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      Pro-Ukraine protests erupt across US after Trump and Vance ‘ambush’ Zelenskyy

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      Protests against the Trump administration erupted across the US on Saturday following an unprecedented Oval Office clash, wherein Donald Trump and JD Vance escalated tensions with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Hundreds of protesters gathered in Waitsfield, Vermont, on Saturday morning to oppose the vice-president’s visit to the state for a ski trip with his family.The demonstration had been planned earlier in the week by the Mad River Valley chapter of Indivisible, a grassroots organizing group, but additional protesters said they were motivated to join after watching Vance and Trump’s combative White House meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday.Protesters held signs reading “Vermont stands with Ukraine” and “International embarrassment”, while many waved Ukrainian flags in solidarity. Fox aired video of the protesters, but blurred out signs displaying messages against Vance and in favor of Ukraine.“After what he did yesterday, he crossed the line,” protester Cori Giroux told Vermont Public Radio.On Thursday, the governor, Phil Scott, a Republican who refused to vote for Trump in any of his three runs for the White House, issued a statement calling on Vermonters to be respectful of Vance and his family during their visit.“Please join me in welcoming them to Vermont and hoping they have an opportunity to experience what makes our state, and Vermonters, so special,” he said.While Vance, who admitted Friday he has never been to Ukraine, fled to an undisclosed location to evade protesters, some commentators noted that Zelenskyy, who stayed in Ukraine during Russia’s invasion, was returning to a Kyiv still under attack.The protest followed a contentious confrontation in the Oval Office, where the US president told the Ukrainian leader to make a deal with Russia “or we’e out”. At one point, Trump accused Zelenskyy of not showing enough gratitude for US military and political aid, warning that he was “gambling with world war three”.Zelenskyy countered that he had repeatedly thanked the American people and their leaders for their support, that but Ukrainians did not want to accept a ceasefire with Russia without security guarantees, since Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, had repeatedly broken a previous ceasefire agreement.Following the exchange, European leaders, along with the prime ministers of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, posted messages of support for Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLeading Democratic lawmakers also rallied to Zelenskyy’s side, with one, the senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, calling the Oval office meeting an “ambush” of the Ukrainian president by Trump and Vance.The aggressive meeting led to protests in cities and towns across the US, including New York, Los Angeles and Boston, where hundreds gathered to express their support for Ukraine and Zelenskyy.Videos posted on social networks showed hundreds of demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square, many carrying the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine on their backs. In Los Angeles county, a pro-Ukraine crowd rallied in front of a SpaceX’s facility, and protesters in Boston held an “emergency rally” for “fair peace” for Ukraine at Boston Common.“Ukraine wants fair peace. Ukraine wants the war to end,” the group Boston Supports Ukraine wrote on Facebook. “Ukraine wants all of this on fair terms with security guarantees.”For his part, Zelenskyy posted video of his warm reception in London on social networks, showing crowds of supporters lining the street outside Downing Street, where he was embraced by the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. More

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      ‘Heinous actions’: opposition to Trump, slow to energize, shakes off its slumber

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      On a bright winter’s day this week, a group of protesters fanned out along a palm tree-lined thoroughfare in the picturesque city of Palm Desert to demand that their Republican congressman stand up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn effort to reshape the American government. “You work for us, not Musk!” read one sign. “Remember your oath,” another warned, as a mobile billboard circled nearby, featuring the president and the billionaire tech mogul, with the message: “When he’s snooping through your bank accounts, you dump him.”The group, dozens strong, cheered wildly when the driver of a white Tesla turned the corner and laid on his horn. A smaller contingent of constituents had attempted to secure a meeting with the congressman, Ken Calvert, but found the door of his regional office locked and the blinds drawn.“He needs to hear from us, we the people,” said Colleen Duffy-Smith, 71, who helped organize the lunchtime demonstration as a volunteer with the progressive political advocacy group MoveOn. The semi-retired trial lawyer and college lecturer waved her “Nobody elected Elon” sign as a string of cars honked. She insisted she was not a “professional activist” but had been “called to action” by a real fear that Trump, with Musk by his side, had put the country’s democracy in grave peril.