When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, an angry opposition immediately rose to meet him. News outlets, including Slate, saw spikes in subscription numbers and published roundups of practical actions people could take to mitigate the harms of his presidency. Planned Parenthood saw 40 times more donations in the wake of Trump’s win than in a typical week. Perhaps most memorably, the day after the election, a grandmother in Hawai’i started inviting her friends to join her for a demonstration after Trump’s inauguration—an event that would become the Women’s March, which drew millions into the streets for the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.
Over the next couple of months, the so-called resistance swelled. Groups like Indivisible and Run for Something sprang up to offer direction to the newly politically enraged. Existing organizations, like Greenpeace and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, enjoyed surges in volunteer interest. EMILYs List saw sign-ups for candidate trainings increase 22-fold as tens of thousands of women considered running for office.
The fledgling resistance movement in 2016 was decentralized and expansive, without a single unifying principle save for stopping Trump’s agenda. And with a few years of hindsight, it has become clear that it wasn’t really a movement at all. It was a pervasive shift in left-leaning America’s orientation toward politics—“protest is the new brunch”—and a mass awakening of people who’d suddenly come to the realization that they couldn’t just sit by and allow the arc of the moral universe to take care of itself.
But this time around, the post-Trump-election vibe has a different quality. In place of frenzied calls to action on the Facebook group Pantsuit Nation, there are meme accounts posting ironic, detached jokes about the end of democracy. Rather than slapdash plans for protests, there are more calls for self-care and self-preparation, like stocking up on Plan B and gender-affirming hormones. I contacted several organizations that saw bumps in donations after Trump’s 2016 win to ask how the 2024 response compares. A few didn’t answer my inquiry, and the ones who did wouldn’t tell me how their fundraising was going.
There are a lot of reasons for the change in reaction for Trump’s second victory. First of all, his election was not a surprise in the same way it was eight years ago. And the singular horror of imagining someone like Trump in the White House, or controlling the military, has dulled a bit. (Credit to him—he has successfully expanded the Overton window of what we believe a president can be.) In 2016, there was a sense that the Trump era might be a temporary, four-year nightmare. After all, he’d lost the popular vote; most of America didn’t want this.
This time, it’s tough to argue that America doesn’t want this. And we know exactly what we’re getting into. We’ve lived through an entire Trump term, an insurrection, and a yearslong denial of the past election’s results. His unfettered dominance in the Republican Party has made clear that he is a lasting force who has permanently reshaped the GOP. He was exactly himself all campaign long, and he is poised to win the popular vote.
In 2016, the mandate for an opposition movement was simple: stopping the agenda of an ill-prepared, inexperienced president. In 2024, it is much broader: beating back a well-orchestrated conservative plan to usher us into a punitive authoritarianism, all under the control of a Supreme Court and federal judiciary packed with right-wing Trump loyalists. It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing a spate of protests and donations can stop.
So, no, there will be no re-creating the energy of the moment when America first realized that it was capable of electing a President Trump. It would be preposterous to expect otherwise. But it’s worth figuring out what a public effort against Trump’s agenda in 2025 could look like. And despite the bleak feeling of the present moment, there is reason to believe that a resistance impulse will emerge, even if it looks different than it did before.
It’s easy to forget just how quickly the postelection outrage transformed into something tangible in 2016. By just two weeks after Trump’s first win, the Women’s March had already coalesced out of several disparate Facebook events—and been criticized for its haphazard planning and whiteness. In those first two weeks, women in nearly every state created Facebook pages for coordinating charter buses and ride-shares to Washington, D.C. The city’s police department was already fielding calls from women asking if the march was truly happening, and local hotels were reporting a surge in march-related bookings. Women were mad, and they were ready to commit to action.
This is normal. Hahrie Han, a Johns Hopkins political science professor who has done research on why certain activist campaigns work, says that social media platforms have made it possible for 21st-century social movements to arise through virality, as with some Arab Spring protests and the Facebook group that spawned the Women’s March. “Moments of outrage can spark widespread optimism in response,” Han said.
Trump’s second election might not inspire as much outrage, per se, as his first, given that it came as much less of a shock. But even if it does, a massive uprising doesn’t necessarily translate to massive impact. Social movements before the digital age could take months or years to amass the kind of network they’d need to turn hundreds of thousands of people out for protests—but that groundwork often meant that the resulting network would last beyond any single march. In 2017, the Women’s Marches came first. “It’s almost like the digital tools are a double-edged sword, in the sense that they enable a much more widespread beginning, but they don’t create the incentives for the same kind of infrastructure-building that you need to make it last over time,” Han said.
