The Democrats Taking On Trump And Musk — And Winning

The resistance meets daily on Microsoft Teams.

The country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general log on at 4pm ET for a thirty-minute confidential video chat to coordinate their plans for pushing back against the Trump administration. They share updates on the seven cases they have moving through federal courts and argue about whether to treat Elon Musk as a lawful arm of the government or an uncredentialed interloper to it. They plot where to respond next, leveraging timezone differences to expand the workday.

The American left has floundered during Trump 2.0. The mass protests of 2017 have not emerged, and donors to progressive causes are not giving the way they did then, either. Democratic congressional minorities have been cowed by Trump’s assertions of executive power, while many of the governors who stand as their party’s leading figures are cautious about provoking fights with the president. In confronting Trump, elected officials have largely yielded to labor unions and advocacy organizations.

Then there are the attorneys general, who see themselves as the last backstop between the people and the president. Their multi-state lawsuits have temporarily stopped the president from revoking birthright citizenship, freezing federal funding and cutting off money for medical research. This week, they filed their sixth amicus brief in an action against the Trump administration, with 23 attorneys general signing on to argue the importance of the Affordable Care Act. The US Department of Justice declined a request for comment on that suit, or others it is defending. 

“Right now in the United States, the Democratic AGs are the only group of people who are united and working to prevent some of these unconstitutional actions from continuing,” Hawaii attorney general Anne Lopez boasted in an interview.

Their work reflects an upgrade from Trump 1.0, when Democratic state officials collaborated but in an improvised, reactive fashion, with plaintiffs sometimes coming together with only a few hours’ notice. They notched key legal victories then, but were driven by caution as they feared undermining each other’s cases with conflicting rulings in different courts.

This year, the attorneys general are executing on a plan they worked to develop for a year before Trump’s return to the White House, according to interviews with more than half of the Democratic attorneys general, former holders of the office and their staff. Coming together to respond to Trump’s policy blitzkrieg after it began, they say, would have represented coming together too late.

For many of them responding to Trump has become a full-time job, on top of their other constitutional duties. All worry they will need to ask their legislatures for money and more muscle to keep up their national work against Trump without compromising the other work they do investigating Medicaid fraud or suing tobacco companies.

“We talk each and every day these days, and you’d think we start to get tired of it, but we’ve just grown closer over time,” said Kathy Jennings, Delaware’s attorney general. “And in the next four years, we’re going to grow very close.”

The brief bank

Bob Ferguson jotted down notes as his car navigated the streets of Seattle, the hometown where he worked at a large corporate law firm before embarking on a political career. Ferguson had attended Democratic Attorneys General Association meetings all over the country, typically upbeat events swarmed by lobbyists eager for face time with some of the country’s most powerful state-level law-enforcement and regulatory officials.

The February 2024 meeting represented a special moment for Ferguson as he began the final year of his third term as Washington’s attorney general. He was running for governor and, win or lose, would depart his office as the country’s last surviving Democratic attorney general from the start of Trump’s first presidency.

The host state’s attorney general is traditionally granted a speaking slot at the meeting, and Ferguson wanted to use his to deliver his colleagues a grave warning: They didn’t know what was coming.

He wandered the stage at the Grand Hyatt as he spoke, microphone in hand as he evoked the chaotic early months of 2017, when a rookie president’s stream-of-consciousness policymaking trampled on civil-rights protections and the separation of powers.

Even though the 2024 election was still nine months away, Ferguson implored them, it was past time to start preparing for the cases they would file if Trump returned to office. He recalled the work his office did throughout 2016, when Ferguson responded to Trump’s campaign-trail provocation about banning Muslims from entering the United States by prepping a constitutional challenge, just in case. When Trump did issue such an order a week into his term, Ferguson’s office was able to file a brief against the policy within three days.

“Whatever he is saying or articulating on the campaign trail,” Ferguson told the assembled attorneys, “assume he's going to do it — no matter how outlandish it may be — and prepare for that.”

The speech was part pep talk, part lecture on appellate tactics. The most important guidance Ferguson had to share was about resources; attorneys general needed to begin now asking their states for the money to hire more lawyers, he insisted. They had to be prepared for January 20, because the president would be. Last time, Trump’s work was often sloppy, making for easier arguments. Don’t count on that this time around, he said.

