The threatening and fascistic dictates of the Trump administration met a series of stumbling blocks over the weekend. From Minnesota to Denmark, and from protesters to politicians, people have had enough.

Minneapolis, the city where American citizen Renee Good was shot dead in her car by an ICE agent, is a beacon of what protest can and must look like when the actions of the national government render it illegitimate. On Saturday January 17th, Minnesotans took to the streets in their thousands to hinder the ruthless government agency ICE which has been causing chaos in communities since Trump returned to office. These protests have been ramping up since the murder of Renee Good at the hands of ICE, a local woman who was shot dead in her car for protesting ICE activity in the neighbourhood. Trump inflamed the city by defending her murder, claiming self defence when video evidence clearly shows otherwise. Tensions have only been rising since. The residents have not backed down in their fight against ICE.

Locals also shouted down Jake Lang, a neo-Nazi January 6th protester who openly posted on social media that he planned to burn a Quran outside city hall in protest of immigrants. He allegedly shouted to counter-protesters that even "natural born citizens" should be deported in order to "preserve the white race". An enormous crowd surrounded him, pushing him into a literal corner with their bodies, before then subsuming him into the crowd with their own (which may very well be the most philosophical thing we witness this year). Beautifully, it was an African-American man who shielded Lang from the worst of the crowd's fury, shuttling him to fringes where he could leave relatively unharmed.

The tactics used throughout Minneapolis to stand up to the illegal terrorisation put upon them by Trump's goons are diverse and strategic: Outside ICE Minneapolis HQ, Minnesotans poured water on the frozen streets leading up to it. Native Americans took over the streets to dance in protest of four detained Oglala Sioux tribal members, three of whom are still unaccounted for.

Photographer John Abernathy tossed his camera into the crowd while being forced onto the ground and pepper-sprayed. And, finally, Vice President nominee and Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz, deployed the Minnesota National Guard to "support local law enforcement".

Perhaps most strikingly, the Black Panther Party of Self Defence has allegedly been resurrected, and patrolled the anti-ICE protests offering protection to protesters against the government goons. Paul Birdsong, who identifies as the Chairman of the Panthers, gave an interview while carrying a semi-automatic shotgun, encouraging communities to escort their immigrant neighbours and citizens of colour to offer protection against ICE and state violence. He said: "If you're gonna arm yourself legally, arm yourself with something bigger than what they got. Those who serve the public, they should be fearful that the public is going to be dissatisfied with the job they're doing—not feeling like they're tyrants, not feeling like they're bullies, not because they got guns and body armour and walkie talkies that makes them immune to whatever the people would do."

Voicing the sentiment across many Minneapolis communities at the moment, he said: "If ICE thinks they’re going to brutalize the people on our watch? Fuck around and find out.”

Trump's America is flirting with civil war, a civil war for which there will be no incentive to avoid if innocents are killed and disappeared from the safety of their communities anyway. Trump's cronies believe they have already won. While Minnesotans took to the streets this weekend, a group of far-right influencers partied together in a night club, rapping the lyrics of Ye's "Heil Hitler", a song which was banned on Spotify and Youtube (but not Musk's Twitter). A tweet that accompanied the clip announced "the culture is changing".

It is, but perhaps not in the direction Trump wants to take it. When he announced new plans to blight the economies of countries that oppose his takeover of Greenland with new tariffs, his targets didn't roll over in submission as they have in the past. The alliance remains defiant in defence of European sovereignty, the leaders in question said, which include the stalwart Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada. The former Governor of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada has refused to entangle himself with Trump politics since taking office in 2025. But he is preparing for how Trump will change the world, and last week he intrepidly announced a new trade relationship with China to set Canada up "for the new world order".

Trump was also ridiculed by the Nobel Foundation committee over the weekend. US-backed María Corina Machado, opposition leader in Venezuela who promised to privatise the nation if put in power, gifted her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in a thinly-veiled request that he do just that. In response, the Foundation essentially said that it can hang on Trump's wall all he likes, but it will never be his.

Even the illusory market propping up Trump and his Silicon Valley supremacist backers got trashed this weekend. On Friday, Hollywood actors and screenwriters Ben Affleck and Matt Damon rubbished artificial intelligence and the promise that it will take over our lives. Speaking on Joe Rogan's podcast, they blasted the technology not just from an artistic perspective, but a technological one. Affleck offered a lucid explanation as to how and why LLMs —the technology underpinning a.i.—simply cannot work at cost and scale, and that the industry weaponises hype to distract from slow adoption rates. In a wonderful twist of fate, Sam Altman announced not 24 hours later that ChatGPT, the most widely-known a.i., will now run ads on its service. This is an obvious signal that the business is failing to generate money – Altman previously stated that running ads would be "a last resort for us as a business model".

And finally, the President attended a football game on Saturday night. He was booed so loudly that he could be barely heard over the speakers—and even gave up at one point.

This weekend's series of disparate protests is emblematic of why the most important actions we can take are those that are home-grown. Part of how fascism rises to the top is the speed at which it reveals itself, disorienting citizens and making it hard to get a grip on what is happening around them. Reality becomes slippery, purchase becomes impossible. This contributes to the sense the regime's inevitability, that there is very little we can do to stop its ascendence and reclaim the democratic-ish processes which underpinned the national government for hundreds of years.

Slowing it down, therefore, is critical. It reveals the weaknesses and incoherence and chinks which can be exploited. Slowing it down gives a wider range of citizens more opportunities to join in the protest against it, mitigating against that impending sense of doom. No single act can evict the beast from the White House. But it can be, slowly, disempowered. We can grind the gears of the infrastructure that facilitates its rapid, hostile takeover. We can slow things down just enough to get a grip on the world again. We can be the friction which sparks entire movements.

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