The grassroots opposition to Trump can—and must—grow

As noted in a recent article on the Trump’s 100 days in office, Trump’s historic unpopularity has coincided with the beginnings of an opposition to his many destructive initiatives. The article concluded that while it’s “positive that large majorities oppose what Trump is doing, and that hundreds of thousands have protested the administration’s actions,” we must reckon with the “historic weakness of the forces of opposition on our side.”

This article will focus on four sources of opposition to Trump. These are:

The “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations against Trump’s henchman Elon Musk;
The “large crowd” demonstrations called by organizations like Indivisible and 50501;
Local “know your rights” defense of immigrants;
Trade union and working-class resistance;

Considering each in turn allows us to draw up a balance sheet of the resistance to Trump 2.0 so far.

Tesla takedown: This appeared as a genuine grassroots initiative that a few individuals started when they appeared with signs protesting Musk at a Tesla charging station in Waterville, Maine in early February. Online activist Joan Donovan amplified their efforts with the hashtag #TeslaTakedown on the Bluesky platform, and a few days later, documentarian Alex Winter set up a Web site where local groups could advertise their own anti-Tesla protests. Since, hundreds of demonstrations have taken place at Tesla dealerships, charging stations and repair shops.

Tesla Takedown has the distinction of being the first major effort to pull together an opposition to the Trump/Musk rule of ruin. And its work in putting a “tech bro” and Nazi-curious oligarch’s face on the fake populism of the Trump administration can’t be gainsaid. Tesla Takedown might be able to claim some credit for Musk’s subsequent step back from the public limelight, and indications that the Tesla board was considering cutting him loose. But aside from producing bad press, it’s unclear what more pressure the takedown movement can bring against Trump/Musk.

Tesla’s sales were already declining before Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) started its rampage through the federal government. Tesla’s overseas sales are tanking, and its stock price—the source of much of Musk’s wealth—was due for correction because it is one of the most overvalued stocks traded on the exchanges. It’s possible that the Tesla protests will subside as Musk exercises his influence out of the media spotlight. With his Starlink satellite and SpaceX rocket businesses—sustained on billions in U.S. government contracts—Musk continues to exercise influence exceeding that of some sovereign states.

Days of action: By some measures, the number of anti-Trump demonstrations and the numbers they have mobilized exceeds the early days of 2017 when large mobilizations like the Women’s Marches caught the public imagination. A broad range of groups have organized these, but the core organizers are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Indivisible and 50501, a project of the liberal lobbying group MoveOn. Turnouts for the April 5 “Hands Off” rallies at city halls and state capitols from one end of the U.S. to another were impressive. Organizers are looking to replicate (or outstrip) the “Hands Off” rallies on June 14, when they are rallying for “No Kings.”

Two former Democratic congressional staffers founded Indivisible in 2017 with a plan to rally grassroots pressure on Congress against Trump’s initiatives, especially his failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 50501 emerged from a Reddit forum in early 2025. While it has many local affiliates, Indivisible is more rooted in the professional Washington NGO world, with a staff of media and research experts, and a political action committee that “channels grassroots energy into electing progressive candidates.”

50501 (for “50 protests, 50 states, 1 day”) is a more decentralized organization that convenes demonstrations through online calls to action. Its political culture reflects the last decade of “Gen Z” (for Generation Z, people born after 1996) organizing, including an emphasis on “mutual aid” and “leaderless” organization. One of its chief constituents is Political Revolution, a PAC that former 2016 Bernie Sanders organizers formed to support progressive candidates, mostly in and around the Democratic Party. Indivisible fits more comfortably into conventional liberal politics. For example, one of its April 5 slogans was “Hands Off NATO!” but there was no “Hands Off Palestine!” 50501 projects a more radical profile, calling Trump a “criminal” and a “traitor” and denouncing billionaire plutocrats and “fascism”. Nevertheless, 50501 collaborates with Invisible, and has invited Indivisible leaders on its national Zoom organizing calls.