A few attorneys general volunteered immediately to start doing research, drafting motions and working on arguments. They took broad issue categories back to their individual states — immigration, reproductive health, the environment, voting rights — and laid out the criteria they would use to distribute assignments throughout the year: Who has bandwidth? Who has expertise? Who is being harmed?

“There was going to be a need for coordinated action, making sure that we were not caught flat-footed,” said Maine’s Aaron Frey. “It allowed us to be thinking about what it is that was going to be important for our states.”

In Sacramento, Rob Bonta had been preparing to take on more national cases since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. A draft challenge to a potential federal abortion ban was filed in a “brief bank” that Bonta maintained in anticipation of hypothetical scenarios his office could one day face.

The brief bank grew after the Seattle meeting. Thinking in outlines, Bonta and his growing litigation staff worked out the subheads, the ways Trump could attack under each one: military interventions, budget maneuvers, revoking federal waivers and pulling payments.

Unlike Ferguson, who had had to speculate about what Trump’s campaign rhetoric might look like when translated into policy, Bonta and his colleagues had a roadmap. They studied Project 2025, a sprawling set of policy proposals from the conservative Heritage Foundation that would dramatically re-envision the federal government.

The state attorneys general — including from the District of Columbia — began speaking weekly throughout the summer and fall to update one another of their progress, using the time to order their priorities and determine the limitations of their powers.

“I think there was a collective recognition that we wanted to approach things differently,” said Rhode Island’s Peter Neronha, who caught the last two years of Trump’s term and has served as attorney general since. “We knew we would have to come up with a process by which everyone could and would participate.”

Democratic attorneys general didn’t invent multistate suits. Bipartisan collaborations have been a staple of attorneys general’s work going after tobacco companies, opioid manufacturers and social media companies.

Recently they have become a favored tool for state officials banding together on partisan lines to take on a president of the other party. Democratic attorneys general from 11 states, Washington DC and two cities signed onto a Massachusetts-initiated suit against George W. Bush’s administration over its approach to carbon emissions. Republican attorneys general from 25 states joined a Florida-led challenge to Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. (Both cases ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Having all the states hop on the same case makes it easier to show a national impact, and make the case for a national solution, said David Levine, a professor at UC Law San Francisco. “You don’t run the risk that you get different outcomes in different courts that need to be litigated even more,” Levine said.

Even though Democrats recognized the wisdom of joining forces to oppose Trump in 2017, the 23 members of the party who occupied attorneys general offices were not well-organized to do so. Sometimes they banded together by the dozen, sometimes going out alone or in groups of two or three.

“It was more ad hoc than I think it is today,” said George Jepsen, Connecticut’s attorney general during the first Trump presidency.

When Trump issued his ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, three different lawsuits emerged from attorneys general. Washington and Minnesota filed a case challenging the first order, Hawaii followed with a second lawsuit once Trump amended his first travel ban, while Virginia and New York intervened on behalf of individuals who had been blocked at airports.

“It was very reactionary and stressful, we were seeing these orders coming out and trying to get on the phone and figure out what the heck everybody was going to do, “ said Hawaii’s former Attorney General Doug Chin.

“The fear was that — and I remember it being expressed back then — was that we had to think very hard about each one, because we didn’t want a ruling that would somehow box in everyone else.”

By summer, they had established a framework for developing multistate suits they could all get behind. They had figured out who had the most experience in which courts, and which venues could be the best to file in.

“I guess one of the good things about the summer slumps,” Maine’s Frey said. “We had time to get ready and figure out how we're going to work together, figure out how we can maximize resources.”

Where Project 2025 was specific, they prepped tailor-made cases that all the states could sign onto. Where it was vague, they read up on the arguments that had been successful in impeding Trump’s first-term agenda.

Early work was divided by who could afford to work on it. In many cases, that meant the heavy lifting fell upon California’s 5,600-person staff and New York’s 2,400, including 700 just as assistant attorneys general.

Lawyers were polishing a brief on birthright citizenship even before Trump was sworn in. The states decided to invite San Francisco to join as a litigant to harken back to Wong Kim Ark, a native of the city’s Chinatown whose 1898 Supreme Court appeal affirmed that 14th Amendment applied to anyone born in the United States.

By November, the brief bank was bulging, occupying ever more time for government lawyers from Augusta to Honolulu. New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin asked his department’s lawyers if they wanted to help with pre-election preparation, knowing that their work could be rendered irrelevant if Kamala Harris ended up victorious.

