The Trump administration has felt like a nonstop emergency: bigoted attacks on trans people, immigrants, and civil rights in the name of a war on so-called wokeness; the rollback of environmental and public health monitoring; attacks on public employees and the labor movement; and more. This emergency has been made all the more disconcerting by the Democrats’ apparent decision to refuse any meaningful opposition. Democratic strategist James Carville made the case for this refusal in the New York Times.1James Carville, “James Carville: It’s Time for a Daring Political Maneuver, Democrats,” New York Times, February 25, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/opinion/democrats-trump-congress.html. In short, his argument was to let Trump run wild and do a lot of damage so the voters learn their lesson. This bloody approach to politics is unsurprising given the party’s willingness to support both the massacre of Palestinians and the repression of antigenocide protesters, even on pain of Trump’s victory. In its cruel way, this strategy is sensible given that the Democrats’ November loss was less the result of the voters’ active embrace of Trump and more of their rejection of Democrats, with millions either voting third party or simply not voting in the presidential election.2Tessa Stuart, “‘Democrats Lost Them’”: Here’s Why 2020 Biden Voters Sat Out the Election,” Rolling Stone, April 16, 2025, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/why-2020-biden-voters-sat-out-2024-1235318121/; Adam Bonica et al, “Did Non-Voters Really Flip Republican in 2024? The Evidence Says No.” On Data and Democracy (substack), April 10, 2025, https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/did-non-voters-really-flip-republican. Carville is betting that those who couldn’t bring themselves to embrace Genocide Joe’s anointed successor can be made politically hungry enough to eventually shut up and eat their gruel.
The cruel calculation that this disastrous Trump presidency will make the electorate grateful for the crumbs on offer hinges on the absence of any meaningful opposition outside of the Democratic Party. Given the recent nationwide Hands Off protests, other voices within the Democrats will likely soon carry the day, and so the party will start to pretend that it’s a meaningful opposition. When it does, its intent—to bring people to heel—will remain the same, with only its approach changing.
Elements of Hands Off will help the Democrats in their efforts. The defensive and limited character of “Hands Off” as the slogan is part of the problem. Of course, every movement is broader than its slogans and there are many signs exceeding the official message at every protest. Still, that official message isn’t ambitious enough.3“About: On April 5th We Rise Up,” Hands Off!, accessed June 7, 2025, https://handsoff2025.com/about; “Host Toolkit: How to Plan Your Event,” Hands Off!, accessed June 7, 2025, https://handsoff2025.com/toolkit. To be clear, Trump is laying hands on various parts of our government and society with malicious intent: the threat is very real. At the same time, we lived threat-filled lives before the last election, in the sense that our society was lousy with economic insecurity, racism, sexism, transphobia, anti-immigrant bigotry, and ongoing bipartisan support for the massacre in Gaza.4Eugene Ludwig, “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong,” Politico, February 11, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464; Megan Cerullo, “Most Americans don’t earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds,” CBS News, May 16, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/; Brandon Drenon, “US Deportations under Biden surpass Trump’s Record,” BBC, December 20, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36e41dx425o. The Democrats’ share of that is a lot of the reason that so many people stayed home.5Abdelhalim Abdelrahman, “Why Michigan’s Arab American’s Voted for Trump,” Foreign Policy, November 13, 2024, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/11/13/michigan-dearborn-trump-harris-arab-gaza-israel-vote/. To stop at Hands Off is, in effect, to demand that Trump govern like Biden. Surely our aspirations are far more ambitious than that.
