Prominent leftwing activists across the US say a second Trump administration demands new tactics to achieve their goals, amid expectations the huge protests that marked both the Biden and first Trump presidencies won’t materialize in the same way.
As many as 4.6 million people attended Women’s Day marches in the US the day after Donald Trump’s first inauguration. The Saturday before Trump was inaugurated for a second time, thousands turned out in Washington DC and in cities around the country as part of the People’s March, this year’s version of the Women’s March – though the turnout was much smaller than in 2017.
“The novelty of mass mobilization has kind of worn off,” said Jamie Margolin, who previously led climate group Zero Hour.
“Is the goal to demonstrate you are an activist and to self-actualize, or is the goal to actually affect change?” said Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, a progressive group that emerged in 2016.
They are two of several activists across the country who spoke with the Guardian about their plans. The organizers expressed a need to “get creative” – to find smaller-scale, more impactful means of changing public sentiment and reaching lawmakers.
This story is part of a new Guardian US ongoing series, Democracy and Justice, that reports on people and communities affected by threats to democracy, with a focus on climate and racial justice. Are the voices of ordinary people being heard – or do those of the wealthy or powerful hold sway?
‘Marches are not the end game’
When more than 100,000 people joined a call with progressive groups after Trump’s win last November, Michelle Hensley and Diane Brady-Leighton were on the line.
The Minneapolis women, who have been activists for decades, committed to host a local gathering to process another Trump term and plan for how they would push back. They used a guide that walked through the various roles someone could play in the four years: they could block, break, bridge or build. “I think people are trying to figure out how to be strategic and what they can best do to help,” Hensley said.
The meetings are one example of how the Trump 2.0 resistance is shaping up. There’s been a more subdued response than in 2016 – influenced, perhaps, by the fact that Trump won the popular vote – with less emphasis on large-scale protests and increased focus on how to make an impact at all levels of government, say organizers and activists.
If the mood among progressives after 2016 was shock and anger, in part because Trump lost the popular vote on that occasion, the goal this time is strategy and sustainability. The organizations that built the backbone of the resistance are more experienced, and their view on building power has been shaped by years of trial and error.
This year’s rendition of the Women’s March, the massive protest held in 2017, is known as the People’s March. It took place on Saturday, and saw solid turnout but far below the 2017 record numbers. Organizers see the protest as the entry point for new activists and a way to connect with the groups they will work with to take further actions.
“The march itself is not the end game,” said Tamika Middleton, Managing Director of Women’s March. “The march itself is a tool, is a mechanism to bring more folks into the movement and get more folks engaged.”
Brady-Leighton went to Washington for the Women’s March in 2017 and marched again in Minnesota for the People’s March – but her mindset this time around is different.
“I think there was this sense of, at that point like, this is ridiculous. We are going to impact this. This is not going to last. People will rise up against this, and this will be a short blip on our way to a progressive future,” she said of the 2017 march. “There wasn’t anything wrong with the strategy, but I think the imagined outcomes were very different than what was hoped for.”
Activists expect people to take to the streets rapidly when Trump takes certain actions, like workplace raids or immigration bans – similar to the protests that quickly materialized in the early days of Trump’s first term over the so-called Muslim ban.
Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, said that like in 2017, energy for protesting might pick up once Trump takes office. He also says protests are merely one “tool in the tool belt.”
“Is the goal to demonstrate you are an activist and to self-actualize, or is the goal to actually affect change?” Levin said. “There can be overlap between those two things, don’t get me wrong, but I care far more about the second. My goal is to win. My goal is to stop bad things from happening and to build our coalition, retake some amount of power.”
– Rachel Leingang
The next stage of the climate movement
The climate protest movement during Trump’s first term was about scale. But now, as activists face both burnout and increasing crackdown on protests, leaders expect groups will use a wider array of tactics, including more targeted actions.
Just after Trump first took the White House in early 2017, US marches for climate action and science convened hundreds of thousands. The following year, youth-led groups Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour made headlines by holding rallies and occupying congressional offices. And 2019 saw the largest global climate protest in history, with record turnout in the US.
“Between 2016 and 2020, a new kind of politically-oriented protest really exploded,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, communications director for the Sunrise Movement.
Those years brought newfound attention to local environmental justice fights, said Sharon Lavigne, an activist from the highly polluted region of the Gulf South known as “Cancer Alley”.