“I said, ‘This is purely volunteer, nobody has to do this, we can't pay you any more,’” he recalled recently. “Over fifty lawyers signed up not knowing who was going to win that election, because they were so concerned.”

On Election Night, Bonta emerged from a half-empty ballroom in a downtown Los Angeles hotel where California Democrats had hoped to fête their native daughter winning the White House.

Instead, as dejected lawmakers and labor leaders streamed into the hallway, Bonta’s mind turned to the year’s worth of planning he had hoped would “gather dust” after a Harris win. He and his colleagues, he said, had strategized down to the detail of which courts to file in, the virtues of facing state versus federal judges, and how to ensure their cases would have standing to take on Trump.

“If he violates the law — as he has said he would, as Project 2025 says he will,” Bonta said, “then we are ready.”

Time to file

On Inauguration Day, executive orders came flying off White House shelves by the dozen. They directed the federal government to make it easier to drill on federal lands, withdraw from international agreements, end diversity programs, change the legal definition of sex and alter the names of geographical features.

Among the attorneys general, there was a sense of shock at the speed with which he moved and how reckless some of the orders seemed. But they also knew they had spent the past year “trying to map out a list of areas where we might see massive policy changes and things that are illegal,” said Nick Brown, who in November was elected to succeed Ferguson as head of Washington’s attorney general’s office.

They spoke every few hours that day, divvying up lawsuits by who had standing, who had expertise, who had staff. If a brief had already been started, what’s the latest? Where would they file? Who is writing the press release template?

“As you can imagine, everybody is the chief legal officer of their respective state, so everybody is used to being in charge,” said Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. “When you’re working collectively on something there’s a desire for everyone to have a leadership role, but you have to put that aside sometimes in the interest of working together.”

One day later, they filed their first two cases. In Massachusetts, 19 states delivered their well-planned response to a Trump order denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.

It springboarded off cases from the last Trump administration, where attorneys general successfully stopped Trump’s attempts to change census and asylum policies by arguing it was a breach of the Administrative Procedure Act.

“They had a way to articulate what the state's interest was, because that's the main hurdle you have to get over,” said Levine, who now teaches the case in his law-school classes. “You can’t just sue because you don't like what he’s doing.”

Hours after that, Oregon, Arizona and Illinois filed their own suit in Washington, which would later include three pregnant mothers who feared their children would be born stateless, another way to show the harm of the order.

“It wasn’t any strategic thing,” said Illinois’ Attorney General Kwame Raoul, who filed in the West Coast group. “It happens sometimes, where one AG may want to file in their state for a particular reason and another group may do it elsewhere. We’re trying as much as possible to minimize that and work together.”

On January 27, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget issued a temporary government-wide funding freeze across the board, sending state and local programs into chaos. The attorneys general had not predicted the memo’s specifics, but had spent the prior year getting language ready for when Trump’s actions inevitably bumped up against Congress’s power of the purse.

“We had to get that filed quickly, so we leveraged the West Coast offices,” said Rhode Island’s Neronha. “It’s only a 24-hour day, but when you’re working overnight, you get three extra hours when you can get the West Coast teams online and our folks can get a little sleep.”

A day later, all 23 states filed a suit in Rhode Island to block the memo’s implementation, using the same separation-of-powers argument successful in 2020 when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals prevented Trump from redirecting Pentagon funds for border-wall construction. Only Congress, the attorney generals’ brief argued, had the power to appropriate money.

Democratic state officials were not the only plaintiffs emerging to sue the new president. The AFL-CIO challenged Trump’s changes to the civil service, the ACLU to protect access to gender-affirming care, and the City of Baltimore over the shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The attorneys general followed days after each suit with supportive amicus briefs signed by 23 states.

But states are in a unique position unavailable to labor unions and outside groups. Their suits are essentially class-actions on behalf of all their constituents, informed by the full range of concrete harms only a state government is positioned to document. On February 10, 22 of the states sued over cuts to the National Institutes of Health. It was filed in Massachusetts, but is filled with details on which programs at the University of Wisconsin are being the most impacted.

“Making sure that information is being included and considered as part of these cases is what I see as sort of a key role for us and for other states,“ said Wisconsin’s Attorney General Josh Kaul.

Ferguson and other veterans of the Trump 1.0 suits had warned their successors to gird for chaos. Few of them, however, expected that chaos would come at the hands of a techo-mogul with a hyperactive social media feed and seemingly unfettered access to the inner workings of the federal government.

