Alumni in the Nation’s Resistance

Most Americans anticipated that President Donald Trump’s second term wouldn’t be a simple repeat of his first. But few anticipated the speed with which he’d tear into government, or the extent to which he’d challenge laws, norms, and the Constitutional separation of powers.

Still, many have been pushing back against the Trump administration. PAW spoke to a dozen alumni — and one Princeton senior — who are filing lawsuits to block Trump’s orders, mobilizing opposition, or simply trying to lead their communities through these turbulent times. In the pages that follow, these Princetonians describe what they’ve observed and share the strategies they’re following.

To a person, however, they say formal institutions alone won’t prevent the country from tipping into autocracy. “What ended up making a difference during the first Trump administration was [ordinary people] who got involved in local organizing,” says Josh Marshall ’91, the editor in chief of Talking Points Memo.

Kate Huddleston ’11, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, says she learned from her undergraduate studies at Princeton that history “is contingent, always changing.

“What happens next is not yet written. It’s up to all of us to decide what direction we want the country to go in.” 

Emerson Sykes *11, Maribel Hernández Rivera *10, Kate Huddleston ’11, and Sarah Xiyi Chen ’13

The Lawyers

The primary battles against Trump’s policies have taken place in the courts, with civil rights lawyers filing lawsuits on everything from free speech to immigration enforcement to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) activities.

The American Civil Liberties Union started drafting playbooks for potential second Trump and Biden terms a couple of years ago, says Emerson Sykes *11, a senior staff attorney in the group’s speech, privacy, and technology practice. Still, the pace and volume of the first months was unprecedented. “In the last two weeks, my team has filed five new cases, which is extraordinary for us,” Sykes said in mid-March.

The administration’s attacks on speech have been numerous, from canceling federal grants that use words related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, to threatening to deport legal residents and naturalized citizens for their political views and pressuring universities and corporations to end DEI programs.

“This is not the first administration that’s tried to regulate speech based on viewpoint,” Sykes says. “But the brazenness … . 
They’re not hiding it behind some other justification. They’re making it very clear that they’re cracking down on people because they don’t like what they’re saying.”

As an ACLU immigration lawyer, Maribel Hernández Rivera *10 has been inundated with questions. “Family members call me and say, ‘We heard ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is in the subway. What do we do?’” she says. “Mothers in Venezuela reach out to me saying, ‘I just saw my son is in Guantanamo.’ … They’re desperate.”

Sarah Xiyi Chen ’13, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, has long anticipated the new policies. “What we’ve experienced in Texas has been a lot of what Trump is starting to do at the federal level: the criminalization of immigrants, the crackdown on the border, the attorney general using state resources to target immigration and voting nonprofits,” she says.

Chen works on voting rights and says she’s watched Texas use investigations into alleged ballot harvesting or election fraud to intimidate civil rights organizations. “Demanding documents or other ways of getting inside a nonprofit makes it more difficult for them to operate,” she says. “It also scares other nonprofits from doing similar work.”

While many planned for immigration crackdowns and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative took them by surprise. Numerous organizations, including the Campaign Legal Center where Huddleston 
is an attorney, have filed suit to stop the group from gutting the federal government.

“Government is not the private sector,” says Huddleston. The center has sued DOGE on the grounds that federal statutes don’t permit “seizing power over large swaths of federal spending, dismantling federal agencies, [and] reducing the federal workforce dramatically” by someone who’s not Senate-confirmed, she says, and by an organization “that does not have any powers from Congress.”

In addition to filing lawsuits, the ACLU is also ramping up its storytelling to awaken the general population to the erosion of civil rights. “Not everybody needs to be on the front lines with federal officials, but there’s so much we can do to support each other and make sure that the folks in our communities who are most under attack know we have their backs,” Sykes says. “Even dropping a note to friends who might be struggling — these very small things are not going to necessarily change the world, but they can help in concrete ways.”

Chen says Trump’s actions have revealed how much of American democracy rests purely on norms. “We need to rebuild those norms of respect and trust,” she says. Ordinary people need to start “doing the uncomfortable thing of talking to random people in their communities, face to face, and building the kinds of connections that can actually lead to trust and then to power.”

Raja Krishnamoorthi ’95 and Jeff Merkley *82

The Representatives

Before his confirmation hearings to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought met with senators on Capitol Hill, including Jeff Merkley *82, a Democrat from Oregon, who says Vought anticipated lawsuits would challenge the president’s agenda, but didn’t seem bothered.

“He told me … his goal is to send it to the Supreme Court in the conviction that the court is prepared to hand the executive [branch] far more power than anyone could have ever envisioned,” Merkley says.

That confidence derived from the court’s ruling in Trump v. United States last year that presidential acts are immune from prosecution, Merkley says. “They found invisible ink in the Constitution, totally contrary to the philosophy of the founders, that said the president is more a king than the leader of the executive branch.”

Merkley was among the first in Congress to begin speaking in stark terms, telling CNN in March before the Senate voted on the six-month budget extension, “The best time to take on a tyrant is as early as possible.”

