President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 sparked a resistance movement that saw thousands of people take to the streets wearing pink hats and signs with punchy slogans.
Leaders of left-wing groups that emerged in response to Trump’s first election said they expect a similarly strong pushback against the policy moves of the second Trump administration.
Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March, told NBC News that “people are very angry and will back out.” But “2016 was a long time ago, before the pandemic, before the president’s two terms. Things will change. They will never be the same.”
Sporadic protests broke out in Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia and Berkeley, Calif., after Trump’s reelection on Tuesday, but they have not attracted the attention or numbers that similar protests drew in 2016 and early 2017. do not have.
The Women’s March has already organized snap rallies and protests in New York and Washington this weekend, and is planning a larger People’s March on Washington the weekend before Trump’s inauguration.
But in the years since the Women’s March and other resistance groups formed to combat Trump-era rhetoric and policies, the movement has evolved beyond just rallies and marches, says O’Leary Carmona. he said.
“I think this is a different movement, an older, more mature movement,” she said. “2016 was a year of volunteer-led excitement. …Now it’s a movement that transcends the moment – it’s not about visibility, it’s about building power.”
For example, the Women’s March, an organization that grew out of many women’s immediate reaction to Trump’s first election, has become a “multiracial feminist movement” by fighting online misinformation and working to cancel student debt. The organization has evolved into an organization that aims to “build the future of the world.” Promoting progressive paid childcare leave systems, etc.
“We’re focused on absorption,” O’Leary Carmona said. “It’s not enough for people to take to the streets. We need to build political power.”
This time, compared to 2016, “there’s a connection to the people who are building policy,” she added.
Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, a progressive group that works to mobilize voters and organizers, echoed O’Leary Carmona in a post on Thursday.
“If we are serious about winning, we need to learn some hard lessons and admit where we went wrong,” he wrote. “It is also not enough to dust off the 2016 “resistance” strategy. It’s time to develop a new strategy. ”
In an interview with NBC News, Mitchell said “far-right” political movements are “trying to use forms of chaos to destabilize us so they can move from one fire to the next.” .
He added: “In some ways, some of that happened in 2016. There was crisis after crisis that was being created, and we were trying to mitigate the damage, but we were very on the defensive, and in some ways… It was flat-footed,” he added.
In 2024, Mitchell said, “We were actually planning for this scenario.”
“We are not flatfooted,” he added. “We believe our mission is to go on the offensive. Even though we have experienced electoral defeat, tens of millions of people have condemned the person MAGA for the Project 2025 rulebook. And these are the people we need to organize in the wake of this election.”
Still, in the days following the election, the anti-Trump movement appeared noticeably quieter online than in 2016, with some describing the resistance as “tired” or “dormant.”
In a video call Thursday night led by left-wing groups Move On, Indivisible, the Working Families Party and others, leaders urged the community that it was okay to take a break before moving forward.
“The only feeling we can’t just sit back and watch is hopelessness,” Lana Epting, MoveOn’s executive director, told the 130,000 people on the conference call.
“We know that for some of those on the phone, asking them to remain hopeful may be a tall order right now,” she added. “But hope is the fuel we need. I hope there are many more who believe in love and peace rather than hatred and division.”
Epting told NBC News that she pointed to the thousands of people who participated in the conference call and the fact that more than 8,000 people who attended Thursday expressed interest in hosting their own community gatherings in the coming weeks. , said he is hopeful for the future of the movement.
“President Trump seems to want us to believe that our power evaporated overnight. We won’t allow that idea to sink in, so we can process what happened and, in a desperate situation, We will equip our base with the resources to take action without delay,” Epting said in a statement to NBC News.
Mitchell also pointed to the fact that the 2017 Women’s March, where millions of people protested across the United States ahead of President Trump’s inauguration, was held months after the election, not days. . “It seems very premature” to suggest that energy doesn’t exist, he said.
“This is not the end of the movement. You can’t fold it up like a picnic chair just because you lost,” O’Leary Carmona said.
Using a metaphor, she said: “If you’re personally tired, it’s like a long note in a choir: one person drops out and the rest take over the song. Rest, but don’t keep resting. Here it is. It’s moving and moving.”
