LA Kauffman remembers the day hundreds of thousands of women, men and children marched in the streets of Washington. “If you’ve never been in a crowd that large, it’s hard to convey how powerful the feeling is of standing together with so many people who share your goals and that feeling of community and connection,” says the political organiser, activist and author.
The Women’s March, held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, was the biggest single-day protest in US history until the demonstrations that erupted after the police murder of George Floyd three years later. Both were among the most spectacular examples of “the resistance” to Trump’s first term as president.
Now Trump is heading back to the White House and a People’s March on Washington is scheduled for 18 January, two days before the inauguration. But there are fears that it will be a pale imitation of the historic first protest. The mood feels more muted this time. Some people speak of feeling jaded and disillusioned and turning off the news because they are simply Trumped out.
Bill Maher, the comedian and political commentator, argues that there is a “marked difference” between the reactions in 2016 and 2024. “2016 Trump won and there was 3 million people in the streets,” he said on his HBO talkshow. “Remember the pussy hats and all that? I mean, it was the biggest demonstration ever. This year: nothing. What is this, resignation?”
Jen Psaki, an MSNBC host and former White House press secretary, commented at the Washington screening of a documentary about Trump’s family separations policy at the border: “People are just exhausted of fighting against policies that they feel are immoral, policies they’re opposed to – people who voted for Kamala Harris and feel disappointed with the outcome. It feels a little bit like the same opposition or calling-out energy is not there in this moment.”
The sense of malaise around “Resistance 2.0” may in part be because, whereas Trump’s first victory felt like shocking accident of history, his second was delivered by an electorate that knows exactly what it is getting. Whereas he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, he gained more votes nationwide than Harris and claims a mandate. For many liberals, that result was a gut punch that seemed to undermine the work of three election cycles.
Teja Smith, the Los Angeles-based founder of Get Social, a social media agency that specialises in political advocacy and social awareness, said: “I got into social justice work almost a decade ago and truly have been working tirelessly to keep Trump out of office, essentially.
“The first time it was a lot of people not really being interested in the election; we had Hillary running and she won the popular vote. There was just a lot of like, ‘Ah, well, these things happen.’ This time it was just overwhelmingly people voted for him and that’s where we are. This is what you voted for: how much else can we fight it?”
After Trump was declared the winner over Harris, who would have been the first woman of Black and south Asian descent to win the presidency, many politically engaged Black women said they were so dismayed by the outcome that they were reassessing their enthusiasm for electoral politics and prioritising self-care.
Smith noted that Black women have consistently shown up and voted at a 92% rate for the Democratic candidate. “At this point, Black women are just tired,” she continued. “The act of resistance right now that we’re calling on is to rest because we can only keep so much sanity. I have a husband, I have a two-year-old, and I spent my entire year campaigning, going all around America to fight this good fight, to fight for our rights, and misinformation won.”
But Smith does not doubt that Black women will keep fighting. “Next year we’re going to understand what this presidency is going to mean and what electing him is actually going to do. That’s going to be the time where we’re not going to have a choice but to step up. Do we want to? Yes. But are we tired of having be the ones to be called on? Absolutely.”
The sentiment was echoed by LaTosha Brown, cofounder of the voting rights organisation Black Voters Matter. She said: “We going to always fight to protect our communities but I can tell you, for me personally, I’m going to be much more strategic with how I use my time and what fights I take on. I’m going to be much more intentional about protecting myself and my family, which I feel like I have neglected over the last decade, and I’m going to be much more discerning.”
Indeed, for all the gloom, it is far too conclude that the second resistance will turn into resignation. There are also signs of resilience and adaptation. Once Trump takes office, and launches policies such as mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, the backlash could be spontaneous and swift.
Kauffman, the political organiser and writer who attended the first Women’s March, said: “I don’t know what will be the spark that will bring people out in the streets but I don’t think Americans are so easily cowed. The atmosphere of fear that was carefully cultivated throughout the election campaign works in the short term but people are not going to stay in that kind of fear in the long term.
“People are going to respond when they see injustice as they have at other crucial points, as they did not only the week of Trump’s first election but with the announcement of the Muslim ban. At airports all over the country people rushed to speak up for targeted immigrants. We may see that kind of rapid response again.”
There is a growing emphasis on “Trump-proofing” blue states, with calls for Democratic governors and legislatures to take proactive measures to protect progressive policies. There are also signs that activists are shifting strategies, moving away from mass protests and focusing on more targeted, localised efforts such as state-level initiatives and issue-specific campaigns.
Speaking from the Hudson valley of New York, Kauffman added: “What I’m seeing is that people are looking to find a way to meet those needs for community connection in quieter, more intimate ways. There’s a lot of gatherings that are happening in people’s homes and community centres and neighbourhoods. It’s not a mass coming together that gave us a feeling of enormous collective togetherness. It’s happening in smaller, tighter, face-to-face communities.”
For Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, there is a sense of deja vu. The former congressional staffers co-founded the progressive group Indivisible in response to Trump’s first win in 2016. Over the weekend after Thanksgiving that year at Levin’s home in Austin, Texas, they started writing the Indivisible Guide to help people organise locally to fight back against the Trump agenda.
The guide captured the public imagination and inspired the creation of thousands of Indivisible groups that played a crucial part in saving former president Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law. The Indivisible movement also helped Democrats regain the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections.
Since the 2024 election, Greenberg and Levin have released a new guide, Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, focusing on local action and targeted campaigns, and note that about a hundred new Indivisible groups have since formed in red, blue and purple states.
Levin said: “I’m encouraged that the general response I’m getting from our folks on the ground is that they’re determined. That was the word that came up in the poll of Georgia Indivisibles when I joined them the weekend after the election. They’re going through a lot of different parts of the stages of grief but they do not show signs of just totally checking out.”
A further question mark concerns the media. Some outlets are reaffirming a commitment to accountability journalism but grappling with fatigue, audience disengagement and loss of trust while trying to avoid amplifying every Trump outburst. Ominously, the Washington Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate ahead of election day.
The first resistance was not entirely liberal and Democratic. It was a coalition that also included “Never Trump” Republicans. Among the most pugnacious was the Lincoln Project, a political action committee founded in December 2019 by moderate conservative operatives to eviscerate Trump and noted for its eye-catching, hard-hitting adverts.
One of its cofounders, Rick Wilson, is determined to keep at it. He said: “People say, we’re done, we’re out, we can’t keep fighting. I’m sorry, I’m just not wired that way as a person or as an activist and neither is our organisation. We’re still in this fight.
“We lost an election as part of a big coalition. We were on the wrong side of the electoral fight but we’re not on the wrong side of history so we’re going to keep punching and trying to make sure that both the people and the policies he wants to impose on America aren’t successful.”
For all the monument scale of the Women’s March, it did not prevent women losing a fundamental right the following year when the supreme court ended the constitutional right to abortion. Wilson, who worked as a consultant and political ad maker for numerous candidates and state parties, commented: “As excited people were by the whole pussy hat thing, it didn’t work, so if people are taking a beat in the broad movement to decide what messaging they need to do and what’s the smart way to do it, that’s a good outcome.
“That’s not a sign of weakness. That’s a sign of strategic caution and posture, taking a moment to figure out what’s going to work. Because, again, pink pussy hats didn’t close the deal. They didn’t change the outcomes that we needed to have.”
He added: “I’m results-oriented and win-oriented and even though some people are depressed and down and beat up right now, you got to at some point lick your wounds and get back up, get back in the fight. Because die on your feet or die on your knees, one of the two, and I prefer to go standing if I’m going to have to go.”
