What if we took Collective Action to Stop Trump?

Checking Donald Trump’s drive toward authoritarian control of the US Government depends ultimately on Democrats winning a majority of seats in the House of Representatives in the November 2026 election, and then actually seating that majority in January 2027, a year from now.

These are two separate things, and in 2020 Trump focused on disrupting the latter, the actual transfer of power. He appears to be focused on the same strategy for 2026/27, with more time and resources to set up pretexts.

A Democratic majority in the Senate as well would be fantastic, but more difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, it should be pursued since seats gained in 2026 improve the odds of achieving a majority in 2028.

Trump understands the stakes, and is pursuing his agenda at full speed, looking for ways to corrupt and discredit the November election, purging career Federal employees in favor of loyalists, standing up a violent domestic paramilitary force answering to him rather than the Constitution, and demanding control of elections, contra the Constitution.

For anyone who fears that Trump could break American democracy entirely, betting everything on Democrats gaining control of the House of Representatives next January is a very risky strategy.  However, it has proven difficult to crystallize a separate strategy to blunt the effects of Trump’s rampage in the interim and reduce the risk that he will successfully prevent the swearing-in of a Democratic majority in the next Congress.

Currently, the go-to firewall appears to be lawsuits, in an environment where Trump has appointed over 30% (and rising) of all Federal judges, including a third of the Supreme Court, and has utterly corrupted the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.  Moreover, he has often shown contempt for court rulings and failed to comply with those he doesn’t like. The courts have no effective recourse when this happens.

Public marches and demonstrations have also been remarkably large, but thus far have not slowed Trump’s progress toward authoritarian control.

So what else can be done?

Start with this question: what might persuade a handful of Republicans in the House to join Democrats to impeach several of Trump’s most execrable underlings? Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem and Tulsi Gabbard all may have committed high crimes and misdemeanors in office, and they are even more unpopular than Trump himself.

If such impeachments were achieved in the House, what might persuade enough Republican Senators to either vote to convict or at least abstain from voting? Conviction requires two-thirds of those who actually vote, so Republicans who can’t quite bring themselves to vote for conviction could still help the cause by abstaining.

If, for example, 15 Republican Senators did not vote, it would take 2/3 of 85 to convict, which is 57. There are 47 Democratic and Dem-adjacent Senators, so it would take just 10 Republicans to actually vote with them to convict. 15 not voting plus 10 voting to convict is less than half of the current number of Republican Senators.

At present, of course, this scenario is a fantasy. Yes, there appear to be cracks showing in Trump’s iron control of Congressional Republicans, but the cracks so far are short and shallow. What would it take to move enough Republican Representatives and Senators to make such an impeachment scenario realistic?

Drawing 5 million people into the streets for No Kings marches, as remarkable as these marches are, hasn’t been enough. Substack pundit Robert Hubbell suggests that 50 million Americans in the streets would probably drive a lot of Republicans to jump ship. That seems plausible, but 50 million is a very tall order, a bit over one seventh of the total US population, equal to the entire population of South Korea or Spain.

There’s a meme going around that turning out 3.5% of the population for a cause is a kind of tipping point. In the US, that would mean turning out about 12 million people, roughly double the last No Kings march. Indivisible, a key organization behind those marches, warns that the 3.5% magic number doesn’t refer to how many people can be turned out for a few hours once every few months, but how many people are working in a committed and ongoing way to achieve change. Let’s all turn out on March 28^th and try to create the largest turnout in American history, but don’t expect it to work miracles.

Perhaps, though, it wouldn’t be necessary to turn out people at that level everywhere at once. How about a march on Washington DC that dwarfs the great marches of the civil rights and Vietnam War eras? What if enough people were willing to come from all over the country to overwhelm the District of Columbia while Congress was in session? What if the crowd stuck around to keep the pressure on Congress day after day, week after week?

Such a crowd would make it impossible for Senators and Representatives to travel between home and work without squeezing past thousands of citizens from their home states and districts, looking them in the eye, and demanding that, say, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi be impeached for the sins of ICE and the coverups of those sins? Hell, even John Roberts might notice. To keep the pressure on would require generating rolling waves of replacement demonstrators, so that the crowds would remain giant for weeks, and Congressional “business as usual” would be impossible.

The District’s population is about 700,000, in a metro area of about 6.4 million. Bringing, say, a million or more people into the city and keeping them there for a month would have a pretty dramatic impact. For reference, King’s famous speech in 1963 drew about 250,000, and the Women’s March in 2017 drew an estimated 470,000.  Those were one day events: what I am proposing could last for a month, more like a non-violent version of the EuroMaidan protest in Kviv, which waxed and waned for roughly three months in 2013-14.

That one, of course, resulted in pitched battles, barricades, the deaths of dozens of protesters, and the eventual downfall of the pro-Russian Yanukovych government. Could we do it without the bloodshed?

This too sounds like a fantasy, but ICE might be making it possible. People probably won’t fill the streets of DC for a month or two to save Greenland and Venezuela from Trump, or to protect the Chair of the Federal Reserve, or to improve health care, to argue for affordability, or even to shake loose the Epstein files.

