By Ralph Nader October 24, 2025 In snarling defiance of the Constitution and federal laws, Tyrant Trump’s egomaniacal drive is destroying our country. He is tearing apart the social safety net, health and safety protections, the people’s access to economic justice, worker/union rights, and electoral standards. He is undermining the critical separation of powers and pushing the cowardly GOP Congress and the six GOP Supreme Court “Injustices” to enable his outlawry, corruption, and promote police state actions. Exempted and rewarded are the giant corporations with massive tax breaks, weak law enforcement, and corporate welfare subsidies, bailouts, and de facto immunities for their corporate crimes. After all, Trump is first and foremost a gigantic self-enrichment machine, profiting from his shameless, leveraged use of the White House. The institutional forces arrayed against Trump are not rising to the occasion to counter his fast-expanding fascist dictatorship. Trump has thrown so many devastating dictates against those who have historically protected our democracy that they have become punch-drunk. Let’s do an inventory: 1. The First Responders should be America’s lawyers and their Bar Associations. Do you hear much from them? The state bar associations don’t seem to be troubled by Trump’s jettisoning of the rule of law. The giant American Bar Association has filed just one lawsuit against the “U.S. government, more than two dozen federal departments and agencies, and the heads of those departments and agencies, asking a federal court to declare unconstitutional the Trump administration’s ongoing unlawful policy of intimidation against lawyers and law firms and to enjoin the government from enforcing the policy.” Otherwise, there has been no mobilization of some of the one million plus practicing lawyers to act on their professional duties as “officers of the court.” Too many corporate lawyers in their firms are doing just fine and are not willing to challenge the Trump attack on the rule of law. 2. Universities/colleges, former hotbeds of action on civil rights, environmental health, and opposition to illegal wars, are on the defensive, reeling from Trump’s extortionate bullying that threatens them with illegal cancellation of federal grants if they do not become vassals to his straitjacketed demands. Fortunately, nearly a dozen Universities have rejected his outrageous s commands but they have not engaged in proactive opposition to Trump’s many cuts and closures of the federal government’s long-standing education programs. 3. The American labor movement, stripped of its protections by Trump’s takeover of the National Labor Relations Board, the Labor Department, OSHA, and unilateral cancellation of the collective bargaining, union agreements with federal workers (who he fires en masse) is not tapping its potential to fight back. Granted, the federal workers’ union has filed lawsuits, with some temporary success. But there hasn’t been an organized Day of Labor protest with millions of workers on the streets and in front of the White House and Congress saying to Trump: “You’re Fired.” The bureaucrats running the AFL-CIO, one block from the White House, and its member unions are nowhere near that stage of robust urgency these times demand. Labor leaders’ sinecures and pay are still intact, compared to their anxious and vulnerable rank and file. 4. The organized religions are supposed to be the custodians of civilized norms that undergird our laws. The scriptures call for individual and social behavior that is under direct attack by the Trump Dump in Washington, DC and his obeisant Republican Governors. Religious leaders have been eerily quiet, fearful of being drawn into the Trumpsters’ cruel and vicious blasts of Internet threats and slander. Their organizations, like the National Council of Churches, are also kept on the sidelines by a vociferous Evangelical, Christian nationalist minority in their ranks. Their courageous roles on the ramparts in the 1950s and 1960s civil rights struggles are distant, and are not motivating a robust response to Trump’s attacks on morality and justice. 5. The country’s professionals are frightened by Trump’s assault on scientific programs (climate, weather, pandemic, environment, etc.) It is ignorant, callous, and unrelenting. It is as if Trump’s goal is to envelop America inside a 21st-century DARK AGES. Professionals are shocked at the lies, delusions, fantasies, and quackeries that he blasts from his ever-foulsome mouth. They watch powerlessly his dismantling of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Imagine, the EPA’s scientific research and analysis department is being closed. Professional organizations are protesting with statements. They, however, need to put more muscle into their resistance to the Trump onslaught. Their best argument is that Trump is weakening our country’s national security by sabotaging our preparedness against pandemics, climate violence, and uncontrolled cybersecurity attacks, not to mention uncontrolled generative AI dangers, which knowing critics have called the ultimate approaching omnicide. Professionals know how to dramatize these arguments. 6. The mass media has been attacked mercilessly by Trump, extortionately suing them, slandering them by name, expelling them from the White House press events, threatening their TV/Radio licenses, and pending mergers. It used to be political suicide for politicians to be so brazenly trashing the media. Reporters for the original content newspapers have been exposing Trump for years, daily and vibrantly. But their editors have not been keeping up with what is being reported with powerful editorials and op-eds calling for the impeachment and removal from office of Donald J. Trump – the most impeachable president by far in American history. (See: Letter to President Trump—22 Impeachable Offenses) It doesn’t help that Democratic leaders — Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer —have told their flocks never to mention the word “impeachment.” The anemic Democratic Party is mocked inside Trump’s circle. 7. The civic community – the most fundamental bastion of democracy – is ahead of its elected politicians. This has been demonstrated by packed town meetings demanding aggressive accountability for our nation’s Chief OUTLAW. (See my book Civic Self-Respect.) Organized demonstrations have been growing and rising. On October 18th, 7 million demonstrators in over 2700 locations participated in the “NO KINGS” rallies. A good guess is that nearly five percent of adults have exerted themselves up front against the Trump/Musk/Vance lust for total power. Remember in 2016, Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler.” With those numbers of people power, future mass demonstrations already planned should ask their participants to pull out their cell phones and contribute to funding new, strong, full-time citizen groups at the grassroots and in Washington, DC to carry on with impressive impacts long after the protesters drift away when the rallies end. Indivisible’s (indivisible.org) huge demonstrations could have raised $35 million with an average instant donation averaging just $5 per person. Such a plea needs careful planning, trustworthy transparency and recruitment capabilities ahead of time. There are so many other innovations ready and able to make town meetings, directly called by the people, and public rallies/marches far more effective. But they require their civic leaders to return the calls from experienced supporters who believe that “none of us are as smart as all of us.” Ezra Levin – call me – I have suggestions for you. | 
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