Martin O’Malley — standing atop a planter Saturday outside the Social Security headquarters, arm outstretched to rail against White House threats to the 90-year-old safety net program — was a striking image of dissent.

Not Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But still.

“The greatness of our country is not the amount of wealth we amass, nor is it the size of our armies,” he told a few hundred people gathered for one of the nationwide “Hands Off” protests. “It is the care and compassion that we demonstrate for one another to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless, to heal the sick, to care for widows and orphans. This is our greatness as a people.”

Mayor of Baltimore, governor of Maryland and Social Security commissioner. Now O’Malley can add another title to his resume — the People’s Cabinet.

Friday, Democrats listed O’Malley among their new alternatives to President Donald Trump’s cabinet. Commonly known as a shadow cabinet in parliamentary democracies such as the United Kingdom and Canada, we haven’t seen this in the United States until now.

“I’ve been pushing this for a long time,” Rep. Jamie Raskin said, days before the launch. “The problem is that there will be too much rivalry about who gets to speak.”

Ken Martin, who bested O’Malley for the job of Democratic Party chair, came up with this solution: Remove the biggest ambitions.

When he launched the cabinet Friday, he described it as experts, leaders and “everyday Americans” who will counter the Trump and Republican agenda.

Not a presidential contender among them.

“The challenge, of course, is figuring out exactly who all the players are,” U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen recently told editors and reporters at The Banner.

The DNC said the list will evolve. Members will talk with journalists, join town halls and put out digital content. They’ll work as rapid response teams.

In the past two weeks, O’Malley has been offering briefings and interviews on threats to Social Security posed by Trump’s billionaire sidekick, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk has called it a “Ponzi Scheme.” Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek closed offices and pushed out 5,000 workers. Rep. Andy Harris, Maryland’s Republican in Congress, said he supports a private savings alternative to the safety net.

A few days later, O’Malley was on CNN, ridiculing Senate testimony by Wall Street CEO Frank Bisignano, Trump’s pick to lead Social Security, that he’d never heard of the idea.

There he was on The CBS Evening News, casting Trump’s actions as intended to create enough doubts that people will support a radical change.

“I believe it’ll cascade into the sort of collapse that actually interrupts benefits for some period of time,” O’Malley said.

Rolling Stone followed him to Florida, where he’s been telling people that creating frustration about longer wait times on the phone, websites that crash, and in-person meetings for basic requests is a step toward that.

“That’s how fascists win, by making us feel like we can’t do anything about it,” O’Malley said, according to the magazine.

Then it was Woodlawn, for one of the Hands Off protests planned in all 50 states.

“Bitcoin might be a Ponzi scheme — but not Social Security,” O’Malley said.

The shadow cabinet is one Democratic experiment as the party out of power searches for the most effective way to counter Trump’s bewildering changes — much of it beyond the Constitution.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, joined at some Western stops by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Sen. Corey Booker spoke for a record-breaking 25 hours straight on the Senate floor to condemn Trump’s changes to America.

Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, isn’t part of the People’s Cabinet. He wants to see daily briefings on an issue of the day to spell out the differences.

“We need to be able to adapt and mobilize,” he said.

You can see Raskin’s role in the strategy, and a big part of it is his wit.

He had the crowds laughing at town hall events in both Harris’ district and Rep. Ryan McKenzie’s Pennsylvania home turf, explaining Trump’s claim before Congress that the National Institutes of Health spent $8 million on “transgender mice.”

“I looked it up on my phone, right then,” he said at both. “NIH spent $8 million on transgenic mice, that is, mice that have been injected with DNA so they could do medical research on asthma and AIDS and breast cancer and colon cancer.

“My friends, we are being governed by morons.”

It’s a long way to the elections needed to change the country’s direction.

Right now, all Democrats have are words. Some will be spoken in court, but others will be at rallies and in town hall meetings, interviews and the halls of Congress.

Like Raskin, other Maryland Democratic members in Congress, including Van Hollen, Rep. Sarah Elfreth and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, talk often about the changes.

Can words be enough?

Republicans won two special elections in Florida last week, held to replace members of Congress appointed to the Trump administration. But the Democrats in those races did better than expected.

And they won in Wisconsin, a key swing state in presidential elections, where voters rejected Musk’s attempt to buy the election for a state supreme court judge with $22 million in personal and PAC donations.

Trump withdrew New York Rep. Elise Stefanik as his nominee for ambassador to the U.N. because Democrats might have won her seat in a special election, narrowing the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

It’s a long way to the next elections. We’ll have a better sense by then if all the words uttered by O’Malley, Raskin and others will make a difference.

Words are important. Votes in districts held by Harris, Mackenzie and Stefanik will matter more.

“I’m not sure they could hold the district without her,” Raskin said. “I’m not sure they can hold the district with her.”