At this point, there is little doubt that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are engaged in a fundamentally unlawful effort to rewrite the American constitutional order. Their efforts to redirect federal spending are attempts to seize Congress’s power of the purse, a core element of its Article I constitutional power. They have attempted to shutter multiple federal agencies, like USAID, whose existence are expressly guaranteed by statute.
Yet while the public is waking to the scope of the threat to democracy, many Americans are still feeling powerless. It can seem that Trump’s control over the executive branch, together with congressional Republicans’ spinelessness, makes it hard for anyone to respond effectively.
But nonetheless, there are ways to fight back — to do more than is already being done. An effective strategy would revolve around three key points:
- First, Trump is weak. He has deputized Musk to grab power illegally because he doesn’t have the votes to win it through legislation. The illegality of Trump’s agenda means that there are lots of levers his opponents can pull to stop him. The most significant of these are lawsuits, many of which have already yielded injunctions against unlawful Trump-Musk orders.
- Second, delay means victory. The problem with the courts is that they are slow and reactive; Trump can do damage before they intervene that may prove impossible to repair. So democracy’s defenders need to think of their jobs as buying time for the courts — blocking and delaying everything to prevent him from doing irrevocable harm to the constitutional order before he can be ordered to stop.
- Third, delaying strategies help prepare America for the worst. Trump might defy a court order, sparking a constitutional crisis. In that event, the only levers remaining are extra-legal popular resistance — mass protests, strikes, and the like. The more ordinary citizens work to delay his policies now, the better prepared they will be to escalate in the event of an even deeper crisis.
Of course, delaying a president is easier said than done. But luckily, Americans don’t have to make it up as they go along.
I’ve spent nearly a decade as a journalist reporting on democratic decline around the world. I’ve studied the fight for democracy where the threat has been as great or even greater than what the US faces now: places like Hungary, South Korea, India, Brazil, Israel, and Hong Kong. My recent book examines both why democracy is in crisis globally and what has worked to defend it.
While Americans can’t just directly copy any one foreign movement in any of those countries, they can learn a lot from their successes and failures. What follows is a playbook of sorts — a top-level strategy paired with specific tactics that politicians, activists, and even ordinary citizens can start employing today. In these efforts, time is of the essence.
“We’re not in a marathon,” said one American expert on pro-democracy movements, who insisted on anonymity to avoid possible retaliation. “We’re in a sprint.”
Move fast and break democracy
The Trump strategy centers on the idea of creating new “facts on the ground” — of changing things so rapidly and irreversibly that even a court order can’t restore the status quo. There are two ways that Trump and Musk are trying to do this: one substantive and one more political.
Substantively, it’s hard to fix government agencies once they’re wrecked or politicized. USAID is probably the best example.
The Trump administration put much of USAID’s staff on administrative leave, suspended many of its operations, and broken contracts with humanitarian groups and foreign agencies. Crucial staff members will now look for different jobs. The third-party groups who implement USAID policies, both in the US and abroad, will go bankrupt. Projects that required long-term and consistent field deployments may be impossible to restart.
Courts can declare that what Trump and Musk did was illegal, but they can’t turn back time and un-bankrupt USAID’s partners. The longer USAID remains functionally shuttered, the harder it will be to repair.
Politically, the idea is to change the political landscape such that what was once seen (correctly) as flagrantly illegal becomes yet another partisan dispute. This operates by leveraging fear and team loyalty to get key Republicans on board with the Trump line.
Think about the January 6 protests. In the weeks following the attack on the Capitol, nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle condemned the rioters. But the more Trump stood his ground, the more Republicans rallied behind him. Former critics of the riot began arguing the Justice Department was the real villain. Gradually, the January 6ers turned into “martyrs.” When Trump issued a blanket pardon, he met basically no GOP resistance.
Trump and Musk are now employing the same strategy to shield the power grab. Once they have acted to seize power, they are counting on reflexive partisanship to deflect criticism and potentially even bring conservative judges on board.
All things considered, the “facts on the ground” strategy is a canny one given the constraints Trump faces. But it’s important to recognize that those constraints are powerful: that Trump is in many ways quite weak.
If Trump were a traditionally strong president, he could pass whatever changes he wanted through the normal channels. He wouldn’t need to unlawfully dismantle USAID; he would get Congress to pass a law abolishing it. He wouldn’t need to assert impoundment power; he could get Congress to pass a budget that reflects his priorities.
Thanks to the Republicans’ exceedingly narrow House and Senate majorities, he doesn’t have those options. To wield the degree of power he wants, he needs to depend on flagrant lawbreaking — on getting Musk and the DOGE crew to change the facts on the ground so dramatically that no one can unwind it.
