The Resistance goes quiet

• That could change as Trump moves to implement his agenda. But experts and activists expect the renewed resistance to come in different forms.

Flashback: Trump won in 2016 despite trailing in the polls, and within weeks of the infamous Access Hollywood tape and multiple sexual assault allegations.

This time Democratic voters, particularly women, were just as disappointed but less shocked, says Lisa Mueller, a political science professor at Macalester College.

• "So they didn't have the same acute trigger to rush to the barricades that they did the first time," says Mueller, who studies why social movements succeed or fail. "It's very likely that there is some disillusionment with activism."
• Mitchell Brown, professor of political science at Auburn University, says one big factor is what cognitive psychologists call habituation.
• "When you first see something unexpected, it's really jarring and you react strongly," she says. "But the more you see and normalize something that was unexpected ... the more habituated you become to it."

State of play: "It doesn't hurt the case to reflect first and resist second," says Mark Brilliant, a history professor at UC Berkeley, adding that prominent Democratic lawmakers "are urging their party-mates to look inward, which is always a good place to turn after defeat."

Zoom in: Some activist groups are working with a new resistance playbook and pivoting their strategies.

• Tamika Middleton, managing director at Women's March, told Axios the organization is trying to find new ways to mobilize people, such as holding local-level training sessions on combating misinformation and sharing strategies for immigrants to protect themselves.
• The group is also trying to build out a coalition with other activist groups working on issues from abortion to immigrant rights.
• "We have been through a Trump presidency before, so we have some sense of what it is that we anticipate, and also some sense of what we need," Middleton says. "We know that we need a bigger, more robust movement, which means that we have to be bringing in as many people as possible."

Between the lines: An event scheduled for January — dubbed "The People's March" — will inevitably be compared to the massive Women's March eight years earlier, which garnered hundreds of thousands of participants and spurred nationwide sister marches.

• Some activists are wary that turnout will be much smaller.

What to watch: A part of the shifting playbook could be a more focused approach, targeting specific Trump policies versus Trumpism as a whole.

• Protests are unlikely to unseat Trump, but they could build momentum around "a specific policy outcome," Mueller says.

The bottom line: "The exhaustion is real" among those who organized against Trump during his first term, only to see him elected again, Middleton says.

• "Part of what is beautiful about what mobilization offers inside of these moments, is that they activate and bring in new people who have new energy."