How to fight back

Pushing back with people power, interstate alliances, and a refusal to accept bad faith arguments

Join us today, Thursday, September 4, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we check in with political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio. You can watch the conversation on desktop at The Ink or from a phone or tablet using the Substack app.

Over the past week, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has pointed out that no matter how much Donald Trump wants to be a king, it’s up to the American people whether he’s treated like one, and that a key element of his strategy is faking it until he makes it. Trump and his allies have been spending a lot of effort to create a spectacle of strength to get Americans to accept authoritarianism before it exists.

The administration-produced imagery in Washington is, then, a projection of sorts — a representation of what the president wants reality to be, drawn from its idea of what authoritarianism looks like. The banners and the troops — not to mention the strangely sycophantic cabinet meetings and news conferences — are a secondhand reproduction of the strongman aesthetic of other strongman states. It is as if the administration is building a simulacrum of authoritarianism, albeit one meant to bring the real thing into being.

But people don’t have to accept that, especially before the fact, and lately, there has been plenty of overt rejection of the idea of a world — as Bouie puts it — as Donald Trump wants it to be.

---

Come together

What do you do if the federal government becomes an occupying force?

It’s the kind of question preppers and militia members — many of them on the far right — have been asking themselves for years, and the answer has often involved amassing an arsenal, even if there’s little evidence to support the idea that civilian armor defends democracies.

And sure enough, that’s not happening now, even now that the federal government under Donald Trump is making good on those up-until-now largely imagined threats, perhaps because overreach wasn’t the issue for the militias in the first place.

But more importantly, what is happening in reaction to Donald Trump’s mobilization of the National Guard against Democratic-led cities looks very different from what anybody with a stocked bunker full of canned goods might imagine.

In Washington, D.C., regular folks are standing up to the federalization of law enforcement by organizing to look out for one another.

They’ve protested, recorded, and organized. They’ve wheat-pasted posters onto walls and utility boxes, and shared know-your-rights materials. They’ve volunteered to walk kids to and from school, deliver groceries to immigrant families afraid to leave their homes, and funnel information about the detained to lawyers and advocates…

“We know a huge part of protest and resistance is taking up space, and making sure that we are laying claim to our city, the streets that are ours and the schools that are ours,” they told us. “These are the things we can do: to find joy, and support one another as neighbors and families. I’m frustrated around the macro level, but on the micro level I really do believe this is what true organizing looks like: neighbor to neighbor, family to family, person to person.”

And that’s what mutual aid is all about — building solidarity to do what the state can’t, or won’t. And that makes a lot more sense than burying gold and waiting.

Speaking up for public health

We’ve talked a lot in this newsletter about the damage Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing to public health: tossing out experts and expertise at HHS and now at the Centers for Disease Control; overriding scientific advice to make vaccine access more difficult. This week, the other shoe dropped on vaccines at the state level, as Florida moved to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates.

Before widespread adoption of vaccination, nearly 1 in 5 children died before the age of 5, and it’s safe to say that nobody really wants to go back to that, probably not even Florida’s leaders. Right now, only Republican senators are able to rein in RFK Jr., and only the Republican majority in the Florida legislature can say no to Governor Ron DeSantis or Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo — and it’s not clear either will happen in the current political environment. Even so, yesterday more than 1,000 current and former HHS employees decided to openly criticize RFK Jr.’s leadership, risking their livelihoods to call for his resignation — or else, they promise, they’ll take their fight to the White House and to Congress:

Should he decline to resign, we call upon the President and U.S. Congress to appoint a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, one whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science. We expect those in leadership to act when the health of Americans is at stake.

That effort may not bear fruit. But the rest of the country isn’t waiting. The big West Coast states are banding together to establish their own public health alliance. The Northeastern states are reportedly expanding their existing health messaging consortium to create a similar alliance.

The new alliance of Western states is intended to provide residents with scientific data about vaccine safety and efficacy, and to issue guidance on vaccines for respiratory illnesses like Covid and the flu, as well as an array of childhood immunizations. The announcement did not specify which medical groups would be consulted in formulating the guidance, but both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology have publicly broken with the new federal health guidelines.

Can mini-CDCs covering the blue states solve the problem? Likely not, as illnesses know no borders. And it’s up to insurance companies right now to decide whose advice to take, which will determine access for many. But as Dr. Robbie Goldstein, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, told NPR’s All Things Considered, it’s time to act:

It feels as if we have to shift in this way. The reason that historically Democrats may have pointed to the federal government and to the guidance is that we could believe in that guidance. We knew that that guidance, those recommendations, were based in fact. That's just not the case now. We oftentimes see decisions being made by a tweet or a post on Truth Social, decisions in public health being made by a video posted to YouTube. That's not the system that we've existed in before, and so it requires us to change our tactics.

The lower courts strike back

Back in July, legal journalist Madiba K. Dennie argued that:

It is also nigh impossible to reconcile with an executive branch that is openly contemptuous of the law and brimming with people who find it easier to lie than to breathe. To the extent that Trump was ever entitled to a presumption of regularity, he has forfeited it. Courts should regard both the president and the administration’s invocations of the presumption with skepticism.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has taken that presumption to heart, handing power to the executive branch and splitting hairs to defend the upending of precedent and the stripping of rights. Some of the Republican Justices have gone so far as to warn the lower courts not to defy them.

But the lower courts may have had enough. And in today’s decision in favor of Harvard and the American Association of University Professors, overturning Trump’s freeze of 2.6 billion in Harvard-bound research funding as unconstitutional, United States District Judge Allison D. Burroughs took both the White House to task:

“A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” she wrote in her order.

But she also took aim at the Supreme Court:

the Court respectfully submits that it is unhelpful and unnecessary to criticize district courts for “defy[ing]” the Supreme Court when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus

Similarly, District of Columbia Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan knew from the experience of her colleague, Chief Judge James E Boasberg, in his ruling to halt the removals of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador that she couldn’t take executive branch assurances in good faith. So when she acted to halt the shock rendition of more than 600 Guatemalan children this week, she acted clearly, specifically, and quickly.

“I don’t want there to be any ambiguity about what I am ordering,” said the judge. “You cannot remove any children” while the case proceeds.

A freeze is in place for now, the children are still on U.S. soil, and the legal battle continues.

---

---

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images