SEEING THE RISE of right-wing populism globally, several months ago I began to lead scenario-planning and writing about what might happen if Donald Trump won. I played out strategies for how folks might meaningfully respond. Yet when he won, I still found myself deep in shock and sadness. In the days after, I reached out to my community to try to assess and get my feet back underneath me.
Being grounded is difficult when the future is unknown and filled with anxiety. Trump has signaled the kind of president he will be: vengeful, uncontrolled, and unburdened by past norms and current laws. If you’re like me, you’re already tired. The prospect of more drama is daunting.
As a nonviolence trainer working with social movements across the globe, I am blessed to have worked with colleagues living under autocratic regimes to develop resilient activist groups.
My colleagues keep reminding me that good psychology is good social change. For us to be of any use in a Trump world, we must pay attention to our inner states, so we don’t perpetuate the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion, and constant disorientation. As someone raised by a liberation theologian, I’m reminded of how we lean hard on community and faith in tough times.
In that spirit, I offer some ways to ground ourselves for the times ahead.
1. Trust yourself
TRUMP IS ARRIVING at a time of great social distrust: There’s more distrust of the media, medical professionals, experts, politicians, community institutions, and membership groups. There are rifts among friends and family. Even our trust in predictable weather is diminished. Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it easier to divide people.
Trust-building starts by trusting your own eyes and gut. This means being trustworthy — not just with information, but with emotions. If you’re tired, rest. If you’re scared, make peace with your fears. If you need to stop checking your phone compulsively, do it. If you don’t want to read this article now and would rather take a good walk, do it. Start with trusting your inner voice. Trust in self is foundational for a healthy movement life. I wrote some resources at FindingSteadyGround.com that you may find helpful.
2. Find others who you trust
IN A DESTABILIZED society, you need people who help ground you. Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, uses the word verlassenheit — often translated as loneliness — to describe a kind of social isolation of the mind. Constant attacks on social systems turn us away from leaning on each other and toward ideologically simple answers that increase isolation.
In Chile in the 1970s and ’80s, the dictatorship aimed to keep people in such tiny nodes of trust that everyone was an island unto themselves. At parties, people would commonly not introduce each other by name for fear of being too involved. Fear breeds distance. We must consciously break that distance.
Find people you can regularly touch base with. Use that trust to explore your own thinking and support each other to stay sharp and grounded. For the last several months, I’ve been hosting a regular group at my house to “explore what is up with these times.” Our crew thinks differently but invests in trust. We emote, cry, sing, laugh, sit in stillness, and think together. All of us will benefit from actively organized nodes to help stabilize us.
3. Grieve
THE HUMAN THING to do is grieve loss. Humans are also good at compartmentalizing, rationalizing, intellectualizing, and ignoring — the damage this does to our body and psyche is well documented. But the inability to grieve is a strategic error. After Trump won in 2016, we saw colleagues who never grieved. They remained in shock. For years they kept saying, “I can’t believe he’s doing that.”
When Trump won the first time, I stayed up until 4 a.m. with a colleague for a tear-filled night of naming things that we had lost. This helped us find the sadness, anger, numbness, shock, confusion, and fear inside of us. We grieved. We cried. We held each other. We breathed. We dove back into naming what we knew we’d lost and things we thought we’d be likely to lose. It wasn’t strategizing or planning. Ultimately, this helped us believe it — so we didn’t spend years in a daze saying, “I can’t believe this is happening in this country.” Believe it. Believe it now. Grief is a pathway to acceptance.
4. Release that which you cannot change
ON HER BEDROOM wall, my mom had a copy of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote this during the rise of Nazi Germany.
Trump has proclaimed that his first day will include everything from pardoning Jan. 6 insurrectionists, reallocating money to build the wall, pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and firing 50,000-plus government workers to begin replacing them with loyalists. It’s doubtful that day two will be much quieter. Amid that chaos, it will be hard to accept that we cannot do it all.
A colleague in Turkey told me that something bad happens every day, and if he were to react to every bad thing, he’d never have time to eat. Another time, an elder saw me trying to do everything and pulled me aside. “That’s not a healthy lifelong strategy,” she said. She’d been raised in Germany by Holocaust survivors who told her, “Never again.” She felt she had to stop every wrong. It wracked her and contributed to several ongoing medical conditions.
I’ve created a journaling exercise. It asks what issues in the coming years I would “completely throw down for, do a lot for, do a little for, or — despite caring about — do nothing for at all.” That last question can feel like torture for many of us, but the desire to act on everything leads to bad strategy.
5. Find your path
LAST SPRING, I wrote What Will You Do if Trump Wins, a choose-your-own-adventure-style book. Differentiated pathways of resistance will emerge, as will plenty of opportunities to join the cause. You may be attracted to some pathways more than others. Your path may not be clear right now. That’s okay. Below are just a few paths. You can find more at WhatIfTrumpWins.org.
Protect People. These are folks surviving and protecting our own — especially those of us directly targeted, such as trans people, folks choosing abortions, and immigrants. This might mean organizing outside current systems for health care and mutual aid or moving resources to communities that are being targeted.
Defend Civic Institutions. This group may or may not be conscious that current institutions don’t serve us all, but they are united in understanding that Trump wants them to crumble so he can exert greater control over our lives. Institutional pillars understand a Trump presidency is a dire threat. These insiders will need external support, such as showing compassion that some of our best allies will be inside, silently resisting. Celebrate people who get fired for doing the right thing, then offer them practical help with life’s next steps.
