A year on from Trump’s victory, resistance is everywhere | Rebecca Solnit

Americans have shown a tremendous amount and variety of opposition - more than some may realize

A young white woman in yoga clothes berating masked ICE agents in a parking lot this spring. A pope speaking up again and again for immigrants. Furious judges dressing down the Trump administration and ruling against it time after time after time, in response to the blizzard of lawsuits filed by human rights and environmental groups, states, cities and individuals. A senator speaking nonstop for 25 hours and another flying to El Salvador to find out what happened to his kidnapped constituent. The biggest day of protest in US history as an estimated 7 million people showed up for No Kings on 18 October in small towns and red counties as well as big blue cities.

Weekly protests at Tesla salesrooms earlier this year that succeeded in damaging the brand, depressing global sales and prompting Tesla CEO Elon Musk to retreat from his Doge slash-and-burn project. Federal workers resisting sometimes merely by adhering to law, truth and fact, and sometimes by speaking out as whistleblowers or in protests, as with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff who staged a walkout in late August in solidarity with senior staff who'd just resigned in protest against the health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr's anti-vaccine policies.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell's Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility