WASHINGTON — Organizers have stashed bullhorns in apartments and offices near Manhattan’s Times Square. They’ve stockpiled hot chocolate mix and sleeping bags in Salt Lake City. And they’ve started arranging carpools in Houston.

Across the country, activists are making plans, collecting supplies and raising money to swiftly launch hundreds of street protests if President Trump fires Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who has been investigating the Trump administration.

“The last thing we want is to be caught unprepared,” said Elizabeth Beavers, a Washington-based policy manager for Indivisible, one of several liberal groups involved in the protest plans.

“We’re on red alert,” agreed Zac Petkanas, a Democratic consultant working with the organizers.

Never mind that Trump and his legal team insist there’s no plan to oust Mueller or otherwise interfere with the investigation into whether the president’s associates helped Russia meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Trump’s opponents don’t buy the denials, especially as some Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators have escalated demands for Mueller to get the boot.

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The president’s lawyers have been expected to meet with the special counsel’s office as Trump seeks a public exoneration to remove the cloud over his presidency. Few outside legal experts believe Mueller would offer that promise while the investigation remains underway.

That leaves Mueller’s fate a potent issue for organizing and fundraising in an era when protest politics have become the norm and a midterm election looms on the calendar.

“I went into shock (after the presidential election) and I became politically active almost immediately,” said Mary Louise Ochoa, a retired University of Houston staff member who is helping to organize in the city. “There’s been no respite since then.”

The protests began on Jan. 21, the day after Trump was sworn into office, when hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington and other cities in a kind of counter-inauguration.

After Trump tried to ban immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries in his first week, thousands of protesters flocked to Los Angeles International and other airports. Courts blocked the executive order, although the Supreme Court recently allowed a modified version to take effect.

Next came protests and lawsuits against Trump’s immigration crackdown, his attempt to ban transgender people from the military and his rollback of clean air standards. There was a March for Science to oppose cuts to research budgets and environmental regulations, and a March for Truth to support an independent investigation into allegations of Russian collusion.

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Indeed, Trump has turbocharged the country’s left-leaning activists. Liberal groups focused on issues such as climate change and the sexual abuse of women have been flooded with new members and money, just as conservative and tea party groups beefed up to oppose President Barack Obama’s policies.

In perhaps the most dramatic example, the American Civil Liberties Union raked in $24 million in online donations in just one weekend after Trump took office. That was six times the $4 million it normally raises online each year.

Emily’s List, which supports pro-abortion rights Democratic candidates, announced Wednesday that 25,000 women have contacted the organization since the election to discuss running for office. That compares with 920 women in the two years before the 2016 election.

“What we’re seeing now is like nothing we’ve seen before in our history,” said Alexandra De Luca, the Emily’s List press secretary. “This is building a pipeline for cycles to come.”

Organizers said that firing Mueller would mobilize Trump’s opponents as few issues have done in the past.

“This is different from the kind of overreaches we’ve seen from the Trump administration already,” said David Sievers, campaign director for MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group.


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