The Real Power of This Weekend’s Anti-Trump Protests

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On Monday, Americans awoke to plunging markets, gutted retirement accounts, and the prospect that their clothes, electronics, and groceries are about to get a whole lot more expensive. Immigrants in the U.S., including legal ones, are living in fear after aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups, heinous administrative sloppiness, students being nabbed off the streets, and the consigning of innocent people to Salvadoran prison. In Texas, a second unvaccinated child has died of measles, a preventable disease once thought to be eradicated from the U.S. Donald Trump is musing about an unconstitutional and illegal third term.

It is not a sunny morning in America. But something else happened over the weekend that is a little ring of light peeking around the dark clouds emanating from the White House: Americans took to the streets by the tens of thousands and said enough.

More than 1,200 demonstrations were held nationwide, to say, “Hands Off!”: Hands off the government, hands off our rights, hands off our freedoms. The protests were against shadow president Elon Musk as much as they were actual President Donald Trump. And while the protests didn’t get as much coverage as they deserved, and while they are not going to change the nation overnight, they were nevertheless phenomenally successful. We should take heart. And even if nothing changes right away—and nothing will change right away—we must get out and do it again and again. Because the point is not an immediate result from the White House on down. It’s to galvanize from the ground up—to put pressure on the powerful, and to forge a pathway for the public to collectively say “no” to this devastating regime.

The protests were not perfect. Anecdotally and observationally, they were very white—not exactly representative of the Democratic coalition. They were disproportionately female (which is increasingly representative of Democrats, if not of American power structures). Many of the participants seemed to be part of the exact demographic that made up the #Resistance of the first Trump term: middle-aged wine moms, that much-maligned demographic of college-educated suburban-dwelling denizens of PTAs and community carpools.

That means these protesters won’t get as much coverage as keffiyeh-wearing college kids. But these are women with long track records of getting things done—and they got things done the first time around, too. For all the dismissals of the #Resistance, the protests against Trump’s first-term overreach really did have an effect, both constraining the administration and forcing Democrats and moderate Republicans to act.

The Resistance wine moms organize their families, friends, and communities. They show up. And they often show up for other people. The fact that the protests were so white is, clearly, a bad thing for Democratic organizing: We need everyone under our big tent to turn out. At the same time, though, this administration is targeting immigrants, and not just undocumented ones. It is targeting people of color, smearing them as unqualified DEI hires. Immigration authorities have made mistakes and erroneously arrested and deported people.

Virtually none of the people being snatched off the streets or handcuffed in immigration raids are middle-aged white women. That doesn’t mean middle-aged white women are safe: The rights of women to determine our own reproductive lives have been decimated in conservative states and are at risk in liberal ones; our children live under threat; and under an authoritarian regime, no one’s safety is guaranteed. But in this moment, college-educated white citizens are among the most secure people in the nation. That so many of them (and especially the female among them) are getting out to protest a government whose abuses are largely targeting others speaks well of them, not ill. It may not be the best thing for the movement—it seems reasonable to guess that protest movements will be more effective if the protesters that make them up actually represent the coalition they’re protesting on behalf of. But given the circumstances, the stakes, and the unequal distribution of risk, it may be the best we can do at this particular moment.

The point of mass protest is not to stage a perfectly organized, fully realized one-time event. The point is to boost collective morale, to allow for a mass expression of rage, and to galvanize the public—to propel people out of their postelection exhaustion and malaise and remind them that we can and must fight back.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s win, far too many people wrote obituaries for the Resistance. And that was understandable: There was a sense of widespread defeat. But what a thing, to see so many thousands of people find their vitality and their courage. What a thing, to see this happen on the grassroots level, from regular people in cities and towns across America, at a moment when so many of our most venerated institutions and most powerful citizens—from finance leaders to tech titans to politicians—have capitulated.

Truly pause to consider that: Among the people in America with the most power and money and means and clout, precious few have stood up to Trump in his second term; many more of our supposed best and brightest, and certainly our best-resourced, have gotten on their knees and groveled. The people who are taking to the streets are just ordinary Americans who are righteously enraged over extraordinary circumstances: an unelected billionaire plundering the government and an elected megalomaniac dismantling America’s democratic traditions while he tanks the global economy.

When Trump was elected the first time around, much was written about the ways in which he expanded a social permission structure to be crasser, more misogynist, more racist, and less respectful of long-held principles. Social permission structures are always being refashioned, and with them, social obligations. The power of these protests is that they create a wider-open permission structure for those who object to Trump but are perhaps afraid or hesitant—who have so far been keeping their heads down out of apprehension, or going along despite a growing sense of unease—to voice their discontent and to feel protected by the greater whole. And they create a sense of social obligation for the more powerful. If my septuagenarian retired-nurse mother can show up to a protest, then certainly the president of Columbia University can stand up for what’s right, too.

This time around, the Trump administration came in hot with a “flood the zone with shit” strategy that initially worked. The public was stunned. Democratic politicians flailed. Media outlets were overwhelmed. Powerful men capitulated (and others had been cheering all along). With apologies for continuing Steve Bannon’s disgusting metaphor, if you’ve ever actually been flooded with shit—clogged toilet, over-full septic tank, baby who somehow managed to expel many times its own weight into a failing diaper—you know that while you might initially freeze in horror and disgust, you pretty quickly figure out that nothing is going to improve if you just stand there watching the shit rise up past your ankles. You can’t just burn you house down and walk away, so you grab a plunger. You call a plumber. You wipe down and hose off with whatever you can grab. You act decisively and quickly, because being flooded with shit is a pretty terrible feeling.

The protests will not change this administration overnight. But that’s not the point. Pressure is the point. Changing the social climate is the point. Creating a sense of social obligation to resist tyranny is the point—in a functional democracy, that’s a basic obligation. Liberals are about as well-positioned here as we can be. This is not a case of an authoritarian leader grabbing power and then maintaining it because, well, at least the trains run on time. This is an authoritarian leader who has managed to make life worse for Americans by nearly every measure: losing them their money, taking away many of the basic services they rely on, making many of the basics they buy more expensive. Trump’s agenda is a radically unpopular one, rivaled only by its implementation. At their best, protests give voice to those fighting the powerful and nefarious—and in this case, the anti-Trump protests gave voice to a majority that had previously been cowed into stunned silence.

Whatever dam of despair that kept so many Americans quiet or despondent has now broken. People flooded the streets with a popular and reasonable demand: Stop destroying the country. Trump is unlikely to listen. But the many powerful people who have folded or stayed silent or supported him? They might. Trump stands in the Oval Office only because so many are propping him up. This weekend’s protests were the first big strikes at that scaffolding.