“I have to believe, given the heinous actions that are being signed with a Sharpie on the daily, abridging people’s personal freedoms, their civil rights, our social service programs, our aid abroad, that somebody would have a conscience,” Duffy-Smith said. “And once you start tipping the iceberg, other right-minded people will follow.”Progressive activists and concerned constituents spent the first week-long recess of the new Trump administration pressuring congressional Republicans to stand up to the president, Musk and their potentially unlawful power grabs.At congressional offices, Tesla dealerships and town halls across the country, including in solidly conservative corners of Georgia, Wisconsin and Oregon, voters registered their alarm over Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, the widening influence of Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” and the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle or entirely eliminate federal agencies that Americans rely on for essential services.“They scoff at the constitution,” said Kathleen Hirschi, 74, who wore a knitted pink pussy hat that became a symbol of an anti-Trump resistance movement during his first term to the Palm Desert protest. She carried the same sign she made for the Women’s March eight years ago, when the wave of discontent helped fuel Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms. Calvert’s office did not respond to a request for comment.One month into the new Trump administration, the opposition looks different than it did during his first term.But activists say the week of protests signals a growing movement. “We’re seeing a lot of the energy that happened in 2016 and 2020 really coming back as people are feeling pretty incensed by the actions of Musk and Trump,” said Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary for the Working Families Party (WFP). “If the threat did not feel real and urgent at election time or earlier this year, it seems to be feeling very urgent to people now.”The group helped organize several protests this week, including a Wednesday action with parents, educators and students at a congressional office in Republican Mike Lawler’s suburban New York district.Among those who braved the frigid temperatures to protest a Trump administration proposal to abolish the Department of Education was Melita Corselli, 38, a mother of four whose children rely on special education services.“The people who rely the heaviest on these services are your workforce – the people that are pumping your gas at the gas station in your town but who are barely able to afford to live in your town,” she said, describing her message to the congressman. “Our kids deserve the same education as your kids.”With few exceptions, Republicans have remained silent as the president moved quickly to purge critics from the government, fire federal prosecutors, upend democratic alliances and assert authority over Congress’s spending power. And despite a growing backlash, they have mostly voiced support for Musk’s Doge and its purported goal of rooting out waste in the federal government.View image in fullscreenLawsuits brought by Democratic attorneys general as well as unions and legal groups that formed during Trump’s first administration have stalled some of the actions taken by the administration and Doge. While congressional Democrats, out of power and still reeling from their losses in November, face mounting pressure to use all available leverage – including the possibility of a government shutdown – to derail the president’s agenda.Musk has become something of a supervillain to liberals, many of whom spent the better part of the last decade powering the opposition – or the “resistance” – to Trump. Doge’s aggressive government cuts – and its access to sensitive taxpayer data – have triggered a flood of lawsuits and nationwide protests, with activists and Democrats accusing Musk of orchestrating a “hostile” and “illegal” takeover of the federal government.“The idea of somebody who was not elected, who does not have a mandate to lead, who also happens to be the richest man on earth, taking unilateral actions outside of normal processes, feels so deeply disconnected with our values, with just basic democratic principles, that it, I think, is setting off an alarm in a lot of people’s minds,” Mangla said.In a joint interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Trump praised Doge’s efforts while Musk brushed aside his critics: “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful.” Onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, Musk celebrated with a “chainsaw for bureaucracy”.But new polling suggests many Americans aren’t as pleased. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that twice as many respondents disapproved as approved of Musk shutting down federal agencies that he deems unnecessary. Meanwhile, a CNN survey found that 62% of respondents – including 47% of Republicans – believe Trump has not done enough to address many Americans’ top concern: the high cost of everyday goods.In Georgia this week, Trump supporters said they understand it may take the president time to lower prices, but they’re still struggling to pay for basic necessities like eggs and milk.Democrats sense an opening to channel that frustration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn California, Democrat Christina Gagnier, a former school board member, recently joined the race to take on Republican congresswoman Young Kim in a closely watched Orange county district. On the campaign trail, Gagnier said she has heard many stories from business owners and parents who “feel bullied” by the administration’s threats to impose tariffs and enact sweeping cuts.