It’s Day One--Of a New Phase of the Fight to Save Our Democracy

Welcome to the Political Opposition

A week or so after the 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump as president, I woke up in the middle of the night with a sense of dread. As I lay in bed, I had a terrible realization. The cruelty and chaos of the first acts of his presidency were not just by design, such as the disruption at transportation hubs following the executive order to ban people from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, but were the prelude to a process of autocratic capture that was common abroad but new for our country.

I got up, made coffee, and set to work on an essay for CNN entitled “Trump and Bannon’s Coup in the Making” about the intent to use an “onslaught of executive orders and threatening talk” to deliver a “shock to the system,” as Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway tweeted, and disrupt the political system and disorient the public and the political class.

That night, I foresaw “the creation of a small group of loyal insiders, who take orders directly from the leader’s inner circle and…bypass those of the existing federal government and party bureaucracies,” and political purges “to cleanse the government of troublemakers and leave a power vacuum to be filled with loyalists…”

Today, of course, this describes the collusion of President Trump and Elon Musk as well as the designs of Project 2025. In other words, the individuals and organizations that want to destroy our democracy and make us feel powerless and hopeless in the process have been at this game for a long time.

But now far more of us are onto them. We are now familiar with their scams, their distraction and deflection rhetoric, their conversion of violence into patriotism, and their bargains with unscrupulous religious leaders who praise them as instruments of divine will. And we can translate that experience into anti-authoritarian action.

So let’s consider Day One as the start of a new phase of our fight to save our democracy. As of 12:01pmET, all Americans who believe in democracy become the political opposition –a term used in many foreign countries to describe those working to unseat the forces of corruption and autocracy. And that position has power, as those who came together in 2023 in Poland proved when they voted to drive their corrupt far-right government out of office.

Trump & Co. have encouraged Americans to internalize their propaganda, starting with “Day One” as the advent of an all-powerful government to be opposed at your peril. Let’s flip the script.

So, it is Day One to take back our country from those who want to destroy it for the benefit of their autocratic allies abroad. Regardless of your political party, and whether you have voted or not in your lifetime, if you care about the future of democracy and rights in America you can be part of this effort.

The Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island in New York, October 25, 2022. Beata Zawrzl/Nur Photo vai Getty Images.

And it is Day One of what might be a different understanding of politics for many: as something you practice every day, while starting conversations with people in your community who may have opposite political views, or while writing to courageous local and state leaders who will be resisting the administration’s repression, to tell them: “I see you and I support you.”

The coming weeks and months will be full of authoritarian spectacles and acts designed to encourage psychological and political submission to a corrupt authority. But we have knowledge and we have resources.

Here is the invaluable Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit from communications guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, which has guidance for messaging about the executive orders and the start of a new political era:

“Ground in widely-held values to make clear how the Executive Order harms us all. Make clear Trump is acting on behalf of the billionaires that brought him to power. Articulate the problem in voter-facing terms as opposed to lifting up how they stand to imperil institutions or abstract ideals.”

We can also be inspired by the wise words of election litigator Marc Elias in his Democracy Docket: “Trump wants us to be scared. He wants us to give up –gradually and then suddenly…We will not bow down. We will stand tall. We will not obey. Starting at 12:01pmET, I hope you will join us for the next four years.”

For my part, I will do my best to provide clear analyses of unfolding situations, remind us all that we are not powerless and we always have options to push back against tyranny, and present the most effective forms of resistance for that moment in time.

In Lucid’s 2021 founding “manifesto,” I wrote: “Lucid is a space of caring and solidarity where we help each other process the losses we suffer due to negligent and repressive governance, racism, misogyny, homophobia, environmental plunder, and gun violence. We need open hearts and transparent communications to recover and rebuild trust, including trust in our collective power to stand up to situations that threaten our dignity and freedoms.”

This solidarity is at the core of standing up to autocracy. Whatever happens, we will go through it together.