As Trump steamrolls ahead, Democrats see a growing ‘heartbeat’ of resistance
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- After months of aggressive action by President Trump, Democrats and other critics are increasingly finding their voices and speaking out, to receptive audiences.
- For weeks, activists have been targeting Elon Musk by going after his bottom line. They have called for a boycott of Tesla.
In an interview on MSNBC, Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, described “thousands and thousands” of people showing up to recent rallies held by the Vermont senator in Republican-held congressional districts.
Shakir said the crowds were “angry and frustrated” with Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent grip on government spending, and “urging Democrats to stand up and do something.”
“In my mind,” he said, “I have Bernie Sanders holding a stethoscope up to the Democratic Party and saying, ‘Hey, listen to this: the heartbeat of America.’”
Shakir’s remarks reflected a growing sentiment among Democrats, progressive protesters and others outraged with the way President Trump has steamrolled over long-standing democratic norms since his return to office last month.
Shaking off a pause in protest that had dampened activism in the days following Trump’s return to power, they are finding their voices, landing on new resistance strategies focused on what they see as Trump’s most egregious overreaches, and delivering those messages to receptive audiences at town halls, rallies, marches and street protests.
On Friday, hundreds of scientists marched in Los Angeles at a “Stand Up for Science” event, part of a nationwide day of protest against Trump policies that have slashed federal funding for scientific research and drastically downsized agencies dedicated to weather forecasting and environmental protection.
Porter focused on protecting Californians from President Trump’s policies, a theme that is expected to be a throughline in next year’s gubernatorial contest.
The arrest of Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil by federal immigration officers, despite his facing no criminal charges and being a green card holder, has sparked protests around the country.
On Sunday, Trump was again on everyone’s mind as Democratic lawmakers joined thousands of others for a march to commemorate the 60th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when law enforcement officers brutalized voting rights activists in Selma, Ala., in 1965. “At this moment, faced with trouble on every side, we’ve got to press on,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said.
On Monday, after weekend visits to big crowds in Wisconsin as part of his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sanders, 83, stood with a bullhorn on the back of a pickup truck in suburban Detroit, addressing an overflow crowd at a high school gym.
“The people of this country will not allow us to move toward oligarchy. They will not allow Trump to take us into authoritarianism,” said Sanders, a political independent, to cheers. “We’re prepared to fight. And we’re going to win.”
The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment.
The latest protests are not the first since Trump took office. Last month, thousands of people across the country protested Trump’s planned mass deportations. In L.A., they shut down the 101 Freeway. More immigration protests have occurred since.
Draped in Mexican and Salvadoran flags, roughly 1,000 demonstrators gathered near City Hall shortly before noon, blocking traffic at Spring and Temple streets.
Democrats have for months been accused of being flatfooted, ineffective and poorly coordinated in their response to Trump’s agenda, including during the president’s joint address to Congress last week.
Still, the resistance seems in some ways to be ratcheting up, and has clearly started to reach — and aggravate — the White House.
For weeks now, activists have been targeting Musk, the world’s richest man and head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, by going after his bottom line.
They have called for a boycott of Tesla, Musk’s electric automaker, and staged protests outside Tesla showrooms and dealerships. Partly as a result, the automaker’s sales and stock price have plunged.
Trump lashed out at those efforts Tuesday as somehow illegal, and said he would buy a Tesla as a “show of confidence and support” for Musk.
“Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for.”
Protesters took the president’s comments as another challenge. Tesla Takedown, a decentralized group that has helped amplify Tesla protests in California and across the country in recent weeks, said in a statement to The Times that they would not be cowed by Trump, and that peaceful protests would continue.
“We will not be bullied or allow our rights to be trampled on or stolen,” the group said. “If you’re ready to show Donald Trump and Elon Musk that there are no kings in America, join a Tesla Takedown protest in your community this weekend.”
Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, said that in a moment like this it is “extremely important” for free speech protections to be defended and for critics of the president to “make their voices known” — “particularly given the number of moves that this administration has made in just the first 50 days or so to try to shut down criticism of the government or of Trump.”
She cited the arrest of Khalil, the administration’s threat to revoke federal funding for universities that allow for protests on their campuses, and attacks the Trump administration has launched against big law firms that have worked for Trump’s political opponents or with prosecutors who have built cases against Trump in the past, as clear overreaches of power that must be confronted.
Such actions send a “chilling message to others who may want to take to the streets or engage in some other form of protest or dissent,” Fallow said, and the Trump administration will only grow more emboldened if such steps work to silence their critics.
“It is important for lawyers, for law firms, companies, people who have power and privilege, to use their resources to fight back,” she said.
Whether the recent momentum will hold up, or protests will continue to proliferate, is unclear. Active resistance — including from states like California — is far from the only response to Trump.
Polling shows Trump retains broad support among Republicans, and even some Democrats have decided to stay quiet or move toward the center rather than hold the line.
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For weeks, Democrats and other political observers have considered advice put forward in the New York Times by veteran Democratic operative James Carville, who suggested that Democrats should “roll over and play dead” while Republicans “crumble beneath their own weight” and “make the American people miss us.”
Ahead of Trump’s joint address last week, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) advised Democrats to let Trump “stew in his own juice” rather than vocally oppose him. And in a new podcast launched last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom tacked hard toward the middle in an interview with controversial conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
On Sunday, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan — who delivered the Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s joint address — gave a sober analysis of where Democrats stand on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
She said that Democrats “have been on their heels since Trump won the election,” are “still finding our footing” and need to land on a better strategy to respond to Trump as he continues “flooding the zone” with controversial and chaos-inducing policy measures.
Outside Detroit the next day, Sanders struck a decidedly different tone.
He said the Trump administration is driving the country toward authoritarianism and kleptocracy, but Americans of all political stripes are standing up across the country to push back.
“We’re here today to in fact make sure that after so many people in our country have fought and fought and died for democracy, that we are going to be — stay — a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” he said.
The crowd roared.
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