The weak link here is the need for speed. To execute a “change everything before the courts get involved” strategy, you need to make the most of the time you have. But if Musk and Trump can be slowed, the entire thing could fall apart.
A four-point plan for stopping Trump and Musk
So if the essence of a resistance strategy is clear — frustrate the power grab until the courts block them — what does that look like in practice?
The best lessons we can find come from other countries that have faced similar power grabs by an elected executive. And while these countries all differ from the United States and each other, some lessons that can be generalized to provide actionable advice for Democrats, ordinary citizens, civil society and philanthropists, and government employees.
In tandem, these steps amount to a comprehensive strategy for obstructing the Trump-Musk power grab. If implemented swiftly, it would give America a shot at enough buying time for democracy to emerge with minimal damage.
1) Democrats can do more — but people shouldn’t expect them to lead
Many writers have suggested Democrats use procedural mechanisms, like withholding unanimous consent in the Senate and putting holds on Trump nominees, that can make Trump’s life more difficult.
To this list, I’d add trying to subpoena power to force Musk to testify. A recent effort in the House Oversight Committee came up one vote short, and there is a plausible Republican defector — Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, a purple-district legislator who was recently stripped of Intelligence committee leadership by his fellow Republicans. If Democrats can quietly persuade Turner (or someone like him) to join them, they could subpoena Musk — which would both slow him down by forcing him to prepare for testimony and potentially get him to openly admit to lawbreaking under oath (or at least take the Fifth).
But at the same time, people may be expecting Democrats to play a leading role for which they’re not well-equipped.
Minority opposition parties do not have a great track record in spearheading movements against democratic backsliding. They tend to place too much faith in the system and trust that the normal rules constraining power will constrain a would-be authoritarian even as the authoritarian busts through them.
“What happens is that the demagogue’s popularity drops as the corruption mounts, and the opposition parties say, ‘Oh my god, he’s at 40 percent, there’s no way we can lose, there’s no way he can steal it.’ Then what do you know — he steals it. And they never fully planned for the day after,” the anonymous democracy expert explains.
If that sounds a little like the Democratic Party’s institutional attitude in the past few years — well, you’re not wrong. And it underscores that waiting for Democrats to set the tone, or focusing on demanding more from them, is a tactical mistake.
2) Start showing up to protests
Instead of looking to Democrats, Americans outside of government can take action on their own — directly protesting or otherwise frustrating Trump administration actions and, in doing so, setting an aggressive tone that Democrats can amplify and support from the inside. Indeed, the best international evidence suggests that only a combination of citizen and institutional pressure can halt democratic erosion once it’s begun.
There is a recent example of citizens effectively leading a strategy of delay against an authoritarian grab: Israel in 2023.
That year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed legislation that would have effectively removed the last formal check on his authority — court oversight. Almost immediately people took to the streets in protest. This bottom-up movement set the tone and direction, with the opposition parties joining as allies rather than being the driving force behind it.
The Israelis knew that Netanyahu had enough votes to ram through the bill if he kept his party together. The protests didn’t aim to persuade so much as scare — to signal that, if Netanyahu moved too quickly, he would risk massive social and economic disruption. And it worked: The protests caused fractures in the governing coalition that forced Netanyahu to abandon his plan to pass a major bill in one fell swoop.
The prime minister still tried to pass the bill more slowly, breaking it up into little bits, but only managed to get a single small law through before events in the world — the October 7 attacks and the Gaza war — took the power grab off the agenda entirely. Months later, Israel’s Supreme Court quietly overturned what he managed to pass.
In the first week of the Trump administration, it didn’t look like Americans had enough energy to sustain such mobilization. And indeed, nothing at the scale of Israel’s protests is happening yet.
Yet the sheer scope of the lawbreaking is starting to wake people up to the danger of what Trump and Musk are attempting, with protests breaking out across the country. The activist group Indivisible is starting to report levels of participation in local events akin to the “resistance” mobilization in 2017.
The success of any delay strategy depends on this emergent trend accelerating as quickly as possible.
3) Philanthropists and civil society need to facilitate better and faster popular mobilization
Of course, organizing effectively to get a protest movement off the ground is hard. That can be a fatal flaw at a moment where speed is everything.
In 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán swiftly enacted an even more ambitious version of the Trump-Musk power grab. During the crucial early days, his opponents could not come together quickly enough to mount resistance.
“The Hungarians never did a good collective organization,” says Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian law and politics at Princeton University. “Everybody went off and did their own little thing, as they normally do, and there was no united press.”
When I spoke with Orni Petruschka, an Israeli businessman who helped lead the 2023 protest movement, he proposed a way to avoid this problem: that civil society groups and philanthropists work together to rapidly stand up an emergency anti-power grab umbrella group.