A closely related issue is the ideological role of law. Accusations of lawbreaking on Trump’s part are both common and true. However, emphasis on lawlessness misses the mark in important ways.6New York Times Opinion, “The ‘Recklessness Itself Sends a Message’: 35 Legal Experts Assess Trump’s Return,” New York Times, April 28, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/opinion/trump-constitution-rule-of-law.html. Centering the administration’s lack of respect for law amounts to criticizing its policies for their procedural incorrectness, rather than the substantive harm they inflict.7Jason Willick, “Liberals lean on the wrong argument in Trump’s prison deportations,” Washington Post, April 17, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/17/trump-abrego-garcia-deportation-el-salvador/. We know the troglodytes in Congress will vote for heinous things when it suits them. For instance, Congressional Republicans unanimously voted for the racist and xenophobic Laken Riley Act, as did a significant number of Democrats.8International Refugee Assistance Project, “‘Political Cowardice’: IRAP Denounces Passage of Laken Riley Act,” IRAP, January 23, 2025, https://refugeerights.org/news-resources/political-cowardice-irap-denounces-passage-of-laken-riley-act. House Democrats all voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but as political scientist Austin Sarat has pointed out, their opposition outside of formal voting has been tepid and ineffective.9Austin Sarat, “The missing middle class puts Democrats in a ‘big beautiful bind,’” Hill, June 3, 2025, https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5329133-democrats-split-over-one-big-beautiful-bill-act/. (Sarat notes that Democrats have a problem opposing this bill since it overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy, many of whom vote Democrat and donate accordingly.) Right now Trump’s actions are expedient for conservatives in Congress because it affords them some plausible deniability should they become a liability. But, if those actions work out, legislators will endorse them. We saw this recently with members of both parties backing the aforementioned Laken Riley Act and the massacre in Gaza. In the longer term we can point to bipartisan support for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and so-called welfare reform under Clinton. This is to say, if the criticism is fundamentally procedural, the opposition will be left flat footed when state violence is inflicted by people who dot all their parliamentary i’s and cross all their bureaucratic t’s.
Making respect for law paramount is a mistake for other reasons as well: for one thing, it has an apparent immediate benefit of laying out a clearly definable political problem that people can mobilize around right now without any pesky political discussion about what we actually want and value (and who “we” even are); that shortcutting, however, leads to political mobilizations that are less than the sum of their parts and accomplish less than their potential, since the discussions circumvented by this framing would make important contributions to shaping long term political perspectives and building durable movements. Furthermore, making respect for law the focus of this lowest common denominator approach reinforces the uninspiring defensive emphasis I mentioned above—whereby the future implicitly desired by the movement is basically what we all had, and which the voters failed to embrace in early November. It provides a small demand (basically “stop that”) to focus on in a way that feels morally urgent (since lawbreaking is a moral outrage to dominant liberal sensibilities), which distracts attention from the relatively thin, tepid character of the political vision on offer. In short, the shortcut of legalistic outrage politics shortcircuits a transformative, dynamic, and positive political movement.
This isn’t just speculation. As the legal scholar Robert Knox has analyzed, the movements against the invasions of Iraq emphasized the illegality of those invasions, with the effects I just summarized: big early mobilizations followed by a lack of shared analysis, values, long-term ambition and staying power, which, ultimately, failed to stop the war machine.10Robert Knox, “International Law, politics and opposition to the Iraq War,” London Review of International Law 9, no. 2 (2021): 169–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrab014, available at https://www.academia.edu/64028197/International_law_politics_and_opposition_to_the_Iraq_War.
Another problem with emphasis on Trump’s lawlessness is its questionable factual accuracy (or, thought differently, its blanket generality). To be fair, Trump is willing to break the law and the actions he commits (both legal and illegally) are certainly evil ones. That said, the same criticism goes for Biden’s backing of genocide in Gaza and bombing of Yemen. Those actions were of questionable legality at best. That legal status didn’t stop Biden. Moreover, those actions weren’t held up as evidence of a generalized lawlessness. Trump’s illegality is tactical, in that he is willing to break the law when it seems expedient for other purposes. What the emphasis on Trump’s lawlessness misses is that this tactical recourse to illegality is not especially uncommon amongst politicians. We might then conclude that politicians as such tend toward lawlessness. This point, while reasonable (does anyone truly believe that politicians have principled commitments to law, or anything else for that matter…?) is not particularly useful.
