Public Citizen’s Playbook for Fighting Trump

November 14, 2024

Public Citizen's Playbook for Fighting Trump

Public Citizen News / November-December 2024

By Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissman

This article appeared in the Nov/Dec 2024 edition of Public Citizen News. Download the full edition here.

This is a dangerous and upsetting time - and it's also one that calls us to action. Even as all of us - Public Citizen staff and our wonderful supporters - are mourning the electoral outcome, we are simultaneously springing into action to organize for the work ahead.

The good news is that we have a clear playbook for dealing with Donald Trump.

Public Citizen was enormously effective in confronting Trump and his administration in his first term. By highlighting conflicts of interest and corruption and through vigorous use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), for example, we helped drive three cabinet secretaries from office and generated major media focus on Trump's personal conflicts of interests and the corporate capture of his administration.

We also won multiple lawsuits against the administration - wins that forced disclosure of the White House visitor logs, preserved a teen pregnancy prevention program, and forced the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots in a timely way.

We led massive mobilizations to hold Trump accountable, supported both Trump impeachments, andbuilt the 100-organization-strong Not Above the Law coalition.

Together, we're going to replicate this work - and do much more - in the four years ahead.

We will shine a spotlight on the corruption and corporate capture of the Trump administration. We will call attention to Trump and his family's conflicts of interests, including everything from a new Trump cryptocurrency to billions in Saudi investment capital managed by Jared Kusher. We'll also highlight ethical breaches, conflicts of interest, and abuses by cabinet nominees and key officials - running bold campaigns to defeat as many as possible, creating a public tracker of Trump administration conflicts of interest, and fending off the corporate gifts and handouts soon to be showered on giant businesses.

On the legal front, we anticipate a deluge of unconstitutional and illegal actions from the administration, and we will sue whenever needed to block Trump illegality. We'll be closely monitoring existing and proposed rules that we expect Trump's stable of corporate-friendly regulators to try to roll back - from standards for banks to account for climate risk to Medicare drug price negotiation to safeguards against consumer fraud, and much more - and we'll be ready to rush into court to stop them.

We are also prepared to file a tidal wave of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to extract key documents from the administration. And, we'll train allies to do the same, conducting teach-ins for allied groups on how to use FOIA and offering our litigation services for appeals.

We plan to build out our Not Above the Law coalition infrastructure to defend the rule of law and fight against all manner of Trump authoritarian actions. Trump and his allies have telegraphed their intent in a noxious campaign, Project 2025, and the actions of the first four years that Donald Trump was in office. We will likely see President Trump breaking the law and abusing power in areas like immigration roundups, climate-destroying energy extraction, summarily firing tens of thousands of civil servants, the prosecution of political opponents, and much more. Our coalition and our litigators are prepared to meet these challenges.

Meanwhile, in the waning days of the Biden administration, we are advocating for very specific, lasting measures that cannot be undone by Trump, such as clemency for all prisoners on death row, and executive actions that will help create speedbumps for the incoming team.

Make no mistake, we know exactly how dangerous Trump will be in a second term. We're deeply concerned for our nation. But we are even more determined to mitigate the damage and confront his authoritarianism head on. Public Citizen has the plan in place, the expertise to bring to bear, and the grassroots support needed to do so effectively. Together, we're going to face down the awful authoritarian threat we must now confront.

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