Liberal activists and legal groups say the possibility of former President Donald Trump winning November’s election is taking a toll on their mental health, and are preparing plans to resist him again, the New York Times reported.
A sense of “acute exhaustion and acute anxiety” pervaded interviews conducted with over 30 left-of-center activists and officials as they realized “with great dread” that they may need to challenge Trump’s agenda once again, which many of them view as a threat to democracy itself, according to the NYT. This trepidation has spurred a network of nonprofits and Democratic officials to take preemptive action aimed at kneecapping a potential second Trump administration’s approach to abortion, immigration and civil service reform.
“What Trump and his acolytes are running on is an authoritarian playbook,” said Patrick Gaspard, the head of CAP Action Fund, the political arm of the liberal Center for American Progress, according to the NYT. “So now we have to democracy-proof our actual institutions and the values that we share,” he continued. (RELATED: Meet The Donors Funding The Shadow Campaign To Stop Trump’s Second Term Before It Even Begins)
CAP Action Fund and its allied groups plan to stop Trump from implementing key parts of his agenda should the American people elect him to the presidency.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), for instance, are preparing litigation and direct action aimed at bolstering future resistance to immigration enforcement under a potential second Trump administration, the NYT reported.
NILC, a left-of-center Soros-funded immigration group, has been preparing for a possible second Trump term since last fall by plotting how to deploy a network of volunteers across the United States aimed at recording immigration raids on video and intervening if they believe a legal violation is occurring, the NYT reported.
NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 20: Founder and Chair, Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Foundations George Soros attends 2016 Concordia Summit – Day 2 at Grand Hyatt New York on September 20, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)
The ACLU, for its part, has released a memo outlining its plans to obstruct Trump’s immigration plans, going into detail about the combination of legal challenges, lobbying and coordination with liberal officials it plans to employ in service of its goals. Lawyers at the ACLU plan to argue in court that any attempt from Trump to pursue mass deportations would violate the Fourth Amendment by requiring racial profiling and that detaining illegal immigrants for large-scale deportations would violate the Fifth Amendment’s guarantees against arbitrary or punitive civil detention.
Additionally, the organization plans to lobby Congress to limit the jurisdiction of Customs and Border Protection agents and to encourage governors to pardon criminal illegal aliens to prevent them from being deported.
The legal group has hired a financial auditing firm to ensure it is in total legal compliance, anticipating that Trump may use the Internal Revenue Service, which oversees nonprofit organizations like the ACLU, to target it, according to the NYT.
The ACLU referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to a series of memos it is working on laying out its strategies in different policy areas if Trump or President Joe Biden is elected in November. So far, the organization has only published memos on how it will resist Trump’s approaches to LGBT rights and the immigration.
Trump’s immigration plans are popular, with 62% of registered voters, including 53% of Hispanics, saying they support the United States government creating a new program to deport all illegal immigrants, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted in early June. Voters see Trump as preferable to Biden when it comes to handling the border more broadly, with 46% of voters saying they prefer Trump on the issue compared to just 26% saying Biden in a May poll from Decision Desk HQ/News Nation.
“It’s not surprising Biden and his cronies are working overtime to stymie the will of the American people after they vote to elect President Trump and his America First agenda,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told the NYT. “Their devious actions are a direct threat to democracy,” he continued.
On abortion, a group called the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, a coalition of 23 Democratic governors that supports legal access to abortion, is working to secure stockpiles of abortion pills in case a future Trump administration bans or restricts them, the NYT reported. Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says he has secured a large enough supply of abortion pills to last five or six years.
“The Reproductive Freedom Alliance has pioneered a model of coordination across states to defend, and expand, access to reproductive health care—enabling governors and key staff to develop relationships and a structure for collaboration that could be replicated on other issues, like immigration and gun safety,” said Julia Spiegel, a lawyer who helped launch the group from the office of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, told the NYT.
Democracy Forward, a group founded after Trump’s 2016 victory that flooded his first administration with legal challenges, released a “threat matrix” that covers how Trump might approach abortion, health care, climate, civil rights, environmental protections and immigration in his second term, the NYT reported. The organization is, accordingly, drafting litigation to oppose actions it expects a second Trump administration to take and recruiting potential plaintiffs who may have standing to contest Trump’s policies.
Polls paint a somewhat optimistic picture for Trump, with FiveThirtyEight’s average of national polling putting Trump roughly a point ahead of Biden as of June 17. Decision Desk HQ’s presidential forecast model currently gives Trump a 56% chance of winning the presidency.
“We are doing scenario planning for a Biden victory and for a Trump victory,” Brennan Center for Justice president Michael Waldman told the NYT. “For Biden, we are preparing for the chance to pass significant legislation strengthening the freedom to vote, and for Trump we are mapping out how to limit the damage from an epic era of abuse of power.”
Principles First, a self-described conservative anti-Trump group, plans to hold a conference titled “Autocracy in America–A Warning and Response” at New York University in July where scholars will discuss how to combat authoritarian leaders.
“He is no normal candidate, this is no normal election, and these are no normal preparations for merely coming out on the wrong side of a national referendum on policy choices,” Protect Democracy Executive Director Ian Bassin told the NYT.
CAP Action Fund, Protect Democracy, Principles First, NILC, the Brennan Center for Justice and the Reproductive Freedom Alliance did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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