25 Jun Shake, Rattle, and Roll: Holding Our Own in an Era of Earthquakes

By Larry Kleinman June 21, 2025

Trump’s second presidency has elicited comparisons to every imaginable kind of disaster: floods, hurricane (think Katrina), storm (as in “trooper”), tornado. The one I find most salient is “earthquake.”

Such analogies might seem trivial, but we reflexively invoke them because they serve us as templates for setting what I call “right-sized expectations.” They offer us a shorthand for visualizing and organizing our responses, writ large.

We are enduring a swarm of events, each one stressing our world. They range from mild to severe. And they just keep coming.

“Era of Earthquakes” evokes the violent shaking of our institutions, our organizations and communities. Earthquakes arrive unpredicted (though rumblings sometimes foreshadow them), while warnings proceed most other kinds of natural disaster.

The Trump Era of Earthquakes has already done grievous damage, but we hesitate to immediately repair or re-build, lest another quake further compromise our foundations. All the while, we urgently search for ways to stop the shaking and prevent its return. We demand that our political leaders make it so.

As we retrofit our organization (and perhaps personal) defenses with seismic upgrades, we struggle to formulate a compelling “theory of traction”: the set of strategies and actions that will slow, stop or even reverse the unremitting onslaught. Thus far, we have little that produces prompt and consequential results. On April 9th, the bond market sent signals of meltdown which caused Trump to suspend his tariff offensive. The courts have temporarily halted firings, funding revocations, agency closures, some deportations, and more, even as the judiciary struggles to secure full and prompt compliance.

Since brutality and cruelty are essential features of Trump’s approach, he welcomes street protest as openings for activating repression, exemplified by troop deployments in Los Angeles. Protests, lawsuits and everything else we’re collectively going to blunt or slow the Administration is vital. Even an electoral sweep next year and a Democratic majority installed eighteen months from now will lack the power to fully curtail the attacks.

Meanwhile, as Freedom Together Foundation President Deepak Bhargava articulated in The Guardian on June 14th, we organize our fight back around three pillars: “Disrupt, Delegitimize, and Draw Defectors”. As a believer in the power of strategic thinking, I offer some “naming and framing” that aligns with those pillars.

Disruption

• While pro-immigrant forces have stopped few deportations and liberated even fewer detainees, our efforts have unquestionably slowed the expulsion machinery. ICE and its collaborators have had to work harder when challenged to adhere to legal standards and procedures. Over time, hundreds of thousands of immigrants will not be arrested because ICE can’t operate with reckless abandon. We won’t have data to prove it but common sense affirms it.
• Our forces will likely face much harder times in 2026. In 2025, the damage at mass scale has been psychological but material mostly at micro scale. The material damage will amass quickly once federal budget cuts for FY 2026 begin to kick in this October. Federal cuts of all kinds will pressure state and local governments to backfill, forcing cuts in supports and services our communities and organizations have come to rely on, especially in “blue” states. Private foundations will close few gaps and Trump’s endless generation of economic instability will likely tip the economy into recession. We do well to anticipate these trends by identifying what’s truly essential to preserve and by keeping our organizations right-sized as we sustain disruption.

Delegitimization

• Trump’s cruelty, corruption and chaos generally, and his game of chicken with the judiciary in particular, feed a growing institutional and popular sentiment of “bad faith, bad methods and bad effects.” One needn’t fully embrace all three to conclude that the Administration has forfeited legal, moral and practical standing.
• Though the term “due process” has rightly become a universal rallying cry, we do well to routinely demand “facts and proof” as a more visceral and widely embraced manifestation of fairness with the bonus effect of highlighting the Administration’s reliance on abject lies.

Defections

• We can visualize the “who” by considering what I call the “six offs”: the “laid off, cut off, ripped off, pissed off, put off and worse off.” These mostly center around those materially affected.
• Judge as we might those we consider responsible for Trump’s election, we do well to engage those who express some form of “Not what I voted for” or “not why I didn’t vote”.
• If we can embrace gender nonbinary, we can challenge ourselves to think beyond the political binary.

We can bemoan our vulnerabilities and lament our opponents’ strengths. Harder though it may be, we gain greater strategic value from discerning the likely intersections of our strengths and our opponents’ vulnerabilities. The sudden reversal in late April of the cancellation of 1,500 student visas was just such an intersection. The lawsuits piled up so quickly and produced so many injunctions against their sloppy, ridiculous and arbitrary actions (think “bad faith”), that the Administration pulled the plug on the entire initiative.

Finally, in addition to our right-sizing expectations, we can find “hope” ringing hollow, in part because we rightly reason or intuit that our traction is sketchy and many more quakes await us. I would offer that “resolve”–an evergreen force powering our work–serves as a worthy stand-in for hope. Here are four points of resolve I find compelling:

• We fight along side those who have chosen to fight
• Our fight motivates other to stand up and join in
• Our communities will outlast Trump “One Day Longer”, as they say on virtually every picket line defending a labor strike.

We have much reckoning ahead. We’ll shake, be rattled and roll with it. Some of what has been or will be destroyed won’t be worth restoring. We’ll re-imagine and build anew.

¡Asi Se Puede!

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