Given everything that the Trump administration is doing right now, the US needs massive rallies opposing his actions and his authoritarianism.

Ezra Klein recently wrote in The New York Times that Donald Trump is actually rather weak. He is overreaching, doing decrees because he can’t make them law, and that we must simply “not believe” that he is the omnipotent power he proclaims himself to be. Believing this, as so many clearly do, is disempowering, as the natural response then is to hide instead of act.

I sympathise with the argument. The all-out attack on the US system may represent overreach. Not everything that Trump has ordered will come to pass. But it’s vitally important that people not calm down too much out of faith that the democratic system will somehow defend itself.

I am familiar with right-wing authoritarian power grabs in Eastern Europe. I wrote a book anticipating the triumph of the radical right in Poland soon before it actually happened. What Jarosław Kaczyński did in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary took longer to do than what Trump (and Musk and others) are trying to do right now.

In 2017 I attended a panel at the national political science conference where a group of constitutional scholars all agreed that a US president can basically do whatever he wants – far more quickly than a European prime minister can do – and that judicial checks on such behaviour, if they come at all, come far later, sometimes too late even to matter.

Add to this the fact that Trump, via Vice President JD Vance, has all but said he won’t abide by court decisions he doesn’t like. (We should expect the response to any judicial pushback will be classic Trump: He’ll first say the decision is ridiculous and radical and he won’t abide by it, then to get the pro-Trump moderates to calm down he’ll promise to follow the law, and finally, in practice, he’ll ignore the courts.)

The only way to stop this – at least the only way to begin to stop this – is mass protest.

I was in Poland in the months after the Law and Justice party, led by Kaczyński, came to power in 2015 and started on the same new authoritarian path that Orban in Hungary and now Trump is following in the United States. Within weeks citizens organised massive demonstrations in Warsaw and elsewhere. A group called The Committee to Defend Democracy organised them, and sympathetic press publicised them.

I was at these demos. The Poles who attended were beside themselves when they discovered just how many people had also shown up! No, it did not change any policy, at the moment. But it served the vital purpose of keeping up resistance, which has begun to pay off. The anti-Kaczyński opposition won parliamentary elections a year ago.

It’s now February. The Democrats are doing what they’re doing in Congress and some statehouses. There have been some protests place outside the Labor Department and in support of the US Agency for International Development. But there haven’t been mass protests.

These need to start happening by April or May. At that point even elected Democrats will come (they must not be the organisers!). Such demos will matter – as much as, if not more than, anything matters at this moment. It will be one thing ordinary people can do. The problem right now is that ordinary people are incredibly angry and frustrated, and are being led to believe they can’t do anything, except perhaps to follow the depressing news.

The importance of fighting against helplessness is one of the great lessons from the Polish democratic opposition of the early 1970s.

This was a particularly depressing time for the left in Poland. The official Communist Party authorities had just led the country through their own right-wing national-populist phase. They’d just conducted a massive campaign against left student radicals as well as party-affiliated liberals and progressives. And they’d delivered this package with a dose of antisemitism, since Jews historically have been the villains for Poland’s radical right (like people of colour have been the villains for America’s radical right).

They knew that this antisemitic campaign would win them strong support from “regular people” always ready to accept some easy answer for their problems and also drive out the liberals still influential in the party, which would make their populist eight even stronger.

Hungarians protest against Viktor Orban in Budapest in October 2024. Photo: AAP

The result was that in the early 1970s, leftists and liberals alike thought the situation was hopeless. And the first thing smart new oppositionists said? When there’s nothing to do, you do something anyway. When the situation seems hopeless, you have to maintain some kind of hope through some kind of action. That’s how the great Solidarity movement, based on the sudden emergence of the new Solidarity trade union, came about in 1980.

Later, when leftists and liberals felt authoritarianism rising after 2015, they marshalled that sentiment once again, and did something. They organised the mass demonstrations that gave people hope by proving to them that millions thought the same way as they did, even if their elected leaders were not yet with them.

Let’s do the same in the US now. We need, and can have, a giant rally – or several giant rallies, it’s a big country – where speakers loudly and passionately make the case about the Trump administration attacking US democracy and selling out regular working people to the whims of the rich. People will come! And they will learn that there are millions who are as angry as them, and ready to do something about it.

When should these happen? Personally, I think it best to wait a few weeks, since otherwise too many people might accept the Trumpers’ favourite refrain that opposition comes only from those who simply hate him and always want to oppose him. But we can’t wait long. We need giant mass rallies in defence of democracy by the northern spring at the latest.

Who will organise this? Who has access to skilled and well-connected organisers? I don’t. But you’re out there. Let’s get this going.

David Ost teaches politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York. He has written widely on eastern Europe, with a focus on labour, class, democracy, and the new right.