“They feel like they’re not being respected,” she said. “These are real things that are happening to real people. They are happening to our neighbors. This isn’t just something happening in DC.”In a statement, Sam Oh, Kim’s political consultant, said the congresswoman has “deep roots in the community and has always been focused on meeting and listening to her constituents, fighting for her district, and delivering results”.Fury over Trump and Musk’s actions boiled over not only in liberal enclaves and House battlegrounds that will probably decide control of Congress, but also in conservative places that backed the president in 2024.In Georgia, congressman Rich McCormick may have expected a friendly reception at a town hall in his heavily Republican district. But the congressman was repeatedly booed and jeered by attendees furious over Musk’s merciless approach to the federal government but also over Trump’s baseless assertion that Ukraine started the war with Russia and the president’s social media post likening himself to a “king”.“We are all freaking pissed off about this,” a constituent told McCormick. Another attendee concerned by the administration’s dismissal of hundreds of workers at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked: “Why is a supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?”“I came here to have a discussion,” McCormick said as the tense session came to a close. “I think a lot of you didn’t come here in good faith to have a discussion. You came here to yell at me and to boo me.”Many House Democrats held in-person events to address the impacts of the administration’s cuts and the Republican’s government funding proposal. On Tuesday night, a town hall hosted by Democratic congressman Eugene Vindman of Virginia drew a large crowd that included federal workers who said they were living in fear that their job might be eliminated next.Congressman Mark DeSaulnier, a Democrat of California, scheduled a second town hall in light of the “overwhelming response” to his first one. And congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said 500 people attended his “Coffee with your Congressman” last week, “maybe the most I’ve ever had”. In Omaha and Iowa City, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders rallied thousands as part of his “fight oligarchy” tour.Sanders hit the road after joining Senate Democrats in an all-night “vote-a-rama” to protest against the Republicans’ budget bill. The plan, a blueprint for enacting key pieces of the president’s immigration and energy agenda, passed on a near-total party-line vote early on Friday morning. But it remains a backup option if the House is unable to advance Trump’s preference for “one big, beautiful bill” that “implements my FULL America First Agenda”.To pay for the House version, Republican negotiators are considering steep cuts to social services, and particularly Medicaid, the government health insurance program for poor and disabled Americans that Trump recently said would not be “touched”. With only a razor-thin majority in the House, GOP leaders can hardly afford any defections.Aware of the math, Keeley Level, 64, and her dog Prudence joined the Palm Desert protest on Thursday in hopes that she might persuade Calvert, the Republican congressman, to oppose any cuts to Medicaid, or California’s version, Medi-Cal.For more than two decades, Level has cared for her husband, who suffered a brain injury that left him partially paralyzed. Without federal assistance, she worries: “I don’t know how I’m going to be able to afford his prescriptions.”She also fears for the country. The midterm elections won’t take place until 2026. By then she wonders what will be spared of the federal government from Trump and Musk’s wrecking ball?“I’m hoping that, before it’s too late, people wake up,” she said. More

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      Civil servants are leading the American resistance – with GameStop as a guide | Virginia Heffernan

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      The most ferocious response to Elon Musk’s coup in the US is also the most disciplined. It’s a sustained act of civil disobedience by the civil service. Amid the malignant lies of the current regime, federal workers are steadily telling the truth.This strategy is more methodical than it at first seems. Yes, the distress and anger among federal workers is palpable. But the more anarchy Donald Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) operation loose upon the world, the firmer the federal employees are standing. Their protest might even be seen as a political short squeeze.Starting on 28 January, federal employees refused to leave their posts in spite of Musk’s campaign to bully them out. On the subreddit for federal employees, they exhorted each other not to quit. Their rallying cry soon became: “Hold the line, don’t resign.” Although 2 million workers were pressured to quit, only 75,000 of them took what looked like a sketchy “buyout” deal.Then, this past week, when on the job mass firings started, staying at work became impossible. Thousands of employees, many of them with excellent performance reviews, were terminated on the hollow pretext that their “performance has not been adequate to justify further employment”.But as these employees cleared out their desks, a vocal group refused to vacate their faith in the civil service’s excellence. They have, in short, opposed the lie that they and their colleagues are being fired for cause. In this way, they’ve converged on the policy that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, called “personal non-participation in lies”.On Reddit, one poster encouraged federal employees to think with a view to the public record. They should write letters, the poster urged, on behalf of the “trashed colleagues”. It was imperative to put on paper that these colleagues “did indeed have good performance despite the firing”.The poster offered a list of reasons to write these letters, among them that references help workers get new jobs. But the biggest reason to praise colleagues who have been fired under false pretenses is that, as the poster wrote, “it’s the truth.”This campaign to tell the truth is not the work of to-the-barricades types. Those being harassed, demonized and fired are middle-class workers in agencies established by elected officials in Congress. Their remit includes conducting cancer research, preventing fires and supporting veterans. By refusing to let Doge distort their service as wasteful or inadequate, they have taken a stand that the rest of us should emulate.Solzhenitsyn believed ideology itself was built of lies – the delusion that human society can be remade, from the top down, by social engineers serving an autocrat. This is exactly the kind of program spelled out in Project 2025 and being enacted by Trump’s increasingly totalitarian executive orders.