“Folks will say, ‘We can’t push back now, because we fear the power they have,’” says Merkley, who as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee watched democracies collapse around the world. “But when [the] next moment comes, the executive has even more power, and people are even more reluctant.”

At the town halls Merkley holds in Oregon’s 36 counties every year, residents have started asking what they can do. He’s told them to keep talking to their representatives and to join local groups. “It’s tempting to curl up in a fetal position and hope all of this bad news just goes away,” Merkley says. “If people do not respond, then Trump will be empowered to continue this rampage against our republic, and we’ll be forever damaged.”

As a representative from the Chicago area, Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi ’95 says this, his fifth term in Congress, is “the most turbulent” ever. “My constituents feel a mixture of fear, anger, concern,” he says. “Some people who are supporters of the president are happy with what they see, but even a lot of them are concerned about the unpredictability of certain issues.”

The tension with Canada, one of Illinois’ biggest trading partners, has local businesses worried about their long-term future, and anticipating cuts to Medicaid has left others anxious about paying for health care.

In the short term, Krishnamoorthi says Democrats need to work on awakening their counterparts to how unpopular their policies are. “We need to flip some Republicans,” he says. For the rest, “we need to hold them accountable at the polls.”

But in the longer term, Krishnamoorthi says there needs to be a reckoning with the reality that many voters have lost so much faith in government that they’re willing to “roll the dice” on someone new. “It could be a populist today,” he says. “It could be a demagogue tomorrow.”

Middle-class Americans have long struggled to buy homes, secure affordable health care, and educate their children. “If we can get to the point where government really makes a positive difference in everyone’s lives, and they feel it,” Krishnamoorthi says, “I think, in the future, we’ll be able to resist these attempts to erode our institutions.”

Andrea Campbell ’04

The Attorney General

Democratic attorneys general have been collaborating to jointly file a series of lawsuits against the president’s executive orders, including those revoking birthright citizenship, cutting National Institutes of Health funding, and shuttering federal agencies — as well as DOGE’s handling of citizens’ private information.

Andrea Campbell ’04, the first Black woman to hold statewide office in Massachusetts, helped lead the charge, prompting the Boston Herald to call her “one of Donald Trump’s most dogged foes.”

“I didn’t come into 2025 looking to fight a federal administration,” says Campbell. “I would have preferred to have an administration willing to work with us on the challenges facing our residents.”

So far, she’s been encouraged by the speed with which courts are responding. “I’m seeing judges, appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, who are thoughtful and who are pushing this administration not only to follow the law, but to follow the orders that they produce.”

The changes at the top will ripple down to all Americans, she says. “At some point they may feel it in their utility bills, or if they’re trying to get their child in a pediatric cancer trial that they’re unable to access, or if they’re trying to ensure there’s adequate numbers of teachers in their school district.”

Campbell says voters need to get to know their attorneys general, including in red states. “We can’t do it by ourselves,” she says. “We need a public and an electorate that is paying attention.”

Thomas Emens ’25

The Council President

A series of ice raids in Newark in late January reverberated 35 miles away in Jamesburg, New Jersey, where Princeton senior Thomas Emens ’25 is president of the borough council. “We’ve seen people hesitant to go out or even go to work,” he says.

Emens’ hometown doesn’t track how many of its 6,000 residents are undocumented, but about 35% are Latino. “I grew up with classmates whose parents immigrated from Mexico, Central America, and South America,” Emens says. “When one portion of our residents is singled out, it affects everybody.”

Emens traces his Jamesburg roots to the 1860s. In high school, he led a revitalization project at the local library after joining its board of trustees. Over time, he became concerned about how the borough was being managed. “Instead of complaining, I felt I should put some of the skills I had learned to the test and help the people who have made a huge difference in my life,” he says.   

Emens, a politics major and former summer intern with Princeton’s Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative, was elected to the borough council in 2022 and became its president last year. He says federal funding cuts will be felt directly in small communities. The borough had been counting on federal money for infrastructure improvements to combat flooding and relocate the police department. But now it might have to turn to the state, along with every other strapped community in New Jersey.

“We don’t have wealthy [political] donors, and we don’t have a large voting base, so it’s already very difficult for us to try to get our needs heard at higher levels,” Emens says.

The cuts to federal personnel will also ripple outward. “It’s going to be very difficult for our communities to navigate [loan and grant] applications without there being a sufficient workforce to accommodate it,” Emens says. “When we start to see the real-world effects, people will learn very quickly just how important the federal government really is.”

Alexis McGill Johnson ’93

The President of Planned Parenthood

Cuts to medicaid, the removal of public health information from government websites, and even immigration policies are all affecting Planned Parenthood’s ability to deliver care to the 2 million people who seek it annually. “Fifty percent of Planned Parenthood patients are Medicaid patients,” says Alexis McGill Johnson ’93, who’s led the organization since 2019.

