Rachel Cohen knows the precise moment something clicked in her. It was a Thursday in March, and the 31-year-old attorney was riding the bus home from the West Loop office of Skadden, the big law firm where she worked as a third-year associate. Scrolling on her phone, she saw a news alert: Paul Weiss, one of the country’s most powerful firms, had committed $40 million in pro bono work to causes championed by the Trump administration. In return, the White House dropped an executive order targeting the firm. “I was so infuriated,” Cohen recalls. She suspected her own bosses were preparing to do the same, having evaded questions on the topic. “I realized that I needed to lay all this out for people because they were not paying attention or didn’t think it’s that serious. They needed to see that at least one person thinks it’s that serious.”

That night, Cohen posted her resignation letter on TikTok. When she woke up the next morning, her video had gone viral (it now has nearly two million views). An email from PBS News Hour was waiting in her inbox, asking her to come on the show. Cohen’s suspicions about Skadden proved correct: Eight days after her resignation, the firm reached its own agreement with the Trump administration.

In the months since, as many powerful institutions have capitulated to President Trump’s demands, Cohen has continued to speak out. She now works part-time at Lowell & Associates, a new firm composed of attorneys who, like Cohen, resigned in protest. And with nearly 400,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, she has become a loud voice of resistance. When ICE ramped up enforcement in Chicago this fall, Cohen filmed the protests outside the Broadview processing center. Days later, when Illinois filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to challenge the deployment of the National Guard here, Cohen posted a video breaking down the case. 

Now she’s thinking about not just how to fight back but what’s worth fighting for. In October, she launched American Demands, a national policy initiative articulating a new vision for government. “The most impactful forms of resistance are not going to be about what we don’t want,” says Cohen, “but instead about what we do want.”