Dems Figure Out #Resistance Under Trump 2.0

Nashville, Tennessee
YESTERDAY’S NATIONWIDE “NO KINGS” protest against Donald Trump was, by all accounts, a smashing success. Millions of people showed up at hundreds of events in red and blue state houses and town centers across the country all in the spirit of rallying against the Trump administration.

The crowds dwarfed those that came to Washington D.C. to participate in Trump’s combination birthday/armed forces parade. And while that certainly provided Trump’s opponents with a fair share of schadenfreude, it also raised the question: Why hasn’t this type of resistance risen up sooner?

After all, Trump’s first term saw opponents sprinting to the nation’s airports within weeks of his inauguration to protest his ban on travel from Muslin-majority nations. When Trump did a more expansive version of that same policy several weeks ago, the response was relatively mild and diffuse. Though there have been glimpses of real grassroots energy—from the Tesla Takedown movement to the “Hands Off!” rallies—these moments of light and heat showed how dim and cold the once-ubiquitous #Resistance movement had become during Trump’s second term.

That is how it was, at least, until Saturday. The “No Kings” protests offered the first real sign that the grassroots resistance to Trump hasn’t died—but it does look different from how it did, and it may, perhaps, be taking a more strategic form.

“The first time around there were a lot of [protests], like March For Science, Families Belong Together,” said Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run For Something, which recruits and trains first-time Democratic candidates. “This time around, people are being more targeted and asking themselves: ‘What will actually move the needle?’”

There are a variety of reasons anti-Trump protest culture looks dramatically different from eight years ago. One reason is that Trump made more inroads politically and culturally during his 2024 run for office, and he has since used his newfound power to browbeat major institutions into acquiescence.

But activists on the left also acknowledge that their side has changed, too. Sustaining outrage during a presidency designed to produce continuous outrages is an exacting proposition. The Democratic base is not immune to becoming desensitized to Trump’s actions.

Presented with the challenges that come with Trump’s flood-the-zone strategy, organizers have tried to be more selective in the way they protest.

“It’s different, not less,” Deirdre Schifeling, the ACLU’s chief political and advocacy officer, said of the protests under the second Trump administration. “This time around, people are not shocked. They have lived through four years of this . . . and so, I think protest is taking a different form.”

In addition to fighting exhaustion and choosing their moments, organizers during the second Trump term have tried to appeal to a broader coalition. That’s meant trying to get more moderates, independents, and working-class voters to show up, especially in red parts of the country—not just the college-educated MSNBC-addicts who were largely the face of the 2017 protests. It’s required organizers to shed some of the defining features of the original #Resistance, like the pink pussyhats.

“There’s a little bit more of an all-hands-on-deck approach and a clear understanding that you ain’t winning this with a bunch of base Democrats this time,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne.

“That requires work on the part of the people driving the opposition, because you have to check your desire for purity at the door. You have to check your desire to have everyone conform,” Payne continued. “You don’t want it to be so homogenized that it makes it feel like it’s something easy to write off and disregard.”

But even if “No Kings” felt like the first moment of mass demonstration against Trump 2.0, the data show that protest culture has become quite active over the past five months, perhaps even more so than during Trump’s first term. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a Harvard Kennedy School and University of Connecticut research project that measures political crowds, there have been over 15,000 political protests since Trump’s second inauguration compared to just over 5,000 at this same point in his first term. (Data journalist G. Elliott Morris has a helpful graph of those numbers.)

Organizers estimated that, across the country, three million people participated in the April “Hands Off” rallies, and five million turned out for the “No Kings” demonstrations—which would make Saturday one of the largest single-day demonstrations in U.S. history. (Around four million people were estimated to have joined the Women’s March in 2017.)

“We’re here to defend our Constitution, our way of life, to show the world that Trump is not in favor with a whole lot of people,” said Charles Bowers, a former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia during the George H.W. Bush administration, as he attended the Nashville “No Kings” protest. Bowers, who wore a “Gulf of Mexico” T-shirt and waved an American flag among a sea of protestors chanting anti-authoritarian slogans within earshot of the Tennessee State Capitol, said he showed up out of a belief that “our country is under greater threat than it’s ever been by its own people.”

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ONE REASON THAT IT MAY FEEL as though the anti-Trump protest movements have been late in arriving this go-round is that the opposition party itself has had trouble deciding how best to harness them. Democrats spent the early weeks of Trump’s second term in a state of soul-searching, and on some issues they have sought accommodation, fretful that they had badly misjudged the social and economic currents that resulted in Kamala Harris’s loss.

That has started to change, in part because of public and private pressure from activists for elected members and leadership to act against Trump with more urgency.

In conversations with leaders on Capitol Hill, organizers have stressed that while grassroots movements play an important role, lawmakers needed to do more to help break through in the Trump-dominated media environment. One organizer who helped lead the “No Kings” rallies told The Bulwark that they recently met with Senate staffers to stress that the Democrats’ usual press conferences and floor speeches chiding Trump for his latest actions were not going to cut it in today’s internet culture.

“We are not in a business-as-usual moment, and I think there can be a tendency in Congress to be very slow to understand the moment that we’re in,” said Schifeling. “We’re in an emergency, and we need to treat it like an emergency.”