“Our path is not to give conscious support to lies about anything whatsoever,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in a 1974 essay called Live Not by Lies. “Though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me.”In more 2025 terms, the civil service appears to be initiating a kind of short squeeze on the broligarchy. This is a maneuver akin to the so-called Gamestop affair of 2021, in which tiny-dollar investors banded together to put the screws to major hedge funds.During the pandemic, funds like Melvin and White Square were selling GameStop short – betting on it to fail. Keith Gill, a young financial educator, believed they were wrong, and he put his money on the company. Others wanted in. Not only was the video game store a fan favorite, but, in bleak Covid days, there was something inspiring about being believers in solidarity as opposed to friendless fatalists.Sound familiar? To stand with the US’s civil service today – to continue to believe in a government of, by, and for the people – is a risk. Not only will your wise-guy friends sneer at you, but you could miss out. If the big payouts are in nihilistic plays like crypto or Maga or Project 2025, you’ll feel like a jerk for putting your chips on dippy stuff like making roads and helping the poor.View image in fullscreenBut keeping faith is not as stodgy a project as you might think. With the GameStop short squeeze, everyman investors developed a boisterous lexicon of populist solidarity and above all tenacity. They enjoined one another to hodl the GameStop stonk with diamond hands.Their dominant slogan was just like that of the federal workers: “Hold the line.” And it worked. When they held, they kept the price of GameStop high and the hedge funds couldn’t afford to cover their short bets. Melvin Capital broke down, as did White Square.But back to the federal employees. The second they received the 28 January “Fork in the Road” email trying to drive them out, thousands did what the GameStop apes had done four years earlier: went to Reddit. It was electric. A campaign to save America from Trump-Musk crystallized. “When Tyranny becomes Law, Rebellion becomes Duty,” posted one anonymous federal worker.“Who knew that the fight against tyranny was me looking at some spreadsheets and trying to make Americans healthier?” another said. It was on. “They just created the imaginary deep state they convinced everyone they were fighting against.”And then it came: “Diamond. Fucking. Hands.”The GameStop words. “You made me double check which sub I was in,” someone said, with laughing-crying emoji. Here was the ethic of holding fast to something you believe in, even while tyrants conspire to destroy it.The feds held on. And even now, even among the jobless, they are refusing to lose faith in the American project. “Take up space, put a face to the stories,” said a recent poster to the fednews subreddit. “Make it uncomfortable for them. Let them know the human toll it takes.”Right now, it’s hard to imagine Musk or Trump will ever go bust. But emperors rise and fall. Those two have now bet against America. If the rest of us stay steadfast, they very well might, like those hedge funds, hit a bruising kind of margin call.Musk could have to answer for Tesla’s recent precipitous losses. There have been international boycotts of Tesla and creative, energized and widespread campaigns against it. Steve Bannon, one of the marquee Maga influencers, recently savaged Musk as anti-Maga, calling him “a parasitic illegal immigrant” who “wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions”.Trump, for his part, may have to face his 34 felonies one day, and pay the more than $500m he owes. Axios recently reported on a mounting revolt against Doge among Republicans in Congress. Then there are the people.In icy temperatures on Monday, thousands took to the streets, shouting: “No Kings on Presidents Day.” The goal of the organizers was to protest against “anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration and its plutocratic allies”. And the legal actions against the Trump administration are piling up – more than 75 opposing his executive orders, with more being filed every day.Even people without conscience can be brought up short by realities like the erosion of their fortunes, their standing and their bases of support. The GameStop apes used to say: “I like the stock” when people asked them why they wouldn’t sell. If you like the civil service, hold the line. Keep the faith. The Trump-Musk administration wants the American people to shut up, pack up our desks and resign our roles as citizens. Don’t take the deal. More

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      ‘A particularly heinous villain’: a disdain for Musk has sparked protests across US

