Preface
***This is an excerpt from The People United: A Memoir of Hope and Resistance During Trump’s First Term, now available at Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other ebook vendors.***
What we did mattered.
The resistance to Donald Trump from 2016 to 2021 was an incredibly successful movement, preventing, or at least slowing, his erosion and destruction of American institutions and our way of life. Trump’s reelection in 2024 led some to declare our efforts a failure, but that’s only true if our movement was supposed to banish Trump from American life. That’s not what we were built for.
I wrote this book to tell the story of the resistance to Donald Trump and the ordinary Americans who held him and his administration to account. We were the people marching in the streets, from the 2017 Women’s March to the 2020 Marches for Black Lives. We protested the Muslim ban, the repeal of Obamacare, the family separation policy, and the Kavanaugh nomination. We stood up to Trump and his actions to end American democracy. We were the volunteers who worked on political campaigns that built the 2018 Blue Wave and delivered the White House to Joe Biden in 2020. We donated to Democratic candidates, knocked on doors, made phone calls, wrote letters, and did everything we could to turn out voters. This book is about us and all the work we put in.
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I wrote this book for my family and me to remember how our lives were upended resisting Donald Trump and defending American democracy. At the end of 2016, dejected and searching for a way to resist the incoming administration, I read the newly published Indivisible Guide. The guide was a blueprint for local activism, including urging members of Congress to resist normalizing Trump. I was so inspired that I founded Indivisible Montgomery, a local grassroots activism organization that recruited over 1,700 people resisting the Trump administration in our community and as part of the broader national movement of opposition. Along the way, my family made many sacrifices while I led this resistance organization. And there were a number of times when I wanted nothing more than to walk away and leave Indivisible Montgomery behind.
I wrote this book because our stories haven’t been told. After Trump’s election in 2016, I wanted to stand up for my country and the people who would undoubtedly be harmed during the Trump presidency. I wasn’t the only one. People across the country had hope — a positive vision about what the future could hold and the urge to work for it. What we were lacking was direction. Once I read the Indivisible Guide, though, I realized my years of experience in science policy and working with volunteers gave me the tools and experience necessary to make a real difference. I founded Indivisible Montgomery to give direction to the directionless and to resist the Trump administration. We formed a tight-knit community that celebrated our successes and supported each other through the difficult times. The 1,700 people who made up Indivisible Montgomery, and those in similar groups across the country, made their own sacrifices as we worked toward our goals. The reelection of Donald Trump in 2024 did not erase our history. Our stories of resistance are still worth telling. What we did is worth remembering.
When I launched Indivisible Montgomery in the waning days of 2016, I had no idea our broad national movement to resist Trump and the GOP would be both successful and underreported. Media outlets repeatedly dove deep attempting to understand Trump voters and their motivations, while offering comparatively little attention to those resisting the administration. Trump rode the grievances of America’s white racial majority all the way to the White House and amplified and fed those grievances in a destructive, self-serving attempt to cling to power. But he and his GOP were deeply unpopular. Trump decisively lost the 2016 popular vote, his approval rating never reached 50%, and most Americans disapproved of him in nearly every way that was important for leading the country.
Because the media failed to engage with our opposition movement in a meaningful way, most people don’t know who we are. We aren’t the right-wing caricature of resistance members — Marxists who loved MSNBC and made themselves feel better by writing tRump. We aren’t antifa, con artists, or self-made social media celebrities who craved attention. None of us was paid to protest. Our movement was formed of Americans from all walks of life, and it comprised small acts and big. These acts — minor and major, raucous and quiet, one-off and long-lasting — defined American activism in response to the 2016 election. Our actions were modeled on the Tea Party’s efforts to block or derail the efforts of the Obama administration. We organized, we called, we marched, we donated, we protested. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder with people and groups who had been in this fight much longer. We took the opportunities available to stand up and speak out. And it worked.
This is what I did. This is what we did.
