That’s the question that journalists have been asking me since November 5th. We are about to enter the weekend before the inauguration and young people have been causing trouble from Los Angeles to Washington, DC (while the wildfires continue to burn). This weekend, the People’s March will coordinate over 200 marches across the US on Saturday the 18th (two days before the inauguration).
source: peoplesmarch.com (Accessed 1/16/2025)
Here in DC, organizers are expecting between 50-75K participants. This number is much less than the first Women’s March in 2017 where we had 500K people marching in the streets of DC the day after Trump’s first inauguration (over 4 million were estimated to have joined across the US).
So one of the big questions everyone is asking me is: If this event mobilizes a lot fewer people, what does that tell us about the Resistance?
My answer for now is that the lack of mass mobilization that we are witnessing so far is evidence that Resistance 2.0 has yet to rise from the ashes and build the network it needs to push back effectively against the new Trump Administration and its policies.
After the inauguration, as the administration starts to implement Project 2025 (like it always intended), I expect the outrage to grow quickly. As I documented in American Resistance, outrage and anger and key emotions that provide the energy to fuel resistance.
For more on the Resistance during Trump’s first term in office, check out American Resistance (Columbia University Press, 2019).
Dana R Fisher 