Planned Parenthood’s 600 clinics have been flooded with calls from people looking for information about what services are permitted in their states, how to travel to other states, and whether they’re even permitted to make those trips. “One of the strategies of this administration has been to sow a lot of chaos and confusion and misinformation,” McGill Johnson says.

Abortion only constitutes about 4% of Planned Parenthood’s services. The rest deal with health screenings, contraception, and STDs. Still, Planned Parenthood is looking to build out more virtual care options, not the least because Trump pardoned 23 people who’d been convicted of blocking clinics, along with some of the rioters from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol who McGill Johnson says are known abortion clinic protesters.

“There’s an increased sense of fear for patients and the  staff, watching them have to navigate their safety without  the kind of legal mechanisms to hold people accountable,”  she says.

As her own daughter heads to college, McGill Johnson says she finds it sobering that Project 2025 is trying to “take back the progress that women and people of color have made over the last 60 years.”

“Our generation was the first to be the direct beneficiaries of the feminist and civil rights movements,” says McGill Johnson, who was born in 1972. “And now, depending on where she goes, she’s going to have less rights than I did when I was at school some 30 years ago.”

Still, there are signs of hope. “Just in this last week, I’ve been in big rooms, big rallies, small rooms, small dinners, schools, universities, and public and private institutions with an incredibly powerful, multigenerational, diverse leadership of women who are just quietly putting the pieces together to fight back.”

Ezra Levin *13

The Organizer

In December, the progressive organization Indivisible had 1,000 local groups. When this article went to press, it had about 1,700. By the time you read this, there could be hundreds more. “We’re seeing an absolute wave of grassroots energy,” says Ezra Levin *13, who co-founded Indivisible after the 2016 election.

With chapter memberships ranging from just a handful of people to thousands, the locally led groups organize rallies, meetings in person and online, and phone banks. “They’re started by a couple of friends, or a book club, or a community group,” Levin says, adding that frustration with Democratic leadership at the national level is fueling some of the growth.

Local action is essential, says Levin, a former congressional staffer who received a master’s in public affairs from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. “You can look around the world, and you can look for historical examples, and I don’t know an answer to creeping authoritarianism that does not rely on normal, everyday citizens organizing together.”

That’s the goal for now: build “a broad-based, cross-ideological, pro-democracy movement,” Levin says — one which will involve Trump voters as well, people who “didn’t think they were going to get the Department of Education gutted or USAID gutted, or a fundamental attack on their freedoms.”

The fact that the administration is using intimidation tactics is, counterintuitively perhaps, encouraging to Levin. “It comes from a sense of weakness. They know what they’re doing is unpopular, [and] that if the people organize against it, [the administration] might be stopped.”

Levin has been making the rounds on news shows and doing interviews with podcasters and Substack writers, as well as holding weekly online discussions and Q&As with Indivisible members. “The only real sense of security you can have in this kind of environment is strength in numbers,” he says. “The more people who take that courageous step forward, [the more they’re] seen by dozens or hundreds or thousands of other people, who then decide to take a step forward as well.”

Barton Gellman ’82

The Strategist

Around the end of Trump’s first term, Barton Gellman ’82 wrote a series of articles for The Atlantic about how difficult it would be for U.S. institutions to restrain an authoritarian president. Shortly afterward, the Pulitzer Prize winner, who spent most of his career at The Washington Post, decided to leave journalism, at least temporarily, to join NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice and war-game how the country could withstand a determined power grab.

“I found myself repeatedly writing that we were at a hinge in history, and that the dangers were very real,” says Gellman. “I felt more and more as though I were pointing a finger and saying, ‘It looks really bad out there,’ instead of seeing how I could pitch in more directly.”

Among the Brennan Center’s many projects is an effort to oppose proposed voter registration requirements that the center says are so restrictive they’d effectively disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans.

It’s also reaching out to Republicans to persuade them that many of the things Trump is doing are not what they voted for.

“We know from polling that many of them are surprised by and distressed about what’s happening,” Gellman says.

He’s also run a series of tabletop exercises with retired legislators, judges, military officers, business executives, union leaders, and heads of civil rights organizations to identify tools that could be used to restrain abuses from the executive branch.

“It was a little daunting,” Gellman says. “When you have a president who controls all three branches of government and is prepared to break the law and violate long-standing norms, there’s not tons of hard leverage that can be used to slow him down.”

Still, the president, Congress, and the courts can all be influenced by grassroots efforts, Gellman says, like protests, boycotts, strikes, and local political organizing. “What Trump can get away with … is going to depend on what the American people collectively allow,” he says. “Trump, like every politician, cares about these things.”

Gellman also warns that one shouldn’t assume Trump and his supporters will consider anything out of bounds, including trying to secure a third term or attempting to skew upcoming elections. “Things are happening today that, when they were predicted during the campaign, people on the Right said, ‘Trump would never do that.’ And he is doing that.”

E.B. Boyd ’89 writes about business for Fast Company and is working on a book about women entrepreneurs.