How to fight back against Trump? Look to poor people's movements
Sun 1 Jun 2025 07.00 EDT
Rev Dr Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back
For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a grotesque nightmare. The proposed legislative cuts, including historic attacks on Medicaid and Snap, come at a time when 60% of Americans already cannot make ends meet. As justification, Maga Republicans are once again invoking the shibboleth of work requirements to demean and discredit the poor, even as they funnel billions of dollars into the war economy and lavish the wealthy with tax cuts.
As anti-poverty organizers, we’ve often used the slogan: “They say cut back, we say fight back.” It’s a catchy turn of phrase, but it reveals that for too long we’ve been on the back foot. In the world’s richest country, in which mass poverty exists beside unprecedented plenty, we’re tired of just fending off the worst attacks. Too much ground is lost when our biggest wins are simply not losing past gains. Amid Trump’s cruelty and avarice, it’s time to fight for a new social contract – one that lifts from the bottom of society so that everybody rises.
There are no shortcuts to building the kind of popular power necessary for us to shift from defense to offense. The task is a generational one, requiring even greater discipline, sacrifice, perseverance and patience. But as we consider the best way forward, the past offers clues.
In our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty, we document insights from some of this country’s most significant poor people’s movements. As nascent fascism continues to metastasize, these largely untold stories contain some of the very solutions we need to prevent democratic decline and overcome bigotry, political violence, Christian nationalism and economic immiseration. Today, the historic demands of the poor – for safety, belonging, peace, equality, and justice – are rapidly becoming the demands of humanity. The hard-fought wisdom of the organized poor has much to teach all of us.Anti-poverty activism has provided a model for transformational power, based on four strategic principles
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/01/trump-anti-poverty-protest-movement
❤️ pants
RESIST!! ✊️
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