Mass meetings already underway to plan resistance to Trump

Mass protests and meetings began taking place already the day after the election. | YouTube screenshot

WASHINGTON—More than 140,000 people, assembled by the Working Families Party and allies via Zoom, began planning mass resistance to Republican MAGA President-elect Donald Trump and his plans to replace U.S. democracy and the Constitution with fascistic programs and policies.

Speakers at that massive meeting, two days after Trump won the November election and control of the Senate, underscored the urgency of combatting the Trumpites.

It was one of several mass meetings called by various groups strategizing on how to combat Trump and his MAGA movement in the wake of their election win. African-American and Latino groups convened some of the sessions.

“Democracy and freedom are under attack and it’ll be up to us to defend them,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a constitutional law professor on leave and leader of the House impeachment team for Trump’s second U.S. Senate trial.

“We have no kings, no queens, no czars, and no titles of royals,” he declared.

Trump, however, has already promised to be a dictator on day one, and progressives believe he won’t stop then. Opinion polls show his MAGAites welcome a dictator.

“We will not concede or consent to anything that threatens our democratic rights,” declared Service Employees President April Verrett, leader of the nation’s second-largest union. Trump’s win “doesn’t change our vision, hopes, and dreams” for a progressive future of the U.S.

Not defeated

“We are not defeated, but we are determined and defiant and we are not going to back down.”

For Verrett, the key to combatting Trump and Trumpism is “building cross-racial solidarity, not letting racism, sexism and misogyny in,” she said of the Trumpite movement’s characteristics. The movement to counter Trumpism must be “a workers’ movement that is multiracial and multilingual.”

And, for SEIU, “we are committed to creating new rules, systems and standards” to promote union organizing and collective bargaining.

“I don’t want to hear” the words “’We lost working people,’” in this election, added Becky Pringle, a Philadelphia science teacher and president of the nation’s largest union, the National Education Association.

Post-election exit polls for the AFL-CIO showed 57% of union members and their households voted for Trump’s Democratic foe, Vice President Kamala Harris. That included 58% in Pennsylvania and 67% in Minnesota. And Black women, such as Pringle and Verrett, mobilized and voted for Harris, who is African-American and Asian-American. She won them 87%-9%.

But white women went for Trump by seven percentage points and white men provided an even larger margin for the convicted felon, misogynist, and white nationalist Republican nominee.

Sections of the corporate media have been trying to define the working class as white men without college degrees, leaving out major sections of a class that makes up the bulk of the population.“We are working people,” Pringle said, pointing to both herself and Verrett, Black women, as representatives of the new mass movement. “And we will continue to mobilize.”

Pringle did not minimize “the real threat of Donald Trump,” as detailed in his speeches on the campaign trail, his continued revelations since and in Project 2025, the Republican platform assembled by the Heritage Foundation, a radical right think tank that employed more than a hundred officials from Trump’s first term to write it.

“We will use our organizing muscle to recruit and retain our” three million “members to engage” on the field “and involve them in ways we didn’t before.” And it won’t be just teachers in that movement, either, Pringle said. Her union intends to reach out to parents and families.

Speakers at the session, which ran almost two hours, emphasized how the Republican trifecta—the presidency, the House, and the Senate—plus the Republican right-wing dominated U.S. Supreme Court, must drive progressives together, under the banner of www.mobilize.us.

“In the pain of this loss, this call is about bringing us together in a larger strategy, not splintering apart into chaos,” the Working Families Party moderator said. That goal is in direct contrast to the finger-pointing and blame game now occurring among elected Democrats and their independent allies.

Need to resist finger pointing

“We need to resist finger-pointing,” emphasized Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair.

The progressives, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., faulted the party for not emphasizing kitchen table issues and for not taking clear stands for the working class and against corporate greed and income inequality.

The party’s moderates retort that the Democratic left branded the party by appealing to various constituency groups that “middle class” and non-coastal voters felt it was out of touch.

Their side of the argument is reminiscent of the so-called pro-corporate “New Democrats” who promoted former President Bill Clinton’s successful White House run in 1992. Clinton shunned progressives, notably organized labor, particularly with his North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which stripped out much of the industrial manufacturing base of the country.