But they just might turn out in response to ICE’s massive and accelerating display of brutality aimed at anyone opposing Trump. The administration seems committed to ramping up with a huge budget, a frantic recruitment campaign aimed at bottom feeders, and maximalist defense of the worst ICE behavior by Trump, Vance, Bondi, Noem, Miller, et al.

Pulling this off would be a massive logistical challenge, but I don’t think it would be beyond the reach of an organization such as Indivisible, if founders (and DC residents) Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg embraced the concept. It could not be branded as a Democratic Party action (Dems are even less popular than Trump) and would need to draw a crowd that really reflected mainstream voting America, not just a collection of performatively left-ish factions.

It would require figuring out how to provide food, shelter, safety, mobility and sanitary facilities on an unprecedented scale, probably outside the District of Columbia in the relatively blue states of Maryland and Virginia. Imagine tent cities, soup kitchens, shuttle buses, infirmaries, concerts, and even churches.

Imagine Woodstock and Burning Man, but sensibly clothed. Imagine Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech in 1963, and Marion Anderson singing My Country ‘Tis of Thee at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939. Imagine echoes of past greatness and historical importance. This would be riveting video, to say the least.

All of this would force Republicans to choose between impeaching three of the most disliked people in America… or embracing and defending them in an election year, while crowds of implacable constituents surrounded their homes and offices.

Even if a gathering like this did not immediately force Bondi, Miller, and Noem from their jobs and then make it impossible for Trump to replace them with equivalent toadies, it might make a Blue Tsunami in November more likely, and make Republican Senators and Representatives more willing to break with Trump from then until November, thereby at least slowing his shambolic march to the dark side.

I think something like this might be a better use of the skills developed and resources collected by Indivisible than simply continuing the string of decentralized demonstrations, as good as those are. Indivisible was founded to support hyperlocal activism, so this would be a shift in focus, but the breadth of their local efforts to date would be a strong foundation for a national gathering. Indivisible isn’t the only option, but it has proven adept at bringing other groups along, and it has been disciplined at not becoming just another of the progressive groups—it focuses on broad appeal.

Timing is critical. Congress takes an August recess starting in July and returning in September, after which is too late.  The weather in the winter is a major impediment, and in any case there’s not enough time to organize anything this big and long-lasting for February or March.

That leaves a window from, say, mid-April to mid-June. Since Congress breaks for July 4^th and is often gone a lot after that, scheduling this gathering too close to late June risks letting them escape out of town early. Late May and early June are typically periods devoted to getting a lot done before the recess, so maybe the event could be scheduled for mid-April to mid-May (and longer if needed), with intent to dominate the Congressional agenda and force decisions. Prying Bondi, Miller, and Noem out of their spider holes by Independence Day has a certain appeal.

This strategy depends on these seven assumptions being true:

1. It’s critically important to check Trump’s power sooner than January 2027 when a Democratically controlled House of Representatives could be sworn in.
2. ICE and CPB, by the brutality of its agents, is creating an opportunity to motivate many more citizens to take substantial action, and DOJ is adding fuel to the fire by its corrupt protection of ICE’s violent and illegal actions.
3. Organizations such as Indivisible can actually organize and execute something this and complex on a very tight timetable, despite a hostile federal administration that is entirely willing to break the law.
4. Targeting Bondi, Miller & Noem for impeachment would be an easier lift for Congress than targeting Trump himself.
5. A massive and ongoing assembly of citizens in Washington DC could persuade enough Republicans to break with Trump to make such impeachments of noxious underlings possible.
6. The fundamentally peaceful nature of the event could be sustained, despite the likelihood that the Trump administration will try to force it to become violent.
7. Even if this project fell short of impeachment, conviction and removal, it might scare/shame Republicans into breaking with Trump more often and more substantially from May until the November election and January swearing-in, thereby reducing the risk that Trump will successfully subvert the election.

What do you think, Post Alley readers? How plausible are each of the assumptions? Does such a massive gathering seem achievable? How likely is it to succeed in producing impeachments and convictions? How likely is it to influence Republicans to break more with Trump even if impeachments are not achieved? Would there be a better goal than impeaching these odious underlings?

Does Indivisible seem like a good choice to take the lead? What other organizations might be capable of it? Would this be the best use of the very considerable resources it would require? What else would be better? Where would the money come from to pay for all this on a tight timeline?

What are the biggest risks of trying something like this? Would Trump bring thousands of ICE stormtroopers into the city to turn a peaceful protest into something which looks like a riot on TV? How about bringing in the MAGA faithful as he did in 2020, when he unleashed them on Congress? How would that play to the public outside of DC and to elected officials, specifically Republicans? Would DOJ attempt to arrest and prosecute organizers, donors, etc? Would it attract too many people eager to turn it un-peaceful? What other risks are there?

The Arab Spring (remember Cairo’s Tahrir Square?) was consequential, but in the end did not create a string of liberal democracies across the Middle East and North Africa. Some of the Color Revolutions in Central Europe succeeded, some did not. The goal of an ongoing EuroMaidan-style gathering in Washington would not be to overthrow our government, but to restore our democracy. Could it work? Anybody have a better idea?

Comments encouraged.