In the first hundred days of the Trump regime, actions against his juggernaut have swelled from small local demonstrations to nationwide days of action with millions of participants, initiating a movement to defend society against the MAGA assault. In order to understand this movement and its possible future, this Strike! Commentary provides a snap history of how the movement started. The next commentary will recount the emergence of larger-scale mass actions like “Hands Off” and “May Day.” Subsequent commentaries will explore how that movement can halt, roll back, and eventually terminate the MAGA attack on society, exploring what we can expect from Trump and his interaction with the world, the role of workers and unions, and the lessons to be drawn from past movements.

In a previous Strike! Commentary I proposed a strategic perspective for defending society against MAGA tyranny. It outlined a “Social Self-Defense” based on combining civil resistance in social institutions and the streets with political resistance in the institutions of government. Social Self-Defense cannot be based on a preconceived plan; it will have to be created by the people who make it. We can learn lessons – both positive and negative – from past struggles against autocracy. But we also have to adapt those lessons to the unique conditions we face in the second Trump era.

Trump’s MAGA juggernaut has many vulnerabilities. But these will not automatically lead to its downfall. That will require an active struggle to defend society against the MAGA assault — it will require in short, “social self-defense.” How can MAGA’s vulnerabilities be utilized to defend society, terminate Trump’s rule, and in the meantime limit the damage he can do?

As we grapple with how to live through and ultimately terminate the nightmare of the second Trump regime, we can gain a lot from examining the myths and the realities of the resistance to the first Trump regime.

The previous Commentary in this series laid out the unknowns – known and unknown — that will characterize the Trump presidency. But amidst the uncertainty, the main thrusts of the Trump regime are increasingly clear.

Donald Trump and his entourage are so confused, conflicted, and detached from reality that it is difficult to anticipate what they will actually attempt and how much they will be able to carry their intentions through. We know their intentions include eliminating all barriers to their power; scapegoating of stigmatized groups; redistribution of wealth and income upward; and a war on the world to impose US domination and environmental destruction. Their efforts to realize these objectives will result in enormous destruction. Those efforts are also likely to result in a substantial pushback that could either overcome the MAGA project or simply fade away in the face of repression and despair.

Can a Trump tyranny be impeded, rolled back, and eliminated? Or are we on the road to a long-lasting autocracy as many in the MAGA movement intend? The answer hangs in the balance. This is the first of a series of Strike! Commentaries on social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut.

A future shaped by Donald Trump, MAGA, and Project 2025 is a threat not just to one or another group, but to our society as a whole – to the things that make our lives together something other than nasty, brutish, and short. To resist and eventually overcome such forces, we need to create bastions of what the Polish activists who overthrew their country’s authoritarian regime in 1989 called “social self-defense.” That will involve many methods, including mutual aid, on-the-ground protection of those under attack, combating lies and slanders, protests, electoral strategies, direct action, and many others. Constructive programs carried out from below can be a crucial part of that struggle.