases does not mean that the damage has been fully undone, or that there will not be efforts to extend the harm in the future. But it does show that Trump is not invincible. We know that Republicans can be susceptible to backlash, and that a wide range of resistance tactics can play a critical role in engendering it now — just as they have in the past. During Trump’s first term, widespread mobilization was essential in curtailing some of the worst abuses of the administration, including his signature attempt to repeal Obamacare. And it ultimately stripped the Republicans of their Congressional majority after the 2018 midterms, limiting Trump’s power.
Protests will not directly convince Trump to change his views. But they can create an activated base of opposition, move public opinion against the administration, bolster the resolve of dissident politicians, and raise the stakes for swing-district Republicans who will have to answer for White House policies in the midterms. If done well, they can produce plenty more backpedaling to come.
Research assistance provided by Raina Lipsitz.
Mark Engler is a writer based in Philadelphia, an editorial board member at Dissent, and co-author of "This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century" (Nation Books). He can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com.
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