Disrupt and Disobey. In Norway, to create a culture of resistance during World War II, people wore innocuous paperclips as a sign they wouldn’t obey. In Serbia, protests against their dictator started with student strikes before escalating to strikes by pensioners before finally escalating to the game-changing strike of coal miners. The ultimate goal is paving a path for mass noncooperation: Tax resistance, national strikes, work shut-downs, and other nonviolent mass disobedience tactics are the most effective strategies to displace authoritarians.
Build Alternatives. We can’t only react. We need a vision to build alternatives that are more democratic, loving, and kind. This might include grounding and healing work, rich cultural work, different ways of growing food and caring for kids, participatory budgeting, or seeding constitutional conventions to build a majoritarian alternative to the Electoral College mess we’re in.
6. Do not obey in advance; do not self-censor
IF AUTOCRATS TEACH us any valuable lesson it’s this: Political space that you don’t use, you lose. This is for all levels of society — lawyers advising nonprofits, leaders worried about their funding base, folks worried about losing their jobs. I’m not coaching you to never self-protect. You can decide when to speak your mind. But we must combat the slippery slope. In Timothy Snyder’s helpful book and video series On Tyranny, he cites ceding power as the first problem: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. ... Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Put simply: Use the political space and voice you have.
7. Reorient your political map
A FEW MONTHS ago, I sat in a room with retired generals, Republicans such as Michael Steele, ex-governors, and congresspeople. We were scenario-planning ways to prevent Trump’s abuse of the Insurrection Act to target civilian protesters. For a committed antiwar activist, the phrase “strange bedfellows” doesn’t begin to describe the bizarre experience I felt.
A Trump presidency reshapes alignments and possibilities. How we position ourselves matters: Are we only interested in maintaining ideological purity and preaching to our own choir? Even if you don’t want to engage, we all must give space to those who do experiment with new language to appeal to others who don’t share our worldview.
Empathy will be helpful: At the close of that planning day, I saw a lot of pain in people of great power who were admitting a kind of defeat. The generals said, “The military cannot stop Trump from giving these orders.” Politicians said, “Congress cannot stop it.” The lawyers said, “We cannot stop it.” I felt compassion that surprised me. Only the left activists said, “We have an approach of mass noncooperation that can stop this. But we’d need your help.” I’m not sure that projected confidence was well received. But if we’re going to live into that approach (and I’m far from certain we can), we need to be pragmatic about power.
8. Get real about power
PSYCHOLOGICAL EXHAUSTION AND despair are high. We’re not going to convince Trump not to break norms and laws that get in his way. Marches and symbolic protests will not change his mind. We must recognize that his power is unstable, like an upside-down triangle. It naturally topples without support. Power relies on pillars of support to keep it upright. Describing these pillars, nonviolence strategist Gene Sharp said:
“By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps, or even milk a cow. ... If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule.”
Removing one pillar of support can gain major, life-saving concessions. Removing many will result in systemwide change. In Blockade, Catholic activist Dick Taylor described how he and a tiny group changed U.S. foreign policy by blocking armaments sent to support Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan. They repeatedly sent canoes to block military shipments leaving from East Coast ports until the International Longshoremen’s Association was persuaded to refuse to load them. This broke the back of national policy.
Power will need to emerge from folks no longer obeying the current unjust system. This tipping point of mass noncooperation will require convincing many people to take huge personal risks for a better future.
9. Handle fear, make violence rebound
OTPOR, A SERBIAN student organizing group, took a sarcastic response to regular police beatings by joking, “It only hurts if you’re scared.” Their attitude wasn’t cavalier — it was tactical. They refused to grow fear. When hundreds were beaten on a single day, their response was: This repression will only stiffen the resistance. Handling fear isn’t about suppressing it — it is about constantly redirecting.
Activist/intellectual Hardy Merriman released a studied response about political violence that surprised me: Physical political violence remains relatively rare in the U.S. Threats of violence, however, trend upward. CNN reported: “Politically motivated threats to public officials increased 178 percent during Trump’s presidency,” primarily from the right. He noted that a key component to political violence is to intimidate. We can shrink into a cacophony of “that’s not fair,” which fuels the fear of repression. Or we take a page from the great movement strategist Bayard Rustin. Black civil rights leaders were targeted by the Montgomery, Ala. government, during the 1950s bus boycott. Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. went into hiding after police threats of arrest based on antiquated anti-boycott laws. Rustin organized them to go to the station and demand to be arrested since they were leaders — making a positive spectacle of the repression. Folks held their arrest papers high in the air amid a cheering crowd. Fear turned into valor.
10. Envision a positive future
WE’VE ALL IMAGINED how bad it might get. We would do ourselves a service to envision a positive future. As writer Walidah Imarisha says, “The goal of visionary fiction is to change the world.” We may mount righteous indignation that leads to mass noncooperation far beyond our expectations. Faith groups may play a critical role in leading morally charged strikes, tax resistance, and refusals to comply with unjust orders. Exposed political weaknesses could quickly turn many inside Trump’s organization against him. That feels far away from now. But possibilities remain.
Practicing future thinking gives me some hope and some strategic sensibilities. On the days when I can’t imagine good political possibilities, I zoom out to the lifespans of trees and rocks, heading into spiritual reminders that nothing lasts forever. All the future is uncertain. But a more hopeful future is more likely if we keep thinking of creative solutions.
This article is adapted with permission from wagingnonviolence.org.
Daniel Hunter trains activists globally on nonviolence and founded Choose Democracy. He is the author of the Climate Resistance Handbook and Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow.
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