Americans opposed to the Trump administration have long felt paralyzed about what actions they can take to make a real difference. For many, those feelings have quadrupled in the wake of ICE’s violent siege of blue cities, Minneapolis in particular.

As the administration becomes more committed to power and less committed to the law, Atlantic writer George Packer said the intensity of the resistance in Minneapolis is providing a blueprint for how to actually fight back.

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“No historical precedent exists for where we are,” Packer wrote.

“The federal government has never declared itself immune to the law and the Constitution while explicitly denying protection to peaceful opponents, until now,” he said. It’s challenging, he acknowledged, to understand there is a “sense of urgency” but no actual plan.

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“Rather than inspiring action, the question of what to do more likely leaves you feeling depressed and alone,” he said. “Not even the prospect of waiting out the year until the midterms provides much reassurance. Trump has made it clear that he will try to undermine any election that might cost him some of his power.”

But he warned against letting feelings of helplessness turn into “illegal and violent” remedies for the situation. “That would be a catastrophic mistake, both strategically and morally,” he emphasized.

Instead, he said we must let the vast, decentralized, peaceful resistance network in Minneapolis become a model for the rest of the country.

Trans writer, podcaster, and activist Margaret Killjoy – who recently traveled to Minneapolis to report from the ground – wrote on Bluesky that in her 24 years involved in protest movements, she has “never seen anything approaching this scale.”

She praised the decentralization as a strategy that “the state is absolutely unequipped to handle.”

“There are a few basic skills involved, and so people teach those skills, and people are collectively refining them,” she continued, adding that one organizer told her they hoped the press would cover “the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE’s crimes.”

“What people are doing here is beautiful,” she said. “It’s a tragic beauty, but a real one.”

But Packer said this “is an inherently hard form of activism, requiring high levels of motivation and trust” that may be hard to replicate on a national scale.

The trust “obviously exist[s] in the neighborhoods of South Minneapolis,” he continued, “where civic spirit and personal connections run deep. But replicating them on a wider scale — essentially, creating a mass movement for basic decency — raises obvious problems.”

It’s difficult to create something that can be both nationally coordinated and decentralized, he said, adding, “It could fall apart for lack of discipline, coherence, trust, and leadership — or, conversely, because of leadership that devolves into factionalism. The civil-rights movement confronted all of these problems, and overcame them.”

Peaceful resistance is risky, he said. “It can lead to social ostracism, legal harassment, state intimidation, prison, injury, and, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, death.”

“One sign of the authoritarian depth to which the U.S. has sunk under Trump is that none of these risks is hard to imagine,” he continued. “Examples accumulate every day.”

But the only chance of success we have, he emphasized, is to remain nonviolent and avoid “the familiar trap of sectarianism.”

“It has to be democratic, patriotic, and animated by a sense of basic decency that can attract ordinary people — your TV-watching mother, your apathetic teen, your child’s teacher, the retiree next door, the local grocer,” he said.

In the end, Packer did not provide an answer for how to make any of this happen, but he said the first step is to “see” and “name” the fact that Trump is leading America toward tyranny. Once we can all accept that, he said, we can figure out how to stop it.

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