There is some activist infrastructure that emerged specifically in response to Trump’s 2016 election and still exists today. Inspired by the tea party’s moderate successes during Barack Obama’s 2009 Democratic trifecta, Ezra Levin and his spouse, Leah Greenberg, both ex–congressional staffers, released a guide to blocking Trump’s agenda in mid-December 2016. Small groups of angry Americans began gathering in their hometowns to implement those suggestions, such as attending town halls and showing up at Congressmembers’ district offices. That effort grew into Indivisible, a grassroots network that now encompasses thousands of local activist chapters in every congressional district in the country.
Indivisible chapters and other new resistance groups were involved in the hallmark successes of the resistance, including the historic blue wave of the 2018 midterms and the protests that helped stop Trump’s Republican trifecta from repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2017. These groups didn’t just create fleeting activists—they helped launch lasting involvement at every level. By 2020, the chair of the Maine Democratic Party was a woman who’d never done anything political but vote until she attended a local Women’s March. When Rep. Elissa Slotkin, who Michigan elected to the Senate this month, began thinking about entering politics in 2017, she started by going to a local Indivisible meeting.
Levin said that Indivisible groups are still active, and, in recent days, have been gathering to process Trump’s second win, including on an 11,000-person call the day after the election. But they don’t feel it’s necessary to launch any major actions yet, while Joe Biden is still president and the new Congress hasn’t yet been sworn in. “The recommendation we’re making is folks should show up in community together right now, grieve together, and make clear to one another that we’re not alone,” Levin said. “Because that’s how fascists ultimately win, is by making you think that you’re alone and you have no power.”
Levin is encouraged by the “enormous wave of new energy” that arose when Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee this summer. Indivisible co-hosted the Zoom call of white women for Harris that became the largest Zoom in history, with more than 164,000 participants. About 95 percent of those people had never made contact with Indivisible before; 700 new local action groups formed to support the Harris campaign. “Part of our goal in the coming days and weeks is to make clear that those folks still have a role to play,” Levin said.
Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris, who has studied political participation across democracies and authoritarian regimes, also thinks it will take more time for major activist campaigns to emerge. She predicts that, this time, a movement against Trump likely won’t materialize against his presidency in abstract, but against specific things he does. “The resistance is going to be there, but it won’t be there immediately,” she said. “I think it’ll only react once we start getting into January, February, and we get the initial declarations and executive orders.”
Any moves toward mass deportations, one of Trump’s top priorities, will certainly spark widespread protest, in addition to resistance from blue states and cities that have already begun laying the groundwork to oppose such attempts. Other Trump plans, like tariffs, may cause such extreme consequences for consumers and businesses that public pushback spreads beyond progressive activists and into less-political communities.
But whatever shape this round of anti-Trump activism takes, it will look very different than it did in 2016. After that election, the resistance impulse was inescapable. Everywhere you looked, there was some previously apolitical person discovering that their country was not what they thought it was, or a minor celebrity rebranding themselves as a resistance figure. Support for Trump became a scarlet letter for a family member or potential friend in a way that mere Republican affiliation never was before. People who had never lifted a political finger in their lives—people who had barely even voted—were joining the front lines. In a January 2017 Washington Post poll, 40 percent of Democratic women and 43 percent of Democrats under 50 said they planned to be more politically active that year. During the years that followed, I met dozens of Americans who had made activism their new hobby: protests every weekend, regular visits to their congressman’s local office, senators on speed dial.
Some of this has now become the texture of everyday life in America. The social media pages of many normies, once full of family photos and restaurant pics, are now laden with anti-Trump memes and musings on special counsel Jack Smith. Taking part in activism is no longer a thing only “activists” do; the protests of the early Trump years primed left-leaning Americans to join the racial justice demonstrations of 2020, for instance. If 2016 was a wake-up call for those who didn’t realize how much work it would take to keep the country from falling into the hands of to a regressive, fascism-curious regime, there are far fewer people to awaken today.
