Summary of the guide

Chapter 1: What Happened and Why it Matters. Heading into the 2024 election, Americans were angry about inflation and frustrated with the status quo. Some voters either flipped to Trump or didn’t vote at all. That gave Trump the margins to win — but it doesn’t give him a mandate for dictatorship or Project 2025. Americans of all stripes are going to be pissed when Trump 2.0 comes to town dressed in chaos, corruption, and cruelty. We can stoke that backlash to break up their coalition and build ours.

Chapter 2: A Quick Primer on Constituent Power. Trump wants us to believe that the presidency is all-powerful. It ain’t true. Political power in our democracy overlaps between local, state, and federal electeds. Your power comes from your ability to be a source of support (or a pain in the ass) to those electeds. You can use this power to get them to stand up to Trump 2.0 or face political consequences. We review the basics of constituent power — what it is, how it works, and how yours can do the most good in this moment where you live.

Chapter 3: The Plan to Get Through the Next 2 Years. Our best chance to get through this era with some amount of democracy intact is to hang on until 2026 and win big in the midterms — breaking Trump’s hold on Congress and making sure election deniers and saboteurs aren’t in charge of the 2028 election. We’ve boiled it down to three big plays:

1. We will all throw in to say NO to the Project 2025 agenda pushed by the White House and Congress. We’ll stop what we can and pick strategic fights to drive national backlash to win in 2026.

2. We will play hardball wherever we’ve got Democrats in local, city, or state office — pushing them to block, delay, and challenge MAGA’s attacks.

3. We will work to protect and win elections — defending against election deniers in swing states and turning all that national backlash into an electoral majority coalition that delivers big wins in 2026.

You’ll plug into the plays that make the most sense for where you live and the leverage you have. Think of it as a giant national pro-democracy team — some of us are playing offense, some are playing defense, but if we all play our roles, we’ll make it through together.

Chapter 4: Protect and Prepare. Things are about to get much worse, and we need to treat an attack on one as an attack on all of us. That means supporting communities under threat and preparing to operate under increasingly authoritarian conditions. We’ll review how to:

1. Organize to Protect Communities Under Threat. MAGA will hit hard, and we’ll need to stand together.

2. Operate Under Authoritarian Creep. We’re not giving up on democracy, but we are not naive about what we face. We’ll cover lessons learned about operating under increasingly authoritarian conditions.

Chapter 5: Practical steps for finding or forming your local Indivisible group. Fascists depend on you, believing you’re alone and powerless. And honestly, on your own, you don’t have a ton of power. But, organized groups of individuals do have power. If you’re a fan of an existing group in your area, join it. If not, get a few friends together, start a new local Indivisible group, and build from there. Your local group is the basis for everything else you can hope to achieve in this period. This chapter includes some starter recommendations for how to pull your new, local, volunteer-led Indivisible group together, connect with others on the ground, and get to work.