Here too, the work of Robert Knox is instructive. Knox points out that opposition to the Tories in the United Kingdom tended to portray them as lawless.11Robert Knox, “The Right Against the Rule of Law?” Salvage, January 28, 2023, https://salvage.zone/the-right-against-the-rule-of-law/. The reality, however, was that Tory lawbreaking was tactical, to ideological effect. Knox borrows the concept of “legitimacy through defiance” from another thinker, Nathan Berman, to argue that the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom opposed “certain legal institutions and regimes” in such a way that provided it with “a form of legitimacy – as a bold and courageous actor.” Knox roots this point in a compelling account of the changing political economy of capitalism in the United Kingdom and globally, as well as an account of the law’s role in capitalism. While I cannot do the full argument justice here, comrades should take his work seriously as part of developing an analysis of the current situation in the United States and in global capitalism. Without meaning to be flippant, to briefly illustrate the point about legitimacy through defiance, think about Batman—specifically the political content that he represents as a myth.
…winning justice only really comes from significant social disruption. Having our movements take obedience to the law as a core value underlying our criticisms of our opponents sets them up to split over tactical issues of civil disobedience (and not-so-civil forms of disobedience)…
A vigilante of that sort is “a truly moral person” (a manly man with no time for nonsense—the role of gender here isn’t accidental), who supports the legal and social order so much that they are willing to step outside its typical norms to preserve it. Furthermore, the clear implication (often stated explicitly), is that legal and state institutions have drifted away from justice. By this logic, the “vigilante” temporarily steps outside the typical legal norms to undo that drift and narrow the gap between law and justice. The historian Daniel Lachance’s work on right wing politicians’ embrace of a vigilante ethos to support the death penalty is relevant here as well.12Daniel LaChance, Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). As Lachance points out, some of the most strenuous supporters of right wing law and order politics simultaneously embrace the myths and rhetoric of vigilantes and are themselves sometimes willing to break the law in order to better serve the social order that the law also serves.
Part of the present appeal of calling Trump lawless is that it feels like it appeals to readily and widely available common ground—who likes lawlessnes? Moreover, such criticisms feel like a kind of gotcha—surely the president of all people should respect the law. There is a similar impulse in Bernie Sanders’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour.13Nate Holdren, “Bernie’s Memory Needs a Tune Up,” Counterpunch, April 2, 2025, https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/04/02/bernies-memory-needs-a-tune-up/. However, this impulse has multiple downsides that serve to reduce the efficacy of any opposition that centers lawlessness. Moreover, this impulse strengthens some of Trump’s opponents who, while opposed to the administration, are still not friends of humanity (like the aforementioned James Carville). For example, rather than undermining him ideologically, pointing out Trump’s tactical and demonstrative willingness to break the law actually secures his political legitimacy as a tough populist.
Emphasis on lawlessness is also incompatible with a critique of what Trump is actually pursuing: a politics of law and order that actively seeks to portray itself as tough on those who deserve tough treatment. As the historian Dan Berger pointed out in 2016, law and order politics has been a longstanding bipartisan commitment in the United States, as well as something renewed in particularly ugly form in recent US history.14Dan Berger, “Lessons in Law and Order Politics,” Black Perspectives (blog), August 9, 2016, https://www.aaihs.org/lessons-in-law-and-order-politics/. To be clear, Trump’s version of law and order politics is not identical to the Democrats’. However, the tendency to exceptionalize Trump (in this case, as lawless), often fails to note important continuities between the two parties politics. As part of his pursuit of his particular version of law and order, Trump has prioritized appointing right-wing judges. That’s not lawlessness, it’s a form of political activity well within the bounds of law and with law as its stakes—that is, it’s a politics that takes law as one of its constitutive elements and which pursues one approach to legality among others. Furthermore, and more straightforwardly, Trump regularly invokes the law against his opponents. Most notably, Trump mobilized people for the so-called insurrection on January 6 precisely by claiming election law had been violated.
