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10 Groups Who Can and Must Do More to Fight Trumpism
All these groups have diminished themselves and their real potential to generate strong direct democratic pressures and arouse the citizenry.
Sep 06, 2025
This column is a plea to our readers to help get responses from groups whose duties and rhetoric should cause them to become much more active in countering the fascistic, dictatorial actions of Tyrant Trump.
All these groups have diminished themselves and their real potential to generate strong direct democratic pressures and arouse the citizenry.
We can guess the answer as to why these groups are so meek, but what is needed is for these groups to answer for themselves. (I recognize that there are a few luminous exceptions among them.)
1. Why aren’t the Democrats in Congress, just a few votes from a majority, much more aggressive vis-à-vis the controlling Republicans and President Donald Trump? Voters are vociferously demanding this at town meetings.
Lawmakers in the minority can hold many informal or “shadow” hearings in congressional committee rooms on the rising disasters of the Trump regime. They can invite knowledgeable witnesses and the media. They have done fewer than half a dozen of these events, which have received media coverage.
Moreover, they could do what the GOP does regarding Democratic presidents: Start laying the groundwork for impeaching Trump and several of his lawless, dangerous, out-of-control cabinet members.
2. Why has the media, for years, excluded coverage of what newsworthy, progressive, proven national citizen groups are doing to give the people the kind of effective voice on Capitol Hill and around the country that led in the 60s and the 70s to health, safety, and economic protections by congressional legislation?
3. Why do the most progressive members of Congress—e.g., Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and lately even Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)—refuse to return calls or answer letters urging them to adopt policies and conduct hearings back in their states, to build support for congressional action? Their disrespect is astonishing and unheard of between the GOP and, for example, the Heritage Foundation.
Are we too busy with our daily work and routines to carve out time to join this historic struggle to save our country?
They will not go on our radio or podcast to discuss their new books or causes. Most of the time, they don’t even bother to acknowledge these invitations with a polite refusal. It’s like calling into a congressional dark hole.
This posture is cutting deeply into their own influence in Congress and severing contacts with progressive groups’ millions of members around the country.
4. The medical societies and bar associations are not costing the Trumpsters any lost sleep as the latter deepen their illegal destruction of federal public health and safety programs. Their brazen violations of federal laws and provisions of the Constitution reflect their Big Bad Outlaw in the White House.
These doctors and lawyers may be sullen but are largely silent when they have considerable muscle to flex. After all, the American Medical Association single-handedly blocked in Congress during the 1940s and early 1950s President Harry Truman’s universal health insurance plan.
We have written twice to 50 state bar associations saying that they should be the first responders against the destruction of the rule of law by raw power. No reply from any of these influential groups. (See: Letter to Bar Associations)
5. Trump is destroying labor unions’ collective bargaining agreements inside the federal civil service. He is the most anti-labor president in modern times, reflecting his past, exploitive business record.
Yes, the major labor unions have filed numerous lawsuits and on Labor Day managed some vociferous demonstrations around the country, without announcing a Compact for American Workers (see my last week’s column: LONG OVERDUE DOMESTIC COMPACT FOR AMERICA).
They could do so much more to deploy organizers for action all over the country, reaching deep into Trump’s blue-collar supporters to ask them about anti-worker Trumpism: “Is this what you voted for? How about some big demos in DC around the White House and Congress? How about old-fashioned mass worker rallies, demanding the presence of lawmakers?
6. I and others have written about the silence of former presidents, except for a few mild public remarks. George W. Bush despises Trump, especially for Trump wiping out his administration’s anti-AIDS program in less developed countries. He is silent as he continues his painting. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, where are they? With their large constituency of voters, they could activate thousands to push Democrats in Congress. With their fundraising skills and lists, they could raise quick money to start “Trump, You’re Fired” groups all over the country, tying the Trump brand to the awful, cruel, and vicious cuts, closings, and firings of federal servants, protectors, and scientists. They know he is destroying America and our constitutional Republic. So why are they AWOL, basking in their comfort zones, instead of being patriotically on the impeachment ramparts?
7. What about the enlightened billionaires? They know the score and can see an ominous recession coming. Easily, they could fund new “civic strike organizations” working on Congress and the executive branch to give a sharp, continuing voice to the people increasingly harmed and deprived in both red and blue states (e.g., fast approaching loss of Medicaid and food programs and much more). (See the Economic Policy Institute report, “100 days, 100 ways Trump has hurt workers.” April 25, 2025)
8. Given how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal Palestinian Holocaust is affecting our country’s violated laws, priorities, freedoms, safety, and tax dollars, why does the media adamantly refuse to more credibly report the vast death and serious injury undercount in tiny Gaza (the geographical size of Philadelphia)? Instead of showing probative evidence of over 500,000 deaths (leaving an improbable 3 of 4 Gazans still alive), they report the Hamas narrowly defined fatality figure of over 63,000.
