Rebuilding Community in the Age of Trump

For a number of years now, people have been telling me things I haven’t been expecting to hear. They have been sharing their relationship problems with me; letting me know about their diagnoses, surgeries, and medical scares; sharing their deepest concerns about their own professional and personal futures, which I sometimes suspect are being aired out for the very first time in my email inbox or over coffee at Der Pioneer on Church Avenue. Each time it happens, it surprises me, in part because the people sharing these dispatches with me are often people whose spouses and children I have never met, whose professional lives are a blur at best. So why were they telling me all this, anyway?

Since (gulp) 2017, I have been one of the leaders of an all-volunteer Indivisible group in Brooklyn. It is a task that begins with a daily email message containing a single call to action—make a call, donate money, show up for a protest—and encompasses so much more: cajoling, conspiring, corresponding, organizing. My position is equal parts rabbi, life coach, personal assistant, and therapist. It is the most important job that I do, and it is also not really a job at all.

The unspoken initial promise we made to our members, in those early months of 2017, was that the country had temporarily spun off its axis. We were asking people to show up to complete discrete, tangible tasks in the hopes of defeating Trump and restoring the familiar American order that had sustained us, if imperfectly, for so long. And we succeeded—for a time. 

But what happens to the well-being of Americans endlessly horrified by Trump’s malevolent, brutal rule, who can no longer tell themselves that this is a one-off error or a weird historical blip?

2025 was an entire year devoted to the principle that “next week things will finally calm down,” with next week remaining a mirage in the desert of the real. We hosted fundraisers, sponsored refugees, supported day laborers, attended No Kings rallies, canvassed. It felt relentless.

My co-leaders Julie Peppito and Kate Fermoile launched a weekly pop-up protest in our neighborhood called Freedom Friday. More people kept coming, week after week. They lingered, even after Kate took our photo and thanked us for coming. They walked over to nearby homes to drink wine and talk politics. They marched off in pairs or threesomes to go out to dinner together. And still I remained puzzled. This was nice and all, seeing people get to know each other, but what did it have to do with real-deal activism?

It only really clicked for me when a new member, who had become a Freedom Friday stalwart, approached one of my co-leaders to say that stumbling on our group had saved her life. Our group had not only provided her with political purpose; it had given her a social lifeline, and a sense of belonging hard to find elsewhere.

Each life update sent my way was a statement that this was a community. This was their community. Democracy could not be salvaged as a solo mission. And Trump and his tech- and media-mogul cronies had been exceptionally good at building the world they wanted to see: atomized, angry, solitary. People wanted something else and they no longer knew where to find it. They were looking for something bigger than themselves. They wanted this community and they needed me not to fuck it up for them.

For the truth is that a lot of people did give up after 2024. They either officially left, scrubbing their email address from our list, or went dark, no longer responding to messages or showing up in person. I begrudged no one their exhaustion. Many people reached a day beyond which they could go no further, and I felt only gratitude for everything they had contributed to the fight for democracy. 

I had seen people come and go, and spent a substantial amount of my time worrying about burnout. I did not want to lose anyone I did not have to. So the Trump 2.0 version of our group–now doubled in size– crafted a plan for our new members. Active new members were approached by my co-leaders Joelle Berman and Julie Subrin and asked if they wanted to meet for coffee. 

Joelle was the universally acknowledged master of this work, able to instantly put people at ease and get them to open up about their stories, their beliefs, and their hopes. 

I was—well, I was not Joelle. I had managed to reach my late 40s without developing any observable small-talk skills. But I loved the challenge of trying to understand a newcomer. 

Sometimes, people arrived with a fully sketched portrait of themselves as organizers. Other times, it was our job to suggest the selves they might become. The mission, though, was not to be right so much as it was to look carefully. It was to take in a person you did not know and say, “I see you as you are, and I see you as you want to be.” It was to say, “You are welcome here exactly as you are.” 

Occasionally, people laid out the stumbling blocks keeping them from immersing themselves more fully in the work. They were not explicitly asking us to resolve their problems, and often we could not, but the point was that we were being summoned into the private corners of their lives, asked to see them in their fullness. 

Sometimes, it might be enough to nod our heads and say that we understood. At other times, there might be an opportunity to offer something—an introduction, a suggestion, a connection. The more you fight alongside us, we were trying our best to say, the more we will fight for you. It was not a transaction so much as it was a promise of loyalty. We would be here today and tomorrow and the day after, not only to fight for democracy, but to fight for each other.

