The Trump 2.0 resistance: Alive, but evolved
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A rally to call on Congress to protect funding for PBS and NPR, outside the NPR's D.C. headquarters on March 26. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
The resistance of 2025 may not be wearing a pink knitted cap — but it's alive in town halls, streets, campuses and car dealerships across the country.
The big picture: If the 2017 Women's March heralded a new era of protest, so too, have the days of DOGE and an empowered, zone-flooding Trump.
- The early moves of President Trump's second term have pulled a wide range of Americans into the political crosshairs, from National Parks Service workers to Social Security recipients to the transgender community.
"One of the miscalculations ... in their flood-the-zone strategy is when you flood the zone, you hit everyone," said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party.
- That's brought previously uninvolved people into resistance efforts, Mitchell said.
- Members of varied local labor organizations, parents concerned about education funding cuts, veterans and even some dissatisfied Trump voters, among others, have rallied behind shared frustrations, he said.
- "These are pretty divergent communities of people who didn't have a cause to come together, but have a cause to come together now," he said.
Zoom in: Irate constituents pushing back directly against lawmakers in town halls (even when the lawmaker isn't present) has emerged as one of the signature protests of 2025.
- House GOP leadership urged lawmakers to shift from in-person to virtual town halls amid the surge in protests at events Republicans argued had been hijacked by Democratic activists.
People are also protesting with their wallets: Boycotts and strikes against companies aligned with Trump's agenda have become a key tool of the resistance.
- For administration ally Elon Musk, that's meant slumping Tesla sales and in-person protests at showrooms around the country.
- There were demonstrations at Tesla showrooms across the country — and world — this weekend as part of the Tesla Takedown movement's "global day of action."
Zoom out: Even if the immediate outcry in the wake of Trump's 2024 victory was more muted than in 2016, traditional street protests — including the cross-country #50501 movement and rallies of federal workers in opposition to DOGE — are also still happening.
- The Crowd Counting Consortium, a Harvard Kennedy School and University of Connecticut research project that measures political crowds, tallied at least 2,085 protests in February compared to 937 in Feb. 2017. And preliminary numbers for March suggest that the count will surpass 3,000, Erica Chenoweth, the CCC's co-director, told Axios.
- "I think it would just be a mistake to think that if there isn't some kind of big, visible, feet-to-the to the pavement kind of action, that there isn't meaningful, important and impactful protests happening," Chenoweth said.
What to watch: Mitchell predicts the upcoming "Hands Off!" April 5 nationwide mobilization effort will be "the largest single day of actions against Trump, Musk and DOGE to date."
- As of this week, organizers were tracking more than 600 planned actions — rallies, events and other gatherings — across all 50 states and more than 100,000 RSVPs, Mitchell said.
Friction point: Some of the administration's actions against protesters have raised alarms among First Amendment advocates, who say their crackdown could have a silencing effect on free speech.
- In particular, officials have framed students who voiced pro-Palestinian opinions as Hamas supporters, with Trump vowing to block funds for schools that allow "illegal protests" and federal immigration authorities threatening to deport visa-holding protesters.
- Such arrests are meant to have a "demobilizing effect," Chenoweth said.
But on the other hand, Chenoweth noted, "acts of repression that are viewed as unjust, disproportional or illegitimate are often the things that do catalyze broader scale mobilization."
