Standing Up: It Looks Like This.
Individuals are taking the lead. They can show institutions the way. Ongoing chronicles of resistance.
Throngs in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, as part of nationwide protests against Trump/ Musk policies. In more than 1,000 communities through all 50 states plus DC, several million people showed up. The world looks different from just one week ago. (Photo by Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images)
This post has two purposes.
-One is to note this moment in history: What we know, what we guess, what we can’t even imagine. And how rapidly everything is changing.
-The other is to highlight the example that individual courage can set for institutional determination, in facing the emergencies of these times.
Americans as individuals seem suddenly willing in larger numbers to “meet the moment.” More and more people are acting as they might sometime be asked, “What did you do, when it mattered?” And they’ll have an answer.
They’re showing up at rallies, at polling places, at Congressional town halls even when their Representatives are afraid to. That can’t immediately stop Doge or the tariffs or the MAGA tax cuts. But it throws sand in the gears, and signals a change.
A few institutional leaders have shown similar courage. Not enough. I want to call out a few of the positive examples, as a prod or inspiration to the others.1
Let’s start with our place-in-time.
1) Resistance Chronicles.
During the election campaigns of 2016 and 2024, I did two frequent-update series on what it was like to be in Trump-era America, before anyone could know whether Trump would end up in command.
The first series, called Trump Time Capsule, was here, and the second, called Election Countdown, was here. They ran up to their respective election days, in 2016 and 2024. It is painful to look back on them now. The innocence of people’s hopes! What America had not fully faced about itself!
Now we’re chronicling again: Resistance itself. The drama now is the balance between the Trump/Musk/Vought assault on American institutions and values, on the one hand, versus the forces pushing back or simply trying to slow things down.
Just 76 days into Trump’s return, none of us knows how this will turn out. But in the spirit of recording what we know, as we experience it, let’s consider how different America looks from just seven days ago.
An eventful week.
Here are some of the things we know on the late night of April 6, that we did not know at the end of March:
That voters in Wisconsin, which went for Trump five months ago, would give a runaway win to the Democratic-supported candidate in a crucial statewide race.
That a Democratic US senator, Cory Booker, would break the Senate-filibuster record held by notorious racist Strom Thurmond, and gain well over 350 million online “likes,” while making an impassioned case for American values that predate Trump and must outlast him.2
That US financial markets would collapse on the first day after Trump’s crazed tariff announcements—and collapse more dramatically on day two. As I write, the futures markets predict even further descents on trading day three.
Or that Trump’s own former VP would denounce these tariffs as “the largest peacetime tax hike in US history.” Or that the GOP-friendly, Murdoch-owned WSJ would frame Trump’s actions this way over the weekend, including the striking photo (of an image-obsessed person):
That millions of Americans would turn out on Saturday, in well over 1,000 demonstrations in all 50 states across the country, to protest Trump-Musk policies.
That Elon Musk—who six weeks ago was taking charge of a Trump Cabinet meeting while Trump sat mute, and parading his little son around the Oval Office, and boasting about feeding entire federal agencies “into the wood chipper”—would suddenly be taking a back seat to… Laura Loomer.
Do any of these, or all of them, mean we’ve reached a turning point? The damage to American well-being may already be deeper than I will ever see repaired. That’s my honest guess. But we don’t know what’s coming next.
2) Courage and cowardice, on the individual and institutional levels.
Individuals are beginning to act as if their daily decisions matter.3 That courage needs to spread to the institutional level. Let’s take four illustrations of institutions that are and are not “meeting the moment,” starting with the worst.
-At the bottom: The institutional GOP.
Nothing more to be said.
Except: the tariff-driven crash may be peeling some of them off.
-Next to bottom: Corporate and financial leadership.
Barely any American CEO or financier would say “in private” that Trump’s tariffs are a good idea.
But in public? Where and when it matters? Mostly they’re still biting their tongues. Although the ongoing financial crash might change some calculations.
Here’s an illustration of the deafening silence from corporate America, about the damage Trump and Musk are wreaking on American fundamentals:
At Davos or Bilderberg or other big-think conclaves, American business leaders value the esteem of their global counterparts. But for weeks now those counterparts (from Mark Carney of Canada to Ursula von der Leyen of the EU) have been warning more and more bluntly about the damage the US is doing to itself and the world.
Obviously it’s easier for outsiders to say that, than for American CEOs to criticize their own government. But at a certain point there’s a larger duty to speak up. Which most of our business leaders have shirked.
Think of it even as self-interest: If more of them had spoken up, earlier, conceivably they could have helped fend off today’s economic disaster.
-Still near the bottom: Some of the biggest law firms.
It’s a more complicated case with big law firms: Bad examples, and also some good ones.
Four big firms have acted as if they were just another business, rather than a “profession.” When the Trump administration came after them, they surrendered and obeyed in advance. As the legal press has highlighted, they are: Paul, Weiss; Skadden Arps; Milbank; and Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher. Obeying in advance meant accepting at face value the administration’s complaints, and agreeing among other concessions to “pro bono” work for the administration, valued at $40 million Paul Weiss’s case, and $100 million for Skadden.
For more I refer you to the bitterly eloquent letter sent this week to Brad Karp, the current head of Paul, Weiss from granddaughters of the firm’s famous founder, Judge Simon Rifkind. Those granddaughters, both lawyers, emphasized legal professionals’ higher duty, when “nothing less than the integrity of our legal system is at stake.” They also emphasized that “surrender” only invited further demands and repression. Details below.4
But that’s not the whole story. Some other major firms, when threatened, have drawn a line and are fighting back. Notably they include Perkins Coie; Jenner & Block; and WilmerHale. One by one, other firms have been choosing to stand with them. You can read more details here.
Here’s the point: Leaders of even the biggest institutions have some degree of free will. They can decide to stand up for what’s right. Let’s recognize the ones who do.
Which brings us to:
-Universities, deciding which way they’ll go.
The Trump team’s stated reason for cutting funding to Columbia, Harvard, and many other universities is preposterous. No serious person can take it at face value.