We had collectively grown so acclimated to the absence of care that offering it felt unusual, like we were donning clerical robes in our spare time. But the political climate was changing in real time, and the traditional moderate vs. progressive split in the Democratic Party felt increasingly irrelevant. The only distinction that mattered, to borrow a phrase from New York mayoral and congressional candidate Brad Lander, was “fighting, not folding.” To be relevant and productive in the era of Trump ascendant, we had to not only fight harder for the country; we had to fight harder for each other. 

We began planning more in-person events. People could go through their week knowing that, whatever else might happen, they would get to spend 30 or 60 minutes in the company of others who were equally horrified and heartbroken by the condition of America, and that they would see those same friends the next week, and the week after. 

Our gatherings were all political in orientation—folding our brilliant member Megan Piontkowski’s array of zines, putting together whistle kits to prepare for potential ICE incursion—but were primarily intended to give people a space to get to know each other better. We were operating on Joelle’s theory that the better our members knew each other, the more likely they would be to show up to the next event. And the better they knew each other, the less likely they would be to walk away, giving in to despair about the future.

Building community meant welcoming each person to our group, asking them to come back, checking in to see how they were doing, finding out what they needed from us, or what they hoped to contribute. 

This year, we have made a point of asking our members, personally, to keep showing up. After Renée Good and Alex Pretti were murdered, we checked in with hundreds of our members, one person at a time. Before No Kings 3, we sent a personal email to every single member of our group, asking them if they would be up for joining us at what should be the biggest day of protest in American history. We wanted people to know that they were personally needed for this work, that the day could not be a success without them.

It was assuring them that this was a big tent, that everyone was welcome, and that everyone’s contributions were needed. People regularly told themselves that they lacked the wealth or the charisma or the talent to accomplish anything of value. Nothing of the sort was even remotely true, but it spoke to people’s recurrent fears that here, too, they might be rejected or unappreciated.

American authoritarianism is not only intent on yanking people apart, it actually thrives on the feeling of hopelessness inculcated by a life without connection. The more you feel separated from your neighbors, the more you are convinced that you are surrounded by sheeple and brutes, the more authoritarianism thrives. Trump and his goons want us all convinced that other people are hopeless, delusional, and unsalvageable, because then we can be convinced that there is no other choice but totalitarian misrule. And if other people are not to be trusted, then there is no pathway to a society that is joyous and constructive.

A few weeks back, we had a get-together at a local restaurant. We claimed a few outdoor tables on a balmy spring evening. There was no agenda. I had no asks. (I mean, I always have asks, but I kept them bottled up for a few hours). It was just a chance for people to get a few drinks or some fries or both and talk about whatever was on their minds. We had assumed that a few people would each come by for a short hello. Instead, we had about twice as many people as we anticipated, and practically everyone stayed for the entire time. 

People hunger for community. They strive to belong. They want to know who will fight alongside them when the shit hits the fan. They need to know who will have their backs. This is in no way an abstract question. Who is going to fight alongside you, right now? Who will understand the moment and act accordingly?

The sobering reality is that too many Americans—including many of our friends and colleagues and family members—believe themselves not required to fight, or find themselves unable to do so. 

People sometimes tell me their secrets because they want me—want anyone—to understand what it costs them to show up for democracy. It’s my honor and privilege to listen. It’s my mission to live up to those glimpses of everyday heroism.

You may already have a community just like this one. Or you may not, and find the thought of it pointless or irritating or narcissistic or counterproductive. 

But we are watching in real time as America gives way to the worst instincts of its worst people. To counteract authoritarianism, we must model a world that looks like the one we want to build collectively. It is to be a place where neighbors know each other and come together in the service of others. It is to be a place where we all think about ourselves a whole lot less and about others a whole lot more. 

It is a vision inspired by the words of Viktor Frankl, who wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

 Man is originally characterized by his ‘search for meaning’ rather than his ‘search for himself.’ The more he forgets himself — giving himself to a cause or another person — the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.

In order to build the better world we would like to see, we must first construct a model, a miniature version. Here we are, tinkering with our glue and our scraps of wood. We’ve got a seat saved just for you.

Featured image is Caring, Community, Culture-HWW, by Jo Zimny Photos