“Know your rights.” Some of the most effective forms of opposition to the Trump agenda has come from local immigrant rights and community groups who have impeded the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) dragnets against immigrants. These groups have been so effective in informing immigrants of their rights that Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has called them out. In specific circumstances, community groups have organized to pressure DHS, courts and local law enforcement and to win the release of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrestees like Mohsen Mahdawi and Rühmeysa öztürk. A protest in a small New York town where Homan has a vacation home freed a family swept up in an ICE raid. There are dozens of stories like this that show that protest can work, and that people that neither immigrants nor their supporters need to submit to Trump’s thuggish immigration police.

However, it must be kept in mind that the Trump administration has already gotten away with heinous actions, including the expulsion of hundreds of immigrants to gulags in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And the budget it is pushing through Congress now envisions a multi-billion dollar increase to “scale up” immigrant arrests and deportations at an industrial scale.

Trade union and workplace resistance. It’s no surprise that an administration stuffed with right-wing, anti-union billionaires would take aim at workers’ and trade union rights. The administration’s actions show just how shallow is the claim that the Republican Party has become a “working class” party. The Trump administration’s attack on the federal workforce with illegal mass layoffs and abrogating the contracts of up to 1 million workers is a more serious attack than Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981.

The best that can be said about the labor response is that there is one. Leading unions like the Service Employees (SEIU) and the national teachers’ unions, along with the AFL-CIO, have endorsed demonstrations such as “Hands Off.” Sean McGarvey, the president of the normally conservative North American Building Trades Union, called for the return from El Salvador of the illegally kidnapped Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a building trades apprentice in Maryland.

But decades of complacency and political weakness in the labor movement is coming back to haunt it. For decades, the federal workers’ unions that are currently being gutted were inactive and dependent on lobbying in Washington. The efforts of relatively new organizations like the Federal Unionists Network are important, but they are starting from an exceedingly weak position. Most union officials are hoping that their lawsuits against Trump’s anti-union actions will prevail. But they have no strategy based on any kind of workplace organizing if the courts don’t rule in their favor.

When we turn to the private sector, where unions represent only about 6 percent of workers, we can see the bitter fruit of years of political backsliding. The pro-Trump president of the Teamsters’ union (IBT), Sean O’Brien, has legitimized a labor alliance with the far-right. As a result, O’Brien and the IBT have done little since UPS announced 20,000 layoffs in response to Trump’s planned tariffs. The United Autoworkers union (UAW), whose 2023 “stand-up” strike inspired millions, has supported Trump’s planned tariffs, even though there is no evidence that unfair trade is the cause of the union’s decline. UAW President Shawn Fain has aligned the union with Trump’s tariffs while missing “the real threats to autoworkers and the role the union can play in resisting them”, as Andy Sernatinger recently wrote.

Any genuine resistance to the Trump agenda is to be welcomed and built on. But we also must “tell no lies” and “claim no easy victories,” as the Bissau Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral put it in the 1960s. The state of the opposition to Trump is weak now.

The mass protest organizations are still largely operating on a perspective that they implemented in 2017-2018. That is, protest now, and push for a Democratic Party-led House of Representatives or Congress in 2026. The previous article explored the deficiencies of that perspective—which failed to prevent a return of Trump to the White House. It also put many of the “resistance” organizations from Trump 1.0 into dormancy under Biden.

Grassroots organizing in workplaces and communities has been effective in some limited circumstances. But are the unions and community organizations prepared for a quantitative or qualitative increase in Trumpian rampages and repression? Right now, they do not appear to be.

However, as of spring 2025, U.S. society is opposed to what Trump is doing. And, if history is our guide, ordinary people can explode into action at any time. No one predicted—much less expected—the huge outpouring of anti-racist action that took place in the depths of the COVID pandemic after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. We will need that—and much more—to defeat Trump and the authoritarian threat he represents.