With only weeks now until our midterm election, we Americans feel dread down to our very toes that Trump will succeed in his attempt to sabotage our democracy. We find ourselves immensely heartened for this last stretch by people like Lawyer Norm Eisen, known as the Attorney General of Resistance, who takes Trump to court to win case after case for his Democracy Defenders Action, in alliance with a plethora of legal organizations along with an eager squad of “Contrarians,” (full disclosure, of which I am one) fans of the Substack he produces with former Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin.
Shock and Awe Meets the Rule of Law
Shock and awe is a military term for achieving rapid dominance by throwing everything at your enemy so quickly that they are confused into thinking that they don’t have the means to fight back. That is why Trump hurls everything he has at what he derided as our “deep state,” including executive orders, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to fire civil servants and federal workers and to destroy the operating infrastructures of federal agencies, not to mention the National Guard he let loose in Washington, soon followed by hordes of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents illegally arresting immigrants and cruelly cramming them into inhumane detention centers.
A democracy depends on people following the laws that their elected government has established rather than the whims of an autocratic leader. Trump has become more and more overt in his explicit contempt for courts and Congress, and for the constitutional separation of power between the executive, congressional, and judicial branches of government.
Democracy’s problem is that a would-be dictator’s multiple orders and rapid broadside attacks can overcome the rule of law, which moves much more slowly and deliberately. Enter Norm Eisen (who had served as the White House Special Counsel for Ethics and Government under Obama) and his allied legal organizations using a strategy of immediate response to Trump taking one illegal action after another by filing one legal case after another and winning most of them.
Take, for example, Trump’s Executive Order 14160, signed on January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, in direct contradiction to the Constitution’s 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause by denying citizenship to children born of immigrant mothers. The resistance was immediate, well organized, and determined. A case was filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens LULAC v. Executive Office of the President, with Eisen’s Democracy Defenders as a legal partner along with legal teams and plaintiffs from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund, and the Asian Law Caucus.
The case proceeded to the Supreme Court as Trump v. Barbara, where, as I noted above, Trump’s Executive order was declared unconstitutional.
Backsliding and U-turning Democracies
Eisen was able to leap to the defense of democracy on the first day of the second Trump Administration because he was a long-time student of both backsliding democracies and those that achieve U-turns from dictatorships. Of Czech heritage (his mother was a holocaust survivor and his father escaped the country just before the war), he served from 2011-2014 as ambassador to Czechoslovakia under the Obama Administration, an experience he wrote about in “The Last Palace.”
The only one of the lives not actually a one-time inhabitant of the embassy is Eisen’s mother, Frieda Eisen, who refuses to come and visit not only because of her holocaust memories but also because she senses that the conditions which led to it still lurk in present-day Czechoslovakia, a conviction that proves correct when, during Eisen’s ambassadorship, he has to deal with the right-wing tendencies and fascist friends of Václav Klaus, who was president of Czechoslovakia for the first two years of Eisen’s tenure.
In his 2020 edition of “Democracy’s Defenders,” Eisen wrote about the 1989 “velvet revolution” and the fall of communism in the country, and then applied his insights about what democracies should do when dictators attempt to usurp them in A Case for the American People: the United States v. Donald Trump, based on his experience as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in Trump’s first impeachment. When we add in Eisen’s 2022 co-authored “Overcoming Trumpery” and 2021 “States United: A Survival Guide for Our Democracy,” we can appreciate how well-positioned he was to resist Trump’s attack on democracy
In a Frontline interview after the first month of Trump’s second presidency, Eisen notes that “we’ve enjoyed these wins for years against Trump. […] He tried to do an autocratic takeover of government and myself and many others stopped him. It’s as if you stopped the German army at the Seine River in 1940, and they couldn’t take Paris.”
Eisen’s strategy is not only to activate a variety of governmental institutions that follow long-established legal and constitutional remedies for the abuse of power but also to call upon the integrity and strength of we the people. Litigation is his primary strategy, but he sees political opposition as “the treetops” and the American people as “the grassroots,” aiming to “flood the zone with shock and awe by the rule of law.”
One of Eisen’s most effective tactics is communicating with his thousands of Contrarian subscribers, whose subscriptions are rolled over into legal resistance. In a 2026 panel at Princeton University, Eisen, his editorial partner Jen Ribin, and other Contrarians explain how they used the videos and journalism of this Substack entity to encourage Americans to protest in the streets and to use every legal and non-violent means at our disposal to preserve the democracy we cherish.
Infinite Games, Infinite Laughter
In only a few weeks, we Democrats hope to awaken on November 4, the morning after the election, with a big democratic win giving us a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate. There is every indication, however, that the Trump regime will sabotage the vote and declare a national emergency to bring militias into the streets to stop the process. These are the finite games that shape are our lives now, but infinite games are also afoot:
“The finite play for life is serious. The infinite play of life is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter […] we laugh not at what has surprisingly become impossible fo others, but over what has surprisingly come to be possible with others.”
— James P. Carse, “Infinite and Finite Games.”
Nearly every morning of the week, Norm Eisen pops up gleefully on my phone, often suited and tied in a car or an airport waiting room on his way to a new case, grinning from ear to ear as he shares his excitement about a new legal victory or political surprise. We have had superb resistance leaders during these terrible years, all bringing integrity and a love of justice to the finite games we have been forced to fight. I have written about how Representatives Jamie Raskin, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and Senator Corey Booker have brought a moral clarity to speeches and actions that ring in our hearts like a bell; while journalists like Robert Reich have held in there like pit bulls since Trump’s first inauguration.
Though his fellow Substacker Robert Reich displays wry amusement in much that he says and in the cartoons he draws as he says it, among our resistance leaders Norm Eisen is unique for his gleeful effervescence. If we understand a sense of humor is a sense of human, perhaps his laughter is existentially infinite, the kind that comes when you find yourself in a position to use every talent you have in the service of your most cherished values.
Whatever the cause, Eisen’s cheerfulness keeps our chins up and our hearts whole at this crucial moment in our common cause of retaining democracy in America. Who knows, there might even be joy in the morning?
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com
