I’ve spent a decade fighting Trump. Here are six lessons I’ve learned | Saul Austerlitz

In January of 2017, I sent a tentative email to a few dozen friends and acquaintances who I suspected were also freaked out by the election of Donald Trump, asking if they wanted to join a local chapter of an effort called Indivisible, intended to serve as a grassroots liberal counterweight to the new administration. It was frankly not possible, at that point, to know less about activism than I did.

In the more than nine years since, our group has sent an email every weekday – approximately 2,300 in total – with a single concrete daily ask for our members: call your elected representatives. Make a donation. Show up for a rally. During that span, we have knocked on tens of thousands of doors, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, sponsored refugee families, and mobilized our friends, neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances to keep fighting for democracy.

After Trump was re-elected in 2024, I worried that our members would simply give up, unable to fight creeping authoritarianism any longer. Instead, something remarkable has happened: our group has more than doubled in size. We have also more than doubled in ambition in facing the ugliness of Trump 2.0: supporting refugees and asylum seekers under threat, leading a weekly pop-up protest we call Freedom Friday, giving out thousands of ICE whistles and whistle cards, and much more. As the country’s most powerful people – CEOs, heads of law firms, members of Congress, media moguls – bend the knee to Trump, it has been left to ordinary people like the members of our group to fight back, through efforts like this weekend’s No Kings 3, and much else that goes entirely under the radar.

In that spirit – and in the frank hope that more people join us! – I’d like to offer six brief lessons gleaned from the last decade of effort for every American troubled by Trump 2.0’s galloping authoritarianism and wondering how they can fight back.

The work is every day

Maybe the best thing our group did early on was commit to a rhythm. We would show up, day after day, no matter how daunting or gloomy the environment, in the hope that others would do the same. Trump 2.0 has felt like an unending avalanche of garbage being dumped on our heads, with hardly a moment of respite, and if there has been one consistent piece of feedback that my co-leaders and I have received, it is that people are grateful that we are present in their inboxes and their lives, day after day. (If there is a second piece of feedback, it is the desire for fewer reply-all emails. Working on it!) What is true for organizers is true for volunteers. Pick a rhythm – every day, every week, every month – and commit to it.

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others

I did not know it when I started this work, but I wanted to go far, and it was one of the great strokes of good fortune in my life that, in my blind fumbling after Trump was elected, I found so many willing partners who were willing to devote every spare second of their overstuffed lives to activism.

The most incredible political organizers I know, including my six co-leaders, have nothing but responsibilities: young children, ageing parents, demanding jobs. They would exchange texts with me at 7.30am and 10.30pm; would wake up at 5am on election day weekend to talk to voters; would stand in the freezing December cold to hand out ICE whistles to neighbors. Our country is atomized and our culture propels people to sit in front of their screens, hopelessly doomscrolling. The only solution is community. Not only will it radically increase your capabilities as an organizer, it will also make you feel a whole lot better.

The medical school model

All of our work operates on the medical school model: see one, do one, teach one. We have stood on endless street corners in Staten Island and Brooklyn and Bucks county, Pennsylvania, with rapid-fire guidance for someone who might last have spoken to a stranger about politics when Barack Obama was president. It’s always someone’s first time. Today’s student is tomorrow’s teacher.

The personal touch

Activism is a narrow and deep funnel through which to know other people. I sometimes am offered a glimpse of the most profound sentiments that motivate my fellow members to action, but I may not always know their children’s names or where they work. Activism is deeply communal and can often feel impersonal. People can drift away because they feel like no one would notice if they stopped showing up. Groups built for the long term have to do better.

Over the last year, we have begun to host regular events to build community: zine folding, art builds and more. After Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis, my co-leaders and I sent out about 150 personal emails and texts to our members over the course of a single Sunday, asking how they were doing. We learned a tremendous amount about how people were responding to the horrors of Minneapolis, and also, I hope, firmed up some bonds with members by reminding them that we were not going anywhere.

Be stubborn

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and JD Vance want you to give up. They want you to assume that America is unsalvageable, that they are tougher and more determined than you could ever be, that all is lost. Do not believe them. I pride myself on my stubbornness, product of generation upon generation of Ashkenazi Jewish forebears and over a decade of battling with my children over their homework. I regularly tell my children that however stubborn they believe themselves to be over not doing their math assignment, I am 100 times more stubborn about making sure they did. Channel your inner math teacher for democracy.

Hope is a muscle

Being hopeful is not a belief so much as it is a practice. The state of America right now is dire. Things are as bad as I have ever seen in nearly half a century of being alive. But I still strive to hope. Despair is easy. Despair is cheap and welcoming and asks nothing of you. Hope requires effort. You have to find reasons to hope. You have to hack a path to hope. America can be better because we, too, are America.

Hope is a responsibility. You cultivate it in order to share it with others. It cannot be a private possession. It only blooms when given away. Hope is the prelude to action. So every morning, arise and hope, and go from there.

What’s giving me hope now

For No Kings 2, our group, led by the amazing illustrator Megan Piontkowski, wrote and designed a brand-new zine with suggestions for newcomers about how to get more politically involved. We printed and distributed about 4,000 copies and volunteers passed them out during and after the march. For No Kings 3 on Saturday, we updated the zine, renamed it Everyday Resistance and printed 7,000 copies. Volunteers pitched in to cover the printing costs, to fold the zines, and to hand them out. People are fighting for a robust, flourishing American democracy with all of their hearts, and every step they take encourages someone else to do the same. All it takes is everything we have.

• Saul Austerlitz is the author of How to Assemble an Activist