“We saw all sorts of new people join the fight,” said Lavigne, whose organization Rise Saint James has long worked to block a petrochemical plant in Louisiana – and seen some major wins.
The protests also helped the demand for a Green New Deal go viral. The sweeping, progressive proposal to phase out fossil fuels and create millions of jobs was the central demand of the Sunrise Movement’s 2018 Capitol Hill sit-ins. With support from progressive House members, the calls helped lay the groundwork for historic green investments under Joe Biden, said O’Hanlon.
“Protest is essential,” she said. “What we’ve learned from the last Trump administration is that when we stand up and disrupt business as usual, we can win big things.”
But Biden also expanded planet-heating fossil fuels, noted Jamie Margolin, the former executive director of youth-led group Zero Hour. And the environmental movement also could not prevent the re-election of climate denier Donald Trump.
That fact has made it difficult not to succumb to cynicism and exhaustion, Margolin said.
“The novelty of mass mobilization has kind of worn off,” she added. “Climate strikes were really powerful when that was a new and exciting tactic, but when it becomes routine, it can start to feel like pageantry.”
Americans’ appetite for mass rallies seems to have dissipated since Covid-19 lockdowns, said Michael Greenberg, founder of protest group Climate Defiance. The biggest US climate action since then, in 2023, drew 75,000.
“The movement hasn’t recovered,” he said.
But groups have taken up new schemes. Since 2023, Greenberg’s group has become known for its controversial actions in which small groups disrupt powerful people’s speeches. And other “more boring” strategies will be crucial to reject Trump’s anti-environment crusade, said Charlie Cray, senior research specialist at the environmental non-profit Greenpeace, such as filing legal challenges to environmental rollbacks and working to advance local policies and climate lawsuits.
Resistance won’t be easy. Climate activists are facing increased legal retaliation for direct action, and state crackdowns on peaceful protests against fossil fuels have proliferated, as has civil litigation meant to chill dissent.
Greenpeace is currently facing one such lawsuit brought by a fossil fuel company over 2016 and 2017 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. If successful, the suit could bankrupt the organization, said Cray. Though Trump’s White House won’t directly impact the case, “there’s sort of atmospheric licensing that the Trump administration provides for industry attacks,” he said.
Amid the challenges, said O’Hanlon, social movements need to “get creative”.
“We can find new tactics they can’t shut down,” she said.
– Dharna Noor
Exhaustion and energy in the racial justice movement
As Trump’s second administration begins, racial justice organizers who spoke with the Guardian said that their fight would not stop – the stakes are only increasing.
Trump has promised to enact mass deportations; to further militarize the police; to weaken environmental protections and to curtail diversity efforts. As president the first time around, he pushed forward the Keystone XL pipeline against Indigenous opposition and saw mass protests against police violence and racism.
But after years of organizing and protesting that, for some, began well before Trump’s first term, people are exhausted, Chanelle Helm, with Black Lives Matter Louisville, said. Helm said that it’s inaccurate to point to 2020 or even to 2016 as an inflection point for racial justice protests in the US. To her, the turning point was really in 2014, during the Ferguson uprisings.
Over a decade since then, and nine years after Trump’s first inauguration, the US has seen several instances of mass mobilization – Helm namechecked the recent protests in solidarity with Palestine and the protests following the police murder of George Floyd. But the systems that those groups protested are still in place, she said, and the president against whom they protested is returning to office.
While the organizers to whom the Guardian spoke are from different parts of the country and different groups, they all expressed the need to build movements that are sustainable.
NeeNee Taylor, executive director of Harriet’s Dream, one of the organizers of the People’s March, said that that means now is not the time to give up, even though “rest is revolutionary”.
“My ancestors didn’t quit,” she said. “When a torch is passed on, you have to carry on that torch to build for our future. … We rest, [but we] make change.”
Nick Tilsen, executive director of the NDN Collective, said it’s important to “be in this for the long haul”.
“Sometimes people don’t realize that authoritarianism is here until there’s an army tank rolling down Main Street,” he said.
Tilsen, a supporter of the Land Back movement and of reparations for Black Americans, said that continuing to build a multiracial coalition in which organizers focus on structural changes, not performative activism, will be key.
“The next four years is a fight for the future of this nation. People all across this country are about to be treated how [Native] people have been treated since the founding of this country. There’s some lessons to be learned in that, but one of the biggest ones is you have to resist. You have to. You cannot put your head down and you cannot be quiet.”
– Adria R Walker
