Why America’s resistance looks like silence
I’ve been in the Atlantic Provinces over the past few days, absorbing local atmosphere for my books and great seafood for my stomach. It’s a good place to listen. People talk slower here. The ocean sets the pace. Over scallops and chowder, in kitchens and pubs with fogged windows, a question has come up more than once—never angrily, never smugly, always with genuine confusion.
Why aren’t Americans doing something to stop Trump and his cronies?
It’s a fair question. It lands without accusation, like a weather report that doesn’t match what you’re seeing out the window. From Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, the United States looks loud but inert—endlessly arguing, endlessly posting, but somehow failing to put its shoulder against the door. I didn’t have a clean answer when the question was first asked. So I started paying closer attention to what “doing something” actually looks like inside the country now—and why it so often fails to register as action from the outside.
The first problem is embedded in the premise. Americans are doing things. They’re just not doing them in ways that travel well across borders.
In December, before dawn, clergy chained themselves to the doors of an ICE building in San Francisco. They sang hymns while federal officers cut the chains and zip-tied wrists. Inside the crowd was a woman named Alexandra De Martini, legally blind, holding a baby. Her husband had been detained during what she believed was a routine green-card appointment. She told a reporter she couldn’t function without him. Not rhetorically. Literally.
The idea that Americans aren’t acting is wrong. The harder truth is that much of the action has become personal, costly, and easy to miss.
Zoom out and the numbers complicate the picture further. In June 2025, millions of Americans turned out for coordinated “No Kings” protests.