In response to Trump, a new resistance forms to push back

In Hibbing, they are retirees who call and write their elected officials arguing to save the Affordable Care Act. In Winona, it’s bartenders and manufacturing workers who organize meetings and plot responses to President Donald Trump’s moves on immigration. In Northfield, professors and nurses and farmers save the local congressman’s number in their phones for frequent calls on climate change and gay rights.

And in Blaine, on a Sunday afternoon in early March, they were a small group gathered at an ice-arena restaurant, wearing name tags and making small talk when a man tentatively poked his head in.

“Is this the resistance?” he asked.

Fueled by dissatisfaction, anger and fear over the new presidential administration, thousands of Minnesotans have spent the past few months seeking out like-minded neighbors and figuring out how to push back. Some are pouring time and money into long-running progressive organizations. Others are striking out on their own, attending public meetings and contacting congressional representatives for the first time. But many are signing up with one of more than 70 Minnesota groups following the steps of “Indivisible,” an activist guidebook written by former congressional staffers that bills itself as “a practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda.”

Borrowing from grass-roots tactics of the insurgent Tea Party as it worked to flip congressional seats and move American politics to the right, those who proudly now call themselves “the resistance” are aiming to stop the policies of the Trump White House and GOP-led Congress and lay the groundwork for political victories in the 2018 and 2020 elections — one e-mail, phone call or town hall meeting at a time.

Read more: http://www.startribune.com/in-response-to-trump-a-new-resistance-forms/417093843/