He won a first term by running on “It’s the economy, stupid,” and the second by touting small-bore initiatives plus so-called “welfare reform,” which appealed, underhandedly, to prejudices.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are counting on us to give up,” said MoveOn chief Rahna Epting. “But more than 66 million people voted against their hate-filled agenda. But she warned that “in the next few months” as Trump assembles a regime and starts to implement his extremist agenda “our greatest threat is despair. We must take care of one another.”

“With each setback, we’re going to come back louder and longer” against “the candidate of a corrupt, dysfunctional administration with a hateful agenda” that becomes a top target.

Still, speakers realized that for the next four years, progressives are going to be playing a lot of defense. Epting talked about “blocking and protecting civil society and institutions under threat” all the way through the next presidential election. Pringle said NEA’s top theme will be “to preserve, protect and strengthen public education,” a top Trump target when he was in the White House before losing to incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden four years ago.

Project 2025 has made teachers and public schools a target again, with its advocacy of taxpayer-paid vouchers not just for parents of private school students, but for all parents of all students.

Those vouchers could be used anywhere, just like in a continuing program a former GOP-run Congress imposed on Washington, D.C. It used congressional power over the Nation’s Capital, the project notes.

And Trump’s project also wants to “reform, eliminate, or move” Department of Education “programs and offices to appropriate agencies,” thus killing the agency, a favorite bugaboo of the radical right.

Leah Greenberg, co-director of Indivisible, warned that the threat extends beyond Trump and his MAGA mob to “the ruling class” corporate oligarchs and financiers. Their Republican clients “blamed inflation entirely on the Democrats and we didn’t do an effective job of refuting that,” admitted Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.

Singled out Jamie Dimon

Greenberg singled out investment banker Jamie Dimon, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, and Tesla multibillionaire Elon Musk as particular right-wing threats.

The latter two are also pushing court cases through Trump-named federal judges in Texas to declare the National Labor Relations Act and the NLRB, which enforces it, as unconstitutional, thus stripping workers of even its watered-down protections.

“Inflation always hurts progressive politics. The problem is economic inequality and we didn’t make that connection,” added Raskin. “We have too much inequality, not enough union density, and the right to collective bargaining is not respected.”

The capitalist class was also able to convince voters that Trump’s blunt talk on the stump this year and in the White House in his first, pre-Biden term, labeled him “the candidate of change,” while Harris was left defending a status quo most voters are upset with, Greenberg noted.

Several speakers also urged coalition members to keep fighting for democracy and the rule of law, as Lisa Gilbert, co-executive Director of Public Citizen, put it.

Harris returned to that theme at the end of the campaign, but other Democrats appeared to shun it, despite the overwhelming evidence of Trump’s tries at overthrowing the U.S. Constitution, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021 invasion, insurrection, and coup d’etat attempt at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump plans to pardon and release all the indicted and convicted insurrectionists. Legal scholars split on whether he can pardon himself for the role he played in ordering, aiding, and abetting it.

Raskin was the prime speaker at the session in returning the defense of the Constitution theme, no surprise since he was the lead House prosecutor in the second Trump impeachment trial in the Senate, the one that covered Trump’s heavily documented role in the Capitol insurrection.

“My focus is on the ills of our political institutions and obstacles” to people exercising their rights. Those ills and obstacles, he said, include gerrymandering, voter suppression, “difficulties in voting and right-wing judicial activism which resulted in the” Republican-named Supreme Court majority “gutting the Voting Rights Act.”

“We have millions of disenfranchised people” including former prisoners who have served their terms but are banned from voting in “seven or eight states” and four million citizens from Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., who lack congressional representation. D.C. voters can vote for president. The more than three million Puerto Ricans can’t.

Though she did not speak at the session, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Alexis McGill Johnson summarized its themes in a follow-up op-ed:

“Our rights—civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights—will be won only by seeing and fighting for each other’s humanity. The project for a multiracial, feminist democracy is still my hope…I hope, after you take time to grieve what we lost on November 5, that you will join us. We need you—now more than ever,” she said.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.