So some of the things that felt important to activists in 2016—like staging the largest protest in U.S. history as an outlet for anger, an easy first step into political action, and a way to reassure one another that they were not alone—may no longer hold the same promise and urgency in 2024. The Women’s March planned for Jan. 18, 2025, will almost surely see a smaller turnout than the first. But according to Han, research has shown that the most reliable predictor of an activist campaign successfully changing federal policy is not the size of a movement or how much money it raises. “It’s much more the extent to which they’re able to build and sustain relationships with high-level decisionmakers,” Han said. A giant march might get activists a seat at the table, but they can’t always keep it. The Women’s March itself isn’t what earned the resistance its wins last time. It was the people who came out of it ready to keep the pressure on. Those people are still out there, and they may not need to carry a sign around the National Mall to feel equipped to step back in.
There also continue to be ripe opportunities for action at the state and local level, where issues can be less partisan and polarizing. And there has already been a rush of people eager to take the reins of power for themselves. Amanda Litman is a co-founder of Run for Something, which launched on Trump’s 2016 Inauguration Day to recruit young, progressive down-ballot candidates and provide coaching, mentorship, and funding. It helped support the wave of new people who decided to run for office after Trump’s first win. In the days after this year’s election, Litman worried that the response would be muted, because Trump no longer seems like an aberration—he’s now the mainstream Republican Party.
Instead, since Election Day this month, Run for Something has seen more than 8,000 new people express interest in seeking office. By comparison, 15,000 such people got in touch with the organization in all of 2017. “I am so pleasantly surprised to be wrong—that there is a real appetite here, and a real moment for people to reengage locally,” Litman said.
The issue Litman faces now isn’t a lack of furious enthusiasm among progressives, but a lack of interest from left-leaning funders, who say they’re tapped out after this campaign cycle. About a week after Election Day, Litman announced plans to downsize the organization’s staff in response.
That funding lull is a warning sign for any resistance movement to come. Beyond the money it takes to wage legal battles and political campaigns, vulnerable populations targeted by the Trump administration will need material support. Immigrants at risk of deportation will be less likely to seek or receive government services, and will rely more heavily on nonprofits instead. When Trump’s Food and Drug Administration revokes approval of abortion medication, pregnant people in red states who may have otherwise gotten pills through the mail will need money to travel across state lines for procedures. If Republicans ban abortion nationwide, the costs of getting women out of the country will be monumental.
In 2016, the money was pouring in. That year, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, contributions to liberal nonprofits increased 155 percent over the year before—far more than when George W. Bush won in 2004, when donations increased by 40.5 percent. New websites sprang up to help people connect with causes that would be directly threatened by Trump’s presidency. Ragedonate.com listed inflammatory quotes from Trump, each paired with a donation button that led to a related nonprofit. (A line about immigrants as “killers and rapists,” for example, led to Border Angels.)
Ragedonate stopped tweeting in January 2017. Another site, donatebigly.com, now belongs to a scammy-looking entity called Wazamba Casino. But it’s worth remembering that some of the “Trump bump” money didn’t start flowing until after the 2017 inauguration. The American Civil Liberties Union didn’t get its biggest boost until the days after Trump’s Muslim ban took effect in January 2017, during which it took in a staggering $24 million in online donations, mostly from first-time donors—nearly seven times the amount it raised online in all of 2015. It may take the advent of some truly despicable Trump policy to get the funds flowing this time.
In funding as in activism, today’s response could be dampened by feelings of exhaustion or powerlessness. As Michael Schaffer wrote in Politico several months ago, people respond to threats with a fight-or-flight instinct. The terrors of Trump’s first term provoked Americans to fight. “But a second Trump win, which for many folks will amount to evidence that all that fighting wasn’t enough, could just as easily be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy,” Schaffer wrote. “In other words, flight.”
It is the difficult job of political organizers, themselves drained and despondent after a hard 2024 election cycle, to fight off that fatalism within their ranks. That effort is further confounded by the Supreme Court, which seems eager to green-light anything Trump might want to do and has given him broad immunity to use the powers of his office for violent or even treasonous ends.
In a new Indivisible guide for activists preparing for “Trump 2.0,” Levin and Greenberg write that the next Trump era looks dark, but not hopeless. “Trump wants to govern as a dictator, but he has the slimmest possible congressional majority and a grossly unpopular agenda,” the guide reads. It continues, “There’s a lot we don’t know about what needs to be done. We’ll need to learn and experiment as we go.”
But for hundreds of thousands of Americans who got resistance-brained the last time around, the learning curve in 2025 will be a lot less steep. Progressive organizations are light-years further along in their plans for a Trump administration than they were in 2016, and people who were active during Trump 1.0 have years of activist muscle memory to draw upon. They just need to be convinced to exercise it.
