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I’ve been taking stock of the possible firebreaks against Trump’s illegal marauding. One is the Supreme Court, the ultimate guardian of the rule of law. The high court has belatedly shown some indignation at Trump’s contempt for lower courts, but it remains to be seen whether Trump will defy even the Supreme Court.

A second firebreak is financial markets. Money markets have freaked out at some of Trump’s more lunatic policies, such as scattershot high tariffs and intermittent threats to fire Fed Chair Jay Powell, forcing him to reverse course.

What I’ve been waiting for is Republican elected officials to constrain Trump, and strategic efforts by local activists to pressure them to pressure Trump. Marches and demonstrations provide a sense of activity and solidarity, but by themselves they are not a strategy.

Organizing people to target swing districts for the 2026 elections makes sense, but the extreme threats to democracy are happening right now. Unless they are contained, it’s not clear what sort of election we will even have in 18 months.

Now at last, a group has put these pieces together, and the strategy works. The pilot project is in California’s heavily Latino 22nd Congressional District, a high-poverty, heavily agricultural district, where some 68 percent of people rely on Medicaid, now the target of deep Republican spending cuts. Farmers in the region are also threatened by Trump’s tariff war, which is lethal for agricultural exports.

The seat has gone back and forth between the parties. The incumbent is David Valadao, who lost the seat in 2018 and won it back in 2020.

It occurred to two veteran organizers, Doug Linney and Marguerite Young, that this might be an ideal place to try out a strategy pressuring vulnerable Republicans to pressure Trump. Linney was a founder of Activate America, which was created in 2017 to flip House and Senate seats.

They created a project called the Multiplier Project, directed by Young. The idea was to work with local activists to flood Valadao’s office with postcards, texts, and live encounters, demanding that he protect Medicaid and resist a Trump trade war that stood to kill local agriculture.

More than 173,000 local people were enlisted to send postcards to Valadao. Others sent countless texts and made phone calls. And it worked.

Valadao opposed the proposed Medicaid cuts and was one of two House Republicans who abstained on the budget reconciliation. (Two other Republicans voted against it.) In his speech on the House floor, Valadao said that he’d "heard from countless constituents" opposing Medicaid cuts.

"I will not support a final reconciliation bill that risks leaving them behind," he added. "I ask that leadership remains committed to working with my colleagues and I to produce a final product that strengthens critical programs like Medicaid and SNAP and ensures that our constituents are not left behind."

Valadao also indicated that he was inclined to support legislation sponsored by Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska to take back Congress’s authority over tariffs. Bacon is the most outspoken Republican Trump critic in the House.

"The Multiplier Project aims to build capacity," project director Marguerite Young told me. "How can we erect some speed bumps? How can we press vulnerable Republicans to tell Trump that this or that won’t work."

The effort is built on local activism, which included some 5,000 people gathering on March 31 in Delano to celebrate Cesar Chavez Day and 4,000 attending a local event on the Bernie Sanders–AOC tour, and thousands more participating in local April 5 actions in Bakersfield, Hanford, and Porterville. Instead of the good energy of these separate efforts just dissipating, they feed into an ongoing focused campaign.

A charming thing about this strategy is that MAGA forces will think twice about threatening incumbents in swing districts with primary challenges, since harder-line pro-Trump candidates would be even easier for Democrats to defeat in the general election.

The organizers of the Multiplier Project hope to extend the strategy to 18 swing districts. The progress in CA-22 is pretty good proof of concept. Next on the list is AZ-01, part of Maricopa County, where incumbent Republican David Schweikert won the seat in 2024 by less than four points.

As in CA-22, organizers will work intensely with local groups. "It can’t be just about flipping the House," Young says. "It has to be about changing the power dynamics by building sustained political power locally."