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      When protesters showed up at state capitols around the country and at a host of federal agencies this month, they carried signs with messages about the unelected billionaire running a slash-and-burn government-cutting campaign that moved them to action.As liberal protesters find their footing in the second Donald Trump era, Elon Musk is proving a potent target.“He’s a particularly heinous villain,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the activist organization Indivisible. “He is less popular even than Trump, and it makes sense, because he’s an unelected billionaire, in fact, the richest man in the world, who’s trying to end cancer research and nutrition assistance for the poorest children in the country.”Trump’s inauguration wasn’t met with protests like in 2017. In the 2024 election, Trump won the popular vote for the first time and Republicans took hold of both chambers of Congress, dampening the movement against him. But the ascendancy of Musk in Washington has given the leftwing protest movement somebody to mobilize against, and people across the country appear to be taking their poster boards out of storage.In Washington, Indivisible and other groups on the left have organized protests, moving from agency to agency and following Musk’s team at the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) as it tries to gut programs and services.The protests are meant to voice anger against Musk and Trump, but also to pressure Democrats into working in tandem with groups such as Indivisible as an opposition party, Levin said. Democratic elected officials have not led the resistance, he argued, so the resistance is pushing them to action.Even without Musk, though, Levin thinks people would have been moved to opposition by the actions taken by the Trump administration, which is “not starved for possible villains”.“Musk is particularly bad, and he makes for an easy opponent to rally against,” he said. “ We thought there was going to be a backlash at some point. We didn’t think that we were going to have the richest man in the world tweet out that the Department of Education no longer exists. I mean, that is bonkers.”Beyond DC, a nascent protest movement – organized on social media by people who were tired of waiting for direction on how to voice their discontent with Trump – began in late January with a Reddit post that set a date chosen at random, 5 February, for a 50-state protest. Now called 50501 (for 50 states, 50 protests, one day), the group claims people turned out in 80 cities that day. Established left-leaning groups first viewed the protest plans with wariness, given the organizers’ inexperience.The movement is planning a president’s day protest on 17 February, dubbing it the “not my president’s day of action”. On social media, the group talks about standing up to dictators and “tech bros” and against the abuse of power they see in the second Trump administration.View image in fullscreenThe 50501 group is working to build relationships with activists around the country and plan further protests, said Sydney, an organizer with 50501, who asked that her last name not be used. She had never organized before, but didn’t see anyone on social media channels planning for the 5 February protest in Pennsylvania.“I decided to pick the ball up and do it myself. And I learned a lot extremely quickly. It’s probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done,” she said.Levin, of Indivisible, said he hoped those who attend protests then find further ways to get involved – many local chapters of Indivisible formed on the buses on the way home from the Women’s March in 2017, he said.Those Indivisible chapters around the country have grown steadily, and Levin is seeing more groups registering now than the same period in 2017. Chapters in all 50 states organized 300 events at local Senate offices to call on senators to oppose Russ Vought’s nomination to lead the office of management and budget.Levin said his organization was initially “really frustrated” that Democratic leadership was not responding strongly to the funding freeze that caused confusion and chaos. The group held a “Nobody Elected Elon” protest at the treasury department, and elected Democratic members of Congress made an appearance.At a protest at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on 10 February, Levin introduced 17 members of Congress. During each introduction, he asked them if they would withhold their vote on any funding bill, the next big battle for Democrats to show they are standing against the Trump agenda. Sixteen of the 17 said they would – some answering before he could even finish the question. The one who didn’t, the California representative Brad Sherman, faced a crowd chanting “withhold your vote,” Levin said.While the long-term efficacy of such efforts is unclear, Quinta Jurecic, a a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, suggested in an interview with the New York Times that protests outside the labor department prompted in an-person “Doge” meeting to move online.Some Democrats have privately complained that Indivisible and MoveOn, another liberal advocacy group, were pressuring them too much, considering Republicans hold the levers of government power, Axios reported. Faced with a barrage of phone calls, Democratic representative Don Beyer said: “It’s been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans.’”Republicans have also been getting calls – Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska, told the Washington Post on 7 February that the Senate was receiving 1,600 calls per minute, and that calls to her office were mostly from people concerned about Musk and his agency.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative from New York, said in an Instagram story that the volume of calls to her Republican colleagues is sending the message that people are mobilized and angry. “But the pressure needs to stay on,” she said.Send us a tip