In Israel, they called this “Protest HQ.” Its function was not only coordination on overall strategy, but also distributing talent and resources around the country.
“We realized that there were many, many groups, and they needed specific services. Some of them needed logistical help, some of them needed legal help. Some of them needed PR and advertising; all of them would need resources,” he says. “You don’t want to have philanthropists trying to sort out this maze of different organizations that will compete with each other for the same cause of stopping Trump.”
American civil society groups and the donors who fund them — a far more extensive network than exists either in Israel or Hungary — can start working on something like this immediately.
4) Federal workers need to have courage
Collectively, citizens and civil society have tremendous power. But few Americans are in better positions individually to help delay Trump than the civil servants being asked to implement his power grabs.
When asked to implement unlawful or antidemocratic orders, these workers can either openly refuse or feign incompetence to throw sand in the gears. They can look for bureaucratic chokepoints and man them. If Trump is going to treat them like the deep state, they can be the deep state.
This doesn’t depend on everyone in the federal government acting in unison immediately. Just a handful of defiant civil servants can spark something bigger.
In a recent piece for Jacobin magazine, Rutgers professor Eric Blanc argues that a series of 2018 strikes by teachers in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma — which successfully won concrete victories like higher pay — show how individual American government employees can spark broader movements of non-compliance.
Specifically, he argues that a handful of determined federal employees speaking out, paired with relatively easy actions designed to encourage others to join in, can create momentum that can translate into real disruption.
“Fearing retaliation from above, most teachers in 2018 were initially scared to make their voices heard. But a few bold colleagues broke the climate of intimidation by taking a public stand early on,” he writes. “Because so many workers were initially scared, the movements grew by taking easy actions that could involve the largest number of workers. One prominent build-up tactic was ‘RedforEd’ days in which everybody — both employees and community supporters — wore the same color and posted selfies and group photos with messages about their cause.”
Of course, all of this depends on having civil servants of good conscience in government. And that means they must resist the pressure to resign.
As miserable as it might be, people of good conscience working to slow things down on the inside are a necessary complement to civil activism. Every staffer that quits is one who can be replaced with a willing power grab accomplice.
What if the institutions fail?
The delay strategy is premised on a key assumption: that institutions, above all the courts, can eventually ride to the rescue. But there are at least two foreseeable ways in which this assumption could go badly wrong.
First, the Supreme Court could simply authorize some of Trump’s most egregious power grabs. This seems unlikely: lower court judges, including Republican appointees, have uniformly ruled against Trump and Musk to date. Previous published opinions by Supreme Court justices, notably including John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, have rejected some of the legal theories that underpin their most aggressive moves. But “unlikely” doesn’t mean “impossible:” The Supreme Court shocked legal observers with its sweeping ruling giving Trump criminal immunity, and it could do so again.
Second, and even more ominously, is that Trump chooses simply to ignore court orders and keep doing what he’s doing. This may sound unthinkable, but there are some real signs that it might already be happening. Vice President JD Vance has publicly undermined the courts’ legitimacy and outright advocated that the president ignore them.
This is the Achilles’ heel of a delay strategy. But there is an answer to it: a massive, society-wide mobilization. Millions-strong protests, government officials refusing to work en masse, threats of general strikes: these are the kinds of radical actions that become necessary when an executive declares that the law simply doesn’t apply to it.
Currently, Americans are not mobilized in such a fashion. But there is reason to believe they could be roused.
In December 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared a state of emergency, imposing martial law with little pretext. Overnight, huge numbers of Koreans showed up to protest the decision. These protests helped create cover for legislators to sneak past soldiers guarding the legislative building and vote to end the emergency.
This swift and overwhelming mobilization, Korean observers say, reflected the stunning nature of Yoon’s announcement.
“What mobilized people was this sense of shock,” says Se-Woong Koo, a prominent Korean journalist and scholar. “When he came out on TV and he made this statement, I talked to a lot of my friends who said, ‘Is he crazy? Literally?’ There’s no room for what he proposed in a democracy.”
Movements around the world, from Israel to Hong Kong, show that the judiciary can be a focal point for such a movement. But gigantic protests don’t spring up overnight. In each of the cases where protest made at least some difference, the ground had been prepared in the months and years prior.
That’s why acting now is important even if you think the courts will fail. Delaying strategies both heighten the sense that what is happening isn’t normal, and build the personal connections and organizational infrastructure necessary for effective mass resistance if and when the moment calls for it.
The United States is in a democratic emergency that is only likely to deepen for the foreseeable future. There’s no time to waste.
