Where Is The Resistance 2.0?

The true believers came out to the People’s March in D.C., but a mass movement against Trump 2.0 failed to materialize.

I remember The Resistance. You can say that it was corny, that it was ineffective, that it was performative or overmatched or misguided. But you can’t say it wasn’t real. It happened. In 2017, Trump’s first inauguration was a miserable, lightly attended affair. And then, the very next day, all of downtown DC was choked by a heaving mass of hundreds of thousands of incensed people at the Women’s March — a march in name only, because the sheer size of it made it impossible for the thing to do more than shuffle along gently in a sea of feminist indignation. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, there were several months when the entire country vibrated with the footsteps of angry protesters, a movement large enough to prompt politicians and corporations to scramble to appear concerned about justice, whether they were or not. While separate, those two episodes were consecutive points on a line of Resistance that had been building for years.

Now, the deformed coalition of internet-poisoned fascists and the billionaires who built the infrastructure to poison them is sweeping back into power. At the same time, The Resistance feels like a pricked balloon, alive but dissipating. It makes you wonder where the juice has gone.

At 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, the people trickled into downtown Washington, D.C. for the People’s March. Four grey-haired retirees in matching Columbia hiking shoes pulled on their sensible rain gear as they stepped off the train at Farragut North, joking about how Democrats didn’t seem to be able to control the weather. It was cold and wet in Farragut Square, one of the staging areas for the march. Mist coalesced on your eyelashes and dripped down into your eyes. In the center of it all stood the stolid statue of Admiral Farragut, flanked on all four corners by mortars. He was a man who broke the Confederate hold on New Orleans during the Civil War by unleashing a bombardment of fire. His resistance was of the direct kind.

In the square, the pussy hats had returned. Perched atop the heads of women young and old, pink knitted caps, some of them bearing the word “Nasty” in cursive across the forehead. Some of these hats had clearly been saved since the 2017 Women’s March, resurrected now from the backs of dresser drawers. Others were newly purchased from the vendors who prowled the park, hawking them along with flags and t-shirts and pink baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Pussy Power.” This was The Resistance of the first Trump era transplanted into the second. In its lower numbers, it felt quaint rather than mighty.