Protesters turned out in huge numbers on Saturday, possibly signaling a revivified ‘resistance’ to Trump.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans turned out on Saturday to participate in more than 1,200 protests organized by over 150 activist groups to protest the Trump administration. It was the first moment of the second Trump administration in which the Republican Party’s opposition achieved something approximating the scope and potency it enjoyed during the first Trump administration. Growing apprehension over the president’s global trade war might have augmented the protesters’ numbers. Indeed, as the New York Times put it, the demonstrations were an exercise in outreach to the “newly alarmed.”
The “newly alarmed” who persuaded themselves to give the revivified “resistance” a shot might have been just as unnerved by the alternative to Trumpian chaos. In Washington, D.C., demonstrators unfurled a massive Palestinian flag and were treated to hectoring lectures about the evils of the Israeli government, which probably seemed quite beside the point to those whose apprehension over their 401(k) piqued their curiosity. The guillotine — now a universal symbol of the politically unhinged, irrespective of partisan affiliation — made an appearance. Fans of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s alleged murderer and his lunatic cause took the opportunity to demonstrate where their political sympathies lie.
Protests attract all sorts, some of whom are clearly out of sorts. In the mainstream press, though, the protests were treated as an anodyne expression of Trump critics’ apprehension, and that’s not an unfair overall characterization. The demonstrations were eccentric but generally unremarkable. And even according to their own participants, attendance was primarily composed of the usual suspects.
“I’m a generic white guy, so they aren’t coming for me,” one middle-aged Chicagoan told Times reporters. “There’s a lot of my friends who are Jewish, trans, in the military or sick, and they’re not doing OK. It’s OK for me to stand out here, so I should for the ones who are afraid.” That’s a happy gloss to lacquer over the observation that the diversity you champion was not in evidence at your diversity rally.
In all, it was a nostalgic recreation of the aesthetics and passions that typified the earliest iterations of the anti-Trump street action that erupted in early 2017. Indeed, a general lack of creativity has characterized the Democratic Party’s approach to navigating the second Trump era from its outset. Even the monumental disruptions to the global economy that Trump is busily engineering haven’t produced much rhetorical innovation. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote amid the worldwide market meltdown that is erasing investment gains across the board, “And the rich get richer.” In fact, everyone is getting poorer, but Schumer is neither nimble nor imaginative enough to conceive of a talking point that shifts away from the rhetoric of class warfare — even as Trump’s defenders appeal to the same rhetoric in defense of the president’s actions.
There are two ways to look at this. The first, which might comfort discombobulated Republicans, is that the opposition is still on the backfoot. Democrats and their allies remain committed to the old ways of doing things because they have given up on reinventing themselves to meet the challenges that they created for themselves in the Biden years. Maybe that will dampen their appeal to the “newly alarmed.”
The second approach is less reassuring. Perhaps Democrats and their progressive proxies in the streets don’t have to be innovative campaigners to regain power. Maybe voters will sour on Republican governance to such an extent that they will restore Democrats to authority without a course correction. Maybe the protesters and their allies will get another shot at power in their present, unreconstructed form not because they’ve earned it but because Republicans blew theirs.