At this point, there is little doubt that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are engaged in a fundamentally unlawful effort to rewrite the American constitutional order. Their efforts to redirect federal spending are attempts to seize Congress’s power of the purse, a core element of its Article I constitutional power. They have attempted to shutter multiple federal agencies, like USAID, whose existence are expressly guaranteed by statute.

Yet while the public is waking to the scope of the threat to democracy, many Americans are still feeling powerless. It can seem that Trump’s control over the executive branch, together with congressional Republicans’ spinelessness, makes it hard for anyone to respond effectively.

But nonetheless, there are ways to fight back — to do more than is already being done. An effective strategy would revolve around three key points:

Of course, delaying a president is easier said than done. But luckily, Americans don’t have to make it up as they go along.

I’ve spent nearly a decade as a journalist reporting on democratic decline around the world. I’ve studied the fight for democracy where the threat has been as great or even greater than what the US faces now: places like Hungary, South Korea, India, Brazil, Israel, and Hong Kong. My recent book examines both why democracy is in crisis globally and what has worked to defend it.

While Americans can’t just directly copy any one foreign movement in any of those countries, they can learn a lot from their successes and failures. What follows is a playbook of sorts — a top-level strategy paired with specific tactics that politicians, activists, and even ordinary citizens can start employing today. In these efforts, time is of the essence.

“We’re not in a marathon,” said one American expert on pro-democracy movements, who insisted on anonymity to avoid possible retaliation. “We’re in a sprint.”

Move fast and break democracy

The Trump strategy centers on the idea of creating new “facts on the ground” — of changing things so rapidly and irreversibly that even a court order can’t restore the status quo. There are two ways that Trump and Musk are trying to do this: one substantive and one more political.

Substantively, it’s hard to fix government agencies once they’re wrecked or politicized. USAID is probably the best example.

The Trump administration put much of USAID’s staff on administrative leave, suspended many of its operations, and broken contracts with humanitarian groups and foreign agencies. Crucial staff members will now look for different jobs. The third-party groups who implement USAID policies, both in the US and abroad, will go bankrupt. Projects that required long-term and consistent field deployments may be impossible to restart.

Courts can declare that what Trump and Musk did was illegal, but they can’t turn back time and un-bankrupt USAID’s partners. The longer USAID remains functionally shuttered, the harder it will be to repair.

Politically, the idea is to change the political landscape such that what was once seen (correctly) as flagrantly illegal........

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