By A cohort of former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department—dismissed earlier this year by President Donald Trump—are now turning their skills inward, organizing domestic resistance to what they view as an erosion of American democratic norms. Trained in supporting democratic movements abroad, these officials are repurposing their expertise for a campaign of leftwing “resistance” against the administration.
They appear to have gotten high on their own supply of “defending democracy.”
“Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one,” said a current federal official, who requested anonymity in a NOTUS interview. Pointing to the administration’s abrupt dismantling of USAID, the official added, “They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population.”
At the center of this emergent movement is DemocracyAID, an informal network spearheaded by former USAID leaders Ro Tucci and Danielle Reiff. Tucci, who once directed USAID’s Center for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance, is leading workshops titled “Authoritarianism 101,” aimed at cultivating resistance tactics among current federal workers. “The whole point of it is to start off slow. People are just taking coffee breaks together. And that’s what we’re encouraging them to do,” Tucci told NOTUS. “Today it starts with four, but tomorrow it’s 10.”
The group has circulated a now-infamous CIA manual titled Simple Sabotage, which encourages mundane but disruptive behaviors—such as neglecting maintenance or feigning incompetence—as a means to frustrate bureaucratic operations. The pamphlet, once aimed at foreign adversaries, is now being repurposed for use in the very institutions these former officials once served.
Reiff, who retired in 2024, originally convened the group via a Signal chat to stay in touch with colleagues. “We started to have really robust, good conversations, and we realized this was not going to be a quick incident. We really needed to start organizing for the longer haul,” she explained. DemocracyAID now includes 200 volunteers and operates an Instagram account (@friendsofUSAID) with more than 88,000 followers. Its activities include letter-writing campaigns, historical case study discussions, and skill-building sessions modeled on resistance movements like Denmark’s World War II underground.
The Trump administration has condemned the effort. “It is inherently undemocratic for unelected bureaucrats to undermine the duly elected President of the United States and the agenda he was given a mandate to implement,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Anna Kelly told NOTUS.
The story reveals that many on the left are simply theater kids who weren’t good enough to be on stage. “Fascism is not creative,” one conflict expert told NOTUS, likening their efforts to the decentralized resistance in the television series Andor. For them, noncooperation’s strength lies in its adaptability—fluid, anonymous, and difficult to suppress.
Former liberal staff at USAID aren’t the only ones on the left playing Star Wars. On Inauguration Day, a litigation outfit called Democracy Forward—staffed by veterans of the Biden and Harris administrations—launched a “Legal Response Center,” a war room aimed squarely at stymying the Trump-Vance agenda. Led by Skye Perryman, the group plans to coordinate legal challenges, public relations campaigns, and online activism through its new portal, Democracy2025.org.
With alumni from the DOJ, Labor Department, CFPB, and the Kamala Harris campaign on board, the Center will track executive actions in real time and contribute to several of the lawsuits used by liberal district court judges to slow down the Trump administration.
At the time, The New Conservative Post predicted that the new organization would undoubtedly be part of the liberal “resistance,” as they like to call themselves, while pretending they’re characters in Star Wars or something.
They weren’t the only ones, however, to, in effect, attempt to perform an end around the American people. In early 2024, liberals in the Pentagon began to make plans to undermine the second Trump presidency.
Those taking part in the effort told NBC News they are studying Trump’s past actions and 2024 policy positions so that they will be ready if he wins in November. That involves preparing to take legal action and send letters to Trump appointees spelling out consequences they’d face if they undermine constitutional norms.
“We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to,” said Mary McCord, executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law.
Part of the aim is to identify like-minded organizations and create a coalition to challenge Trump from day one, those taking part in the discussions said. Some participants are combing through policy papers being crafted for a future conservative administration. They’re also watching the interviews that Trump allies are giving to the press for clues to how a Trump sequel would look.
Star Wars costumes or not, six months into Trump’s second term has shown that one thing is now certain: democracy was never what liberals were really after.
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