Hamas does not count tens of thousands under the rubble or the far greater number killed due to “no food, water, medicine, healthcare, fuel, and electricity.” It only counts the immediately identified deaths of Israel’s daily bombardments. ( See, The Lancet piece “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential” July 5, 2024). Editors and reporters know this, but they still are misleading their readers, viewers, and listeners using the Hamas de minimis figures as if they were the total fatalities from this Israeli regime’s mass slaughter of Palestinian babies, children, mothers, and fathers.
9. Then there are the Trump voters who, with few exceptions, have yet to admit that they have been conned big time by the cruel and vicious, egomaniacal, vengeful Trump. With Elon Musk, his smashing of the social safety net includes Trump voters big time around the country. Millions will soon lose their Medicaid, some veteran services, serious labor protections, and care for their children, to mention a few of his betrayals.
Trump voters need to keep reminding themselves, every time Trump shafts them, “We didn’t vote for this.” They knew he was a chronic liar, an abuser of women, a cheater and serial law violator, a promiser breaker from his first term, and a world-class BS-er. But they forgave this unstable personality because his speeches persuaded them that the Democrats had abandoned them. Well, now they have to face the grim realities and speak out collectively about what he is doing to them, his faithful supporters.
10. Then there is “US,” the citizenry. Are we too busy with our daily work and routines to carve out time to join this historic struggle to save our country? We have not seen the worst of what Trump is going to do, by any means. Take him at his word when he says repeatedly, “This is only the beginning.”
A dangerously unstable personality, Trump has expressed global fatalistic attitudes in past conversations. “Watch out and Step Up.” (Read my new book Civic Self-Respect to encourage you to join the 1% already active in the resistance.)
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The Pain of Repeating "We Told You So”
On issues ranging from the Vietnam War and the War on Terror to the genocide in Gaza and Trump's authoritarianism, progressives have a history of being prematurely, fruitlessly right.
Aug 19, 2025
I spent the summer of 1965 arguing about the Vietnam War. I was 13, and my interlocutor was my 18-year-old camp counselor in Vermont. She was headed for UC Berkeley in the fall, where she would, as she later described it, “major in history and minor in rioting.” Meanwhile, I was headed back to junior high school. I was already convinced that our government was lying about why we were fighting in Vietnam (supposedly to protect our sworn ally, the South Vietnamese government, in response to a trumped-up "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin). I was also convinced that the war was unjustified and wrong. She seemed less certain about the war but was similarly convinced that expending energy opposing it would distract activists from supporting the civil rights movement.
As it turned out, we were both right.
Our summer camp subscribed to the Boston Globe, which I read daily, probably when I was supposed to be doing something more physically edifying like playing tennis. I remember the day the Globe ran a story quoting an informal adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson—it might have been Dean Acheson—suggesting that, even if the South Vietnamese government were to ask the United States to withdraw its forces, it wouldn’t do so. I cut the article out (property damage is not violence!) and ran to show her. “See? I was right. They’re lying about the war.”
It’s been 60 years since that summer, and she and I are still arguing about politics, now as life partners of more than four decades. (Don’t worry: it took me another 14 years to convince her I was a grown-up and therefore a legitimate object of romantic affection.)
The Vietnam War Was Wrong and Some of Us Knew It
Although she and I are indeed still arguing about politics, like millions of people in this country and around the world, we were right then about Vietnam. We may not have foreseen it all—the assassinations, carpet bombings, tiger cages, and the Phoenix Program (the Central Intelligence Agency’s first mass torture scheme)—but we were hardly surprised when it all finally came out. Today, there’s a consensus in this country that the Vietnam War was more than a mistake; it was a decade-long exercise in overreach and overkill.
That war would eventually result in the deaths of 58,000 members of the American military and millions of Vietnamese, both soldiers and civilians. We’d see a generation of Vietnam veterans come home with visible (and invisible) injuries: amputations; cancers born of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Air Force to defoliate jungle terrain; heroin habits; the illness we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD; and moral injuries caused by following orders to murder civilians. It tells you something about that war that Vietnam vets would prove more likely to become homeless than the veterans of previous or later wars. They would also suffer contempt from many of their fellow Americans for having been drafted into a vicious and ultimately pointless conflict.
I sometimes think it’s the fate of many progressives for once in our lives to be right—over and over.
Many who actively opposed the war also suffered. I knew young men who went to jail for resisting the draft. Others took on false identities—it was easier in those pre-internet days—or moved to Canada to avoid being drafted. My college boyfriend never registered for the draft (also easier before networked computers permeated the country and when you had to apply for a Social Security number rather than being assigned one at birth). Since many employers demanded to see your draft exemption or, after the war ended, your discharge papers, he worked for his housepainter father until President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 amnesty for draft evaders.
A friend I came to know during the 1980s had spent nine months in the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, for pouring blood on draft board records. Thousands were beaten bloody during the police riots outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, where activists had gone to protest the nomination of pro-war presidential candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey. And on May 4, 1970, four students were shot and killed by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University during antiwar protests. They were all right about the war, but too few Americans believed them—until decades later, when just about everyone did.
For Once in Our Lives
My father had a few sayings he thought were pretty funny. On meeting a child for the first time he’d ask, “How old are you? 10? When I was your age,” he’d continue, “I was 21!” A favorite of his was: “For once in my life, I’m right again.” He’d make that joke whenever he’d been proven right about anything. I sometimes think it’s the fate of many progressives for once in our lives to be right—over and over. This isn’t because we’re particularly good people, although some of my heroes are indeed good people. It’s at least in part because we are people with good luck. It’s been our good luck that, at some time in our lives, somebody offered us a place to stand, a viewpoint, an ethical way of grasping the world.
I think for example of Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan just days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. On the House floor, she got up and responded to the almost universal calls for revenge with these words: “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”
As I wrote about her courage at the start of the Biden years:
The legislation she opposed then, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), has indeed allowed “this”to spiral out of control. It has been used to justify an ever-metastasizing series of wars, spreading from Afghanistan in central Asia throughout the Middle East, south to Yemen, leaping to Africa—Libya, Djibouti, Somalia, and who knows where else. Despite multiple attempts to repeal it, that AUMF remains in effect today, ready for the next president with aspirations to military adventures.
And four years later, it’s still in effect, providing legal cover for a once-isolationist Donald Trump to drop bombs on Iran and threaten Russia with US nuclear submarines.
Back in 2001, Lee was excoriated for her vote against that war. The Wall Street Journal called her a “clueless liberal” and the Washington Times claimed that she was “a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies.”
Twenty years later, the Washington Post celebrated her courage, noting that no one in Congress—not even Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders—had shared her prescience at the time.
…We’re Right Again
The best response to the horror of September 11 was never a military one. The attacks were a criminal act best prosecuted as such, both in this country and in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. It was clear to anyone who remembered Vietnam that the Afghan war would become a murderous quagmire, and some of us said so at the time.
We were similarly right that the Iraq War that followed would never be the “cakewalk” Bush administration officials promised. We knew that Bush speechwriter David Frum, who invented the phrase “axis of evil” for Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, was deluded when he said, “The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.” We were convinced at the time that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were lying about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction. We knew, in part at least, because Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in Iraq, had told the UN Security Council so on February 14, 2003, writing in part, “So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons [of mass destruction], only a small number of empty chemical munitions…”
Twenty years later, and remembering the US response to the 9/11 attacks, some of us had an inkling of what October 7, 2023, portended for Gaza. On October 25, 2023, just a few weeks into the now almost-complete destruction of that tiny strip of land, journalist Omar El Akkad tweeted this sentence: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” (He has since published a memoir of his reporting life, covering everything from the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the war on Black people in Ferguson, Missouri.)
In June 2024, I wrote that both the Democrats and Republicans were offering uncritical support for the demolition of Gaza. Here’s what I said then:
Right now, it’s not too hard to foresee the approaching catastrophe in Gaza. Indeed, at my own university and across the country and the world, even in Israel, students are desperately trying to prevent a genocide already in progress. While the “grown-ups” debate the legal definition of genocide, those young people continue to point to the murderous reality still unfolding in Gaza and demand that it be stopped before it’s too late.
Now that it is too late, it’s no longer forbidden to use the word “genocide” in polite company. Now, as Gazans starve, as they are shot by soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces while seeking food aid at sites run by the farcically-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the world has decided it is, after all, “against this.” Only recently, in fact, two Israeli human rights organizations used the word “genocide” for the first time to describe their own government’s attempts to rid Gaza of Palestinian life.
France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have all called for the recognition of a Palestinian state, again many years too late. No contiguous land remains where such a state could be constructed. The world looked passively on for decades as Israel fulfilled Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s dream of turning the occupied West Bank into a “pastrami sandwich.” Back in the 1970s, he explained the plan to Winston Churchill’s grandson. “We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements,” he said, “in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” Over 20 years ago, The Nation magazine reported that Sharon’s mission had already essentially been accomplished. And now? This past May, the Israeli parliament the Knesset approved another 22 settlements there, a move that, as the country’s defense minister explained, “prevents establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”
Recent weeks have seen increased attacks on Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but on the West Bank. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded 757 such settler attacks by mid-July. As the newspaper Al-Jazeera reports, “The violence also includes the demolitions of hundreds of homes and forced mass displacement of Palestinians as well as annexations of more land in violation of international law.”
