When Columbia student protester Mohsen Mahdawi was released from a Vermont jail on April 30 after being detained by ICE for 16 days, he had a message for his tormenters: “To President Trump and his Cabinet, I am not afraid of you.”

Standing behind him, his supporters chanted “No fear!”

One day later, on International Workers’ Day, people took to the streets in over 1,000 towns and cities across the United States to protest for labor and immigrants’ rights and to denounce Trump’s billionaire-run government. 

Action, like courage, can be contagious. Following the April 5 “Hands Off” protests and another Saturday of mass protests on April 19, the May 1 demonstrations marked the third time in less than a month that large numbers of Americans took to the streets in national days of action. 

Trump 2.0’s rapid blitzkrieg through any institution — public or private — that might oppose him is based on a “flood the zone” strategy that seeks to overwhelm and disorient his political opposition. However, flooding the zone can also make a lot of enemies very quickly. And that’s what appears to be happening. 

Nationwide days of protest are only one tool of a broad-based opposition that stretches from the grassroots activists to powerful elites in academia, the judiciary and even the financial markets that are repudiating Trump’s most disruptive actions. Here are some highlights. 

• The “Fighting Oligarchy” tour led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was the first visible sign of large-scale opposition to Trump. It drew 12,000 people in Nampa, Idaho; 20,000 in Salt Lake City; 34,000 in Denver and 36,000 in Los Angeles. By moving quickly, Sanders and AOC have helped frame the resistance to Trump 2.0 in class-based terms, unlike Trump’s first term, when Democrats channeled public outrage into Russiagate conspiracy theories. House Republican leaders have already dropped their most aggressive plans to slash Medicaid funding due to objections from GOP colleagues who represent swing districts the Fighting Oligarchy tour visited. 
  
• Tesla is the linchpin of co-president and world’s richest man Elon Musk’s $380 billion fortune. Protesters have succeeded in making the car company’s brand toxic among affluent liberals who are its customer base. In early April, Tesla announced its first-quarter sales were down 13% from the same time last year, and its first-quarter profits plummeted a staggering 71%. 
  
• In Sackets Harbor, NY, around 1,000 people marched on Trump’s deportation czar Tom Homan’s summer home in early April after ICE agents detained a Guatemalan mother and her three school-age children. A public letter to ICE by the childrens’ school principal Jaime Cook — “I have no other agenda. Please release my students and their mother back to their community” — helped mobilize the tiny village’s response. Two days after the march, the mother and her children were released. 
  
• On April 16, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) traveled to El Salvador and refused to leave until the country’s Trump-friendly dictator let him meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father of three U.S.-born children who was abducted by ICE agents in March and flown to a notorious Salvadoran prison without due process. After Van Hollen’s headline-grabbing action, several other Democratic members of Congress used their power to make high-profile visits to pro-Palestine students being held in ICE detention, Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi. After years of Democrats refusing to confront Trump’s xenophobia, national polls now show Trump underwater with voters on immigration, his signature issue. 
  
• Like most universities, Harvard has bent over backward since October 2023 to appease Zionists who conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. All that got Harvard was an April 11 letter from the Trump administration demanding the university place its faculty hiring, its student admission process and its curriculum under government review until at least 2028 or lose billions of dollars in federal research grants. Harvard President Alan Gerber shocked the Trumpies by flatly refusing to give in to their bullying and subsequently sued the administration. 
  
• Galvanized by Harvard’s stance, hundreds of university presidents signed a letter protesting “unprecedented government overreach and political interference.” Meanwhile, the majority of faculty senates at Big 10 conference schools across the Midwest have passed measures calling for a NATO-style self-defense compact in which public universities would pledge to share financial and legal resources if any one of them comes under attack. 
  
• If you think Harvard, with its $53 billion endowment, is an unlikely ally, meet the bond market. Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement that he was imposing sky-high tariffs against almost every country in the world — as well as a couple of islands off the coast of Antarctica inhabited only by penguins — erased $6.6 trillion in stock-market value in less than a week. Trump still wouldn’t budge on his tariff scheme. However, when the bond market began to crater as investors fled from the U.S. dollar, Trump was forced to reverse course and announce a 90-day “pause” on his most exorbitant tariffs, though not those against China. 
  
• Trump’s mass firings of government workers, many of his executive orders and his administration’s absurd interpretations of existing laws have repeatedly run into roadblocks in the federal courts, including from judges Trump appointed during his first term. Whether the Supreme Court holds the line against Trump and can compel him to abide by its decisions remains to be seen. 
  
• In Canada, surging anti-Trump sentiment tanked the Conservative Party (aka Maple MAGA) in parliamentary elections it had led in the polls by more than 20 points. Similar results followed in Australia, where previously ascendent conservatives were routed in elections by the Labor Party. In his election night victory speech, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared, “President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never happen.”

Out of a mixture of greed and spite, the second Trump administration has already done tremendous damage to the basic administrative functions of the government, to scientific research and to the United States’ relationships with the rest of the world. We now find ourselves in a race against time to slow down and ultimately defeat Trump’s authoritarian project before he and his favored tech broligarchs fully consolidate their control. There’s no guarantee that “resistance” in its myriad forms will succeed. But think about how much more harm Trump and Musk would have been able to do by now if no one had said a peep. 

As the consequences of the White House’s actions start to be felt — shortages of basic consumer goods due to a 145% tariff on Chinese exports, rising inflation, a loss of governmental capacity to do everything from delivering Social Security checks to fighting wildfires — there’s nowhere for the already unpopular Trump to go but down. The United States was born almost 250 years ago from a revolt against taxes imposed by an unpopular monarch. As we confront our would-be king, will another rebellion begin this summer if Walmart’s shelves go empty and Amazon deliveries cease? Stay tuned. 

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