When Donald Trump started executing on a long list of campaign promises aimed at reshaping the federal government, Methodist minister and county legislator Limina Grace Harmon awaited the anticipated response from elected officials in the opposition. Once it became clear that Democrats at the national level seemed to be paralyzed — or perhaps content to await the 2026 election campaign — Harmon realized that waiting for others to act is not always the best option. In a video posted to social media, Harmon laid out in just under eight minutes a call to action: Americans who consider themselves progressive need to organize, and now.
“The United States is not facing a coup,” Harmon says in the video. “We are in the middle of it.”
“I feel awfully prophetic in that regard,” Harmon said later, when reached for comment. “What we are seeing should not be shocking us, or leaving us discombobulated.” Since being inaugurated, Trump has signed hundreds of executive orders, ranging from declarations to roll back the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, to empowering Elon Musk to gut the federal bureaucracy as a new CEO might that of a corporation. These actions have resulted in dozens of court cases, but Harmon has found the response of congressional members to be lackluster.
“A hundred years of history tells us what comes next,” Harmon said in an interview. “It’s always billed as alarmist, overreacting and extreme until the thing has happened.” Trump’s actions have included relocating some foreigners accused of crimes to Guantanamo in Cuba, rolling back diversity efforts, and declaring intention to take over territories including the Panama Canal, Palestine, Greenland and all of Canada. “We can choose not to wait.”
Harmon doesn’t want to wait for the midterm elections in part out of a fear that there won’t be meaningful elections again, if no resistance to Trump’s agenda is mounted, saying in the video that this “business-as-usual approach to our daily lives” may be due to the volume of executive actions being overwhelming. “However, we’ve wasted too much time already,” but most elected officials seem unprepared in Harmon’s view.
The response Harmon is seeking is from the people broadly, and not relegated to the current progressive political leaders. Predicting that resistance in left-leaning states will be framed as un-American and eventually “felonious,” Harmon sees that eventually resources will be extracted from the wealthiest states in an effort to “destroy our way of life … we must become the leaders that we need.”
It’s the fact that states with very diverse populations, such as New York and California, also hold much of the national wealth that Harmon thinks could become essential during this period of political upheaval. “That’s not nothing,” and could be the basis for systematic efforts of resisting change that is seen by a threat in many communities.
Harmon’s own family has many diverse qualities that results in feeling personally attacked, such as skin color, gender diversity and having special needs in school — all of which are now less protected from discrimination due to efforts to dismantle federal programs and departments.
This “lowly county legislator” wants to see leaders at all levels coming together across state lines to coordinate resistance to these efforts, and believes that only pressure from the populace at large will make that possible. “We have to build something [for those who feel alienated] or there will be no place for them to come.”
What if detractors are correct, though? What if raising the alarm will eventually prove to be a histrionic overreaction? “If I’m wrong, we will have space for new thinkers in progressive circles, and that will do us good.”
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