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      The #Resistance is no more. But a quieter fightback to Trump 2.0 is growing | Jon Allsop

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      In January 2017, the day after Donald Trump was first inaugurated as US president, hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Washington for a “Women’s March” that was actually a broader-based vessel for popular rage. Not that the atmosphere was uniformly angry: I covered the march for a US radio network and found pockets of joy among the crowd. “It’s really exciting,” a teenager from New York told me. “It’s democracy in action.”The march, and parallel events around the country, was emblematic of what came to be known as the #Resistance, a loud liberal movement in opposition to Trump that took the form not only of mass protests, but court fights, adversarial media coverage (and increased consumption thereof) and grassroots organising. The movement made cult figures (not to mention merchandise) of figures seen as standing up for institutions, from the Trump-probing special counsel Robert Mueller to the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Now though, as Trump’s second term is under way, a consensus has formed that the #Resistance is dead. Almost as soon as Trump won in November, media leaders swore off the term, and liberal news consumers appeared to tune out. Titans of tech and culture who criticised Trump last time around either openly backed him or grovelled at his feet; even staunch Democrats suggested that they would find areas of common ground with his new administration. Protests around the inauguration were much smaller. Ross Barkan argued recently in the New York Times Magazine that the era of “hyperpolitics” – or politics as an all-consuming social battleground – is now over.Why? The principal answer might simply be fatigue. Trump is an exhausting figure, and American politics has now revolved around him for nearly a decade. And hopes that the burst of first-term energy against him would exile him from public life proved forlorn.The opposition to Trump also appears rudderless. The institutional Democratic party might technically have a new leader – Ken Martin, a little-known apparatchik – but for now, it lacks towering political talents. Many supporters doubtless feel disillusioned after watching Joe Biden cast the last election in existential terms, then fail to do everything in his power to ensure that the Democrats won it, before welcoming Trump back with warm words and a cuppa.And, if the Democrats are palpably diminished, there is a sense that Trump stands astride the political landscape as a colossus. In 2016, he won the electoral college but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, making room for the conclusion that his win was a fluke or somehow illegitimate. This time, the country knew the threat he posed, and he won decisively anyway. Trump and his allies have seized on that fact to claim a huge mandate.As the influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted, Trump’s victory has percolated down into US culture. Big tech firms and other industries may have submitted to Trump’s will this time out of fear that he would otherwise use the power of the state against them. But it seems equally likely that they are using the clarity of his victory as a permission slip to distance themselves from pesky liberal imperatives (diversity! Workers’ rights!) that they never liked, while seizing on areas of interest alignment and ideological affinity. For all his populist rhetoric, Trump has always been a slasher of tax and red tape at heart.The vibes, as the saying goes, have shifted since 2017. Trump has proved to be a lasting reflection of deep currents in American public opinion, not an accident. Peppy Obama-era liberalism is discredited. The #Resistance really does appear to be dead.Get rid of the hashtag and capital letter, however, and a small “r” resistance to Trump is still visible, as the Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr and New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister have argued. In-person protests are kicking back into gear – albeit still on a smaller scale – as are Democratic blocking moves in Congress. There’s evidence that liberals are tuning back into the news.None of this matches the mass energy and ubiquitous liberal iconography of 2017. But the less flashy work that undergirded the #Resistance – civil society groups suing to block Trump’s policies; local-level organising – is very much in evidence again this time. The Women’s March was a headline-grabbing show of force, but the courts were the most important brake on Trump in the early days of his first term. That’s already been the case again.And Trump is more vulnerable than he might appear to be, for two main reasons. First, if it was an overreaction to think that his 2017 win was an aberration, it’s also an overreaction to see him as an electoral Goliath now; he won the popular vote last year only narrowly and with a plurality, not a majority. Second, he might be enjoying a honeymoon, but his radical and chaotic early moves in office are already likely eating up his political and cultural capital.In part, this is by design. Trump and his allies want to overwhelm their opponents, as has been well documented. But I think they also want to provoke them. Trumpism as a political project is about conquest, yes, but it’s also about conflict – it needs resistance in order to thrive. It is a politics that will keep on pushing until opponents can’t not fight back.The past few weeks might have heralded the death of a specific brand or aesthetic of oppositional politics. But the underpinning idea is alive. It might not feel exciting any more, but democracy is still in action.

      Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today More

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      ‘We are here to fight back’: hundreds protest suspension of US financial watchdog

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      Chants of “let us work!” rang out across the courtyard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) blocks away from the White House on Monday, as hundreds of angry protesters rallied against the Trump administration’s decision to suspend all operations at the US’s top financial watchdog – an agency that has clawed back more than $21bn from Wall Street for defrauded consumers.The demonstration came after Russell Vought, Trump’s newly installed acting director of the agency, ordered all CFPB staff to stand down and stay away from the office in what critics are calling a brazen attempt to defang financial industry oversight.“This is like a bank robber trying to fire the cops and turn off the alarm just before he strolls into the lobby,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told the crowd. “We are here to fight back.”The shutdown order has thrown the agency into chaos, with employees reporting confusion over basic questions such as whether they can check their work email or complete routine training. The agency’s staff union filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of Vought’s stop-work order.View image in fullscreenThose critics also point to the influence of tech billionaire Elon Musk, who reportedly placed several members of his Doge team inside the agency with access to its computer systems. Warren accused Musk of orchestrating the shutdown to benefit his planned financial services platform, X Money, part of X’s eventual evolution to be an app for everything.“The financial cops, the CFPB, are there to make sure that Elon’s new project can’t scam you or steal your sensitive personal data,” Warren said. “So Elon’s solution, get rid of the cops, kill the CFPB.”The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from predatory financial practices. It’s since taken action against major banks including JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America for violations of consumer protection laws.A shutdown would then threaten oversight of everything from credit card late fees to paycheck advance schemes. Without the CFPB’s supervision, companies could potentially charge excessive overdraft fees, while debt collectors and payday lenders would face seriously reduced oversight.The agency’s enforcement actions have secured billions in consumer relief, including a $120m settlement with student loan servicer Navient announced last September over illegal loan servicing practices, and a $175m penalty against Block’s Cash App in January for inadequate fraud protection. In one of its largest actions, the CFPB ordered Wells Fargo to pay $3.7bn in December 2022 for widespread mismanagement of auto loans, mortgages and deposit accounts.But in November, Musk posted that they should “delete” the CFPB for being too duplicative of other regulatory bodies, and on Friday posted: “They did above zero good things, but still need to go.”“We have worked too hard. We have fought too hard for this democracy, and we ain’t turning it over to Elon Musk,” Representative Maxine Waters said to the crowd. “We’re going to win.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenSenator Chris Van Hollen called the situation “the most corrupt bargain in American history”, referring to Musk’s $288m investment in Trump’s campaign. “Elon Musk spent over $280m to elect Donald Trump, and Donald Trump has given Elon Musk the keys to the United States government,” he said.Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel for consumer financial justice at Americans for Financial Reform, was also at the rally, and warned that shutting the CFPB would eliminate crucial consumer protections.“Director Vought ordering all the CFPB staff to stop their work essentially is giving financial companies a green light to defraud and gouge their customers,” she said.The move comes despite broad public support for the agency. A September poll from Americans for Financial Reform showed that 91% of voters believe it is important to regulate financial services to ensure they are fair for consumers, including 95% of Democrats, 87% of Republicans and 88% of independents.“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a really popular agency,” Chen Zinner said. “So to do anything to hamper this work would be a risky political move, because right now, the CFPB is held with the same high regard as programs like Social Security and Medicare.” More