Premature Antifascists?
During the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, a group of Americans formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to help defend the Spanish Republic against the forces of fascist General Francisco Franco (aided by Adolf Hitler’s military forces). Almost a quarter of the Brigade died, the Spanish partisans lost the war, and Franco’s dictatorship lasted until he died in 1975. I knew a few of those Lincoln Brigade members in their later years, including Commander Milt Wolff, who was also a staunch member of the movement in solidarity with the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution.
In the 1950s, when this country was gripped by an anti-communist fervor, the Lincoln Brigade members and others who had opposed Franco came to be known as “premature antifascists.” Unlike the good (and timely?) antifascists who fought the Axis powers in World War II, they had recognized the dangers of fascism too early—before, that is, the United States had decided to enter the war on the side of France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Those Americans who’d jumped too early for the Allies were derided as communists (as indeed, many of them were) rather than being congratulated for seeing the danger ahead of everyone else.
The 2024 election cycle contained what some might call a resurgence of premature antifascism: those of us who warned that electing Donald Trump (and by proxy, his coterie of anti-democratic monarchists) would bring a dictator into the White House and fascism to the nation. During the first Trump administration, of course, many people could already discern his despotic trajectory. And yet, in August 2017, the New York Times ran an op-ed headlined, “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” Its authors ridiculed the (presumably premature) opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism as “tyrannophobia,” which they defined as “the belief that the overwhelmingly important political issue is the threat to our liberal freedoms and institutions.”
Well, yes, some of us did see that threat as an, if not the, overwhelmingly important political issue. There’s no joy in saying, “We told you so.” Sadly, the first six months of Trump’s second term have proved us—disastrously—right again.
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To Beat Back Trump's GOP in 2026, Progressive Leader Says 'Corporate' Dems Must Go
"Voters have made their feelings clear," said the leader of Justice Democrats. "The majority do not see themselves in this party and do not believe in its leaders or many of its representatives."
Aug 14, 2025
A top progressive leader has given her prescription for how the Democratic Party can begin to retake power from US President Donald Trump: Ousting "corporate-funded" candidates.
Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas wrote Thursday in The Guardian that, "If the Democratic Party wants to win back power in 2028," its members need to begin to redefine themselves in the 2026 midterms.
"Voters have made their feelings clear, a majority do not see themselves in this party and do not believe in its leaders or many of its representatives," Rojas said. "They need a new generation of leaders with fresh faces and bold ideas, unbought by corporate super [political action committees] and billionaire donors, to give them a new path and vision to believe in."
Despite Trump's increasing unpopularity, a Gallup poll from July 31 found that the Democratic Party still has record-low approval across the country.
Rojas called for "working-class, progressive primary challenges to the overwhelming number of corporate Democratic incumbents who have rightfully been dubbed as do-nothing electeds."
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in June, nearly two-thirds of self-identified Democrats said they desired new leadership, with many believing that the party did not share top priorities, like universal healthcare, affordable childcare, and higher taxes on the rich.
Young voters were especially dissatisfied with the current state of the party and were much less likely to believe the party shared their priorities.
Democrats have made some moves to address their "gerontocracy" problem—switching out the moribund then-President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race and swapping out longtime House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) for the younger Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.).
But Rojas says a face-lift for the party is not enough. They also need fresh ideas.
"Voters are also not simply seeking to replace their aging corporate shill representatives with younger corporate shills," she said. "More of the same from a younger generation is still more of the same."
Outside of a "small handful of outspoken progressives," she said the party has often been too eager to kowtow to Trump and tow the line of billionaire donors.
"Too many Democratic groups, and even some that call themselves progressive, are encouraging candidates' silence in the face of lobbies like [the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee] (AIPAC) and crypto's multimillion-dollar threats," she said.
A Public Citizen report found that in 2024, Democratic candidates and aligned PACs received millions of dollars from crypto firms like Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreesen Horowitz.
According to OpenSecrets, 58% of the 212 Democrats elected to the House in 2024—135 of them—received money from AIPAC, with an average contribution of $117,334. In the Senate, 17 Democrats who won their elections received donations—$195,015 on average.
The two top Democrats in Congress—Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—both have long histories of support from AIPAC, and embraced crypto with open arms after the industry flooded the 2024 campaign with cash.
"Too often, we hear from candidates and members who claim they are with us on the policy, but can't speak out on it because AIPAC or crypto will spend against them," Rojas said. "Silence is cowardice, and cowardice inspires no one."
Rojas noted Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who was elected in 2022 despite an onslaught of attacks from AIPAC and who has since gone on to introduce legislation to ban super PACs from federal elections, as an example of this model's success.
"The path to more Democratic victories," Rojas said, "is not around, behind, and under these lobbies, but it's right through them, taking them head-on and ridding them from our politics once and for all."
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