“Who could predict that this billionaire, the richest man in the world, comes in out of nowhere and gets the blessing of the president to go into our institutions and invade people's privacy?” Jennings told reporters in February.

Pushing back on the Department of Government Efficiency’s actions required the attorneys-general to agree on a shared view of Elon Musk. Should they treat him as a mouthpiece for the president, giving them another way to go after Trump? Or was Musk acting in a way that violated the law himself?

By mid-February, the states had decided to work both angles at once. One coalition led by New York sued Trump, accusing the Department of Government Efficiency of violating citizens’ privacy. Days later, a second group led by New Mexico went after Musk himself, for wielding too much power for someone who was never confirmed by the Senate.

“It’s important that individuals understand that there are co-equal branches of law that need to be respected, and that states, again, have a unique responsibility to ensure that the Constitution is followed,” New York attorney general Letitia James said ahead of a hearing in the privacy case.

The attorneys general were encouraged to see Musk’s influence animating the general public in a way few other issues had in the flood-the-zone early days of Trump 2.0. Jennings said her office received more constituent phone calls voicing concern about DOGE than anything else in her six-year tenure.

“You ask the AGs and they’re going to tell you the same thing,” she said. “Our phones were flooded. This hit home to people.”

John Suthers, who as Colorado’s Republican attorney general joined in on a challenge to Obamacare while saying no to other multistate suits, said in their rush to file anti-Trump lawsuits Democrats could be falling victim to legal groupthink.

“A lot of these folks aren’t being good lawyers as opposed to good politicians,” Suthers said. “It’s probably great politics to be suing the president for waking up in the morning but it’s certainly not good law.”

The zoom where it happens

High above the schlocky tourist traps of Hollywood Boulevard, the Democratic Attorneys General Association convened this month for its first in-person confab since Trump’s inauguration. Attendees reveled in their early legal victories while navigating a marathon multi-day schedule of sessions on weighty topics like how to respond if Trump defied a court order.

Amid bleak talk of constitutional crises, the attendees' mood was lightened by the easy familiarity of comrades that have bonded in trench warfare. They greeted each other with inscrutable inside jokes — which they declined to explain to an inquiring reporter — and praised their lesser-known talents, like the joke-telling skills of Michigan’s Dana Nessel, a former stand-up comedian, or the singing voice of Nevada’s Aaron Ford.

The good vibes came, in part, from seeing their colleagues out of the confines of a Zoom screen where they began meeting daily after Trump’s inauguration. Their staffs talk every day, as well, clearing up disagreements and fine-tuning strategy, to keep the calls from running over their scheduled thirty minutes. (The participants have a “common interest agreement,” where everything that is said is privileged and confidential. Outside groups, including those whose cases are backed by the states, are not invited to join.)

But there are fears nationwide about burning staff out, and sharing time and resources to avoid it. Behind every 50-page brief that makes it to federal court are hours and hours of time with lawyers and legal professionals to draft and research. Outside firms that were eager to volunteer pro-bono hours during Trump’s first term have largely kept their distance from the states’ efforts this time around.

Smaller states are expanding their operations to play a larger role in the litigation. In Olympia, the 850-lawyer staff is 50 percent bigger than it was when Ferguson started; he had added a civil rights division, environmental protection division and a complex litigation division to his office. In Annapolis, a new six-person “federal accountability unit” has been launched.

“The cavalry is on the way,” said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown. “I anticipate that Maryland will be taking a leadership role on more cases as soon as we have the bandwidth.”

To mount his suits, California sent Bonta an extra $25 million. Rhode Island’s Legislature gave Neronha more money to staff up. Attorneys general in Hawaii, Connecticut and elsewhere are hoping their lawmakers will tap state budgets, too.

“There’s no question our resources are being taxed, I’ve asked our Legislature for more,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.

But it’s only the beginning. For now the attorneys general will keep trying to hire more lawyers, and go about the business of their states while they try to match each executive action they can with a suit of their own. They’re tending to the drafts in their brief banks but trying to play it close to the chest.

“So I think that preparation paid off,” said Ferguson, now Washington’s governor. “I think that that proved to be time well spent, because they've been able to, at this point, match the pace of the administration.”

Emily Ngo, Shia Kapos, Matt Friedman and Kelly Garrity contributed to this article.