Put very simply, given that Trump obeys the law sometimes and that the United States does still have a judiciary committed to legality, we can expect that the legal system will occasionally check Trump to some degree. Political emphasis on supposed lawlessness invites people to think that such obedience to law on his part is a movement victory. Sometimes, such checks may well be: militant movements can sometimes force governments to obey laws or respect rights that they would prefer to ignore. However, it’s important that we accurately determine what is and is not a movement success. Emphasis on lawlessness also invites us to think that any legal institution that reins Trump in is on our side—as if the enemy of our enemy is our friend. This is an especially important mistake relative to the United States’s pervasive pattern of criminalizing poor people, people of color, and the marginalized more generally. A movement that aligns with the forces of law and order is not a liberatory one. The extent to which Trump, and to a lesser but still important extent many Democrats, tends to frame undocumented migrants as having broken the law is salient in this political content. Solidarity with migrants and opposition to the ways they are managed by the state is strategically significant and, more importantly, morally urgent.15“Fuck the Border,” YouTube video, 1:32, posted by “Propagandhi,” November 11, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CpA_D9ilWI; “Movement, cadre, and dual power – Joel Olsen,” libcom.org, November 21, 2012, https://libcom.org/article/movement-cadre-and-dual-power-joel-olson. A legalistic political outlook is at best of little use—and is, I suspect, actively antithetical—to that solidarity.
The content of Trump’s law and order politics, while deeply heinous, is close to the dominant consensus in the Democratic Party in significant ways. Both parties united in decrying the uprisings after George Floyd’s murder with mayors and governors in both parties calling out the police and National Guard. Both have increased funding for police, demonized poor and racialized minorities (remember “superpredator” rhetoric?), and expanded both deportation and racist rhetoric against immigrants. Making emphasis on lawbreaking a primary plank in our opposition to Trump lets law-and-order conservatives in both parties (who hold a lot of views in common with Trump) inside the movement. To the contrary, the movement should be opposing everyone with such right wing views.
Finally, emphasis on supposed lawlessness sets up some fault lines for the near future. We’ve already seen willingness by politicians in both parties to crack down on peaceful, orderly students calling for an end to genocide. After I was nearly finished with this essay, news broke of people in Los Angeles opposing deportation efforts in important ways.16Rachel Uranga et al, “ICE raids across L.A. spark backlash; Trump officials vow to continue operations,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2025, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-06/la-me-ice-raids-protests-color-scene. Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, issued a statement expressing concern over “unrest” including a threat of protestors ceasing to be peaceful, adding with an echo from the repression in 2020 “let me be clear: violence and destruction are unacceptable, and those responsible will be held accountable.”17Karen Bass, “Statement from Mayor Karen Bass Regarding Recent Clashes,” Mayor Karen Bass, June 7, 2025, https://mayor.lacity.gov/news/statement-mayor-karen-bass-regarding-recent-clashes. This too is a version of law and order politics that cannot be contested in a framework of law versus lawlessness.
The architects of crackdowns against protestors are willing to do far worse if the movement starts to escalate in tactics or in its political ambition. It’s likely that reining in the ghouls in charge will require some important tactical escalations by activists—the historical record in the recent and long term past is clear that winning justice only really comes from significant social disruption. Having our movements take obedience to the law as a core value underlying our criticisms of our opponents sets them up to split over tactical issues of civil disobedience (and not-so-civil forms of disobedience), issues we’ll have to confront sooner rather than later.
To reiterate, then, emphasis on lawlessness doesn’t help us, despite its intuitive sense and apparent short-term benefits. One of the major downsides is that it invites influence by Democrats (and similar actors) who neither care, nor know how, to really fight. These actors do not have a robust vision for a society that prioritizes human dignity. We need a movement that projects such a robust vision. In general, if the Hands Off protests are a sign of activist mobilizations to come, the movement will need to quickly surpass its current limits and set its own agenda independent of—and, really, in direct conflict with—the Democrats and the kind of complacent, room temperature political common sense they represent.