The Donald Trump resistance is ready for when Democrats are done grieving
In the wake of Donald Trump's unexpected 2016 win, liberals in pink hats swarmed the streets of American cities in massive marches. They formed thousands of activist groups that protested Trump plans to overturn the Affordable Care Act at local offices of members of Congress and flooded Capitol Hill with phone calls and emails.
Eight years later, after another Trump victory, Democrats are seemingly deflated. Liberal cable news channel MSNBC saw a 39% ratings decline in the week after the election, while conservative rival Fox News' viewership surged.
“I’m sure I’ll come up with something to make me feel good again, but right now, today, it’s hard," Democratic strategist James Carville said in a video posted the day after the election. "It’s depressing."
But Trump's win has also created renewed interest in progressive activism. Since Election Day thousands of Americans have newly joined the loose coalition of online and in-person groups aimed at challenging Trump's policies in court and in Congress, according to several of the organizers.
While plenty of Democrats are tired, frustrated and tuning out the news, the coalition of anti-Trump resistance groups that were hastily put together in 2016 and 2017 already have the infrastructure in place to continue the fight when their members are ready to re-engage.
Strategy calls have attendance levels that rival what they saw in 2017 and volunteers are rushing to offer to run for office or back expected lawsuits. Local activists say people are asking for tangible actions they can take to push back on what Trump's second-term agenda, such as mass deportations of people in the country illegally or abolishing the Department of Education.
Ezra Levin, co-founder of the progressive non-profit organization Indivisible, told USA TODAY that 11,000 people showed up to an election result debriefing call Indivisible held the day after the election and more than 40,000 were on a call announcing a new version of the Indivisible Guide a week later, numbers he hasn't seen since 2017.
"I would not mistake folks going through a very natural grieving process and the stages of grief to then extrapolate out and say, 'Well, we're always going to be grieving, we're always going to be mourning the loss.' If anything, frankly, I've been somewhat buoyed by the response," Levin said.
More than 100,000 people RSVP'd for a call hosted six days after the election by several national progressive organizations.
"We can feel the feelings, but soon we are going to need to raise our collective voices," Rahna Epting, executive director of grassroots progressive organization MoveOn, said on the call. MoveOn was one of the hosts of the call and it provided a website to set up local "community groups" to begin organizing.
Run for Something, which supports progressive candidates who want to run for local offices, hoped 100 people would sign up in the first year. When they launched on Trump's Inauguration Day in 2017, 1,000 people signed up. Since Trump won re-election, more than 7,000 people have volunteered to run for office, said the group's co-founder Amanda Litman, contradicting the anecdotes she's heard that people feel like there is no point in resisting and won't bother getting involved.
“I will say it does feel a little more resigned this time around ? anecdotally, I feel that ? but the numbers aren't” showing a lack of enthusiasm, Litman said. “People are angry, they're galvanized, they're specific with what they want to do."
The groups expect the numbers to grow even more once people see what policies and cabinet secretaries Trump puts in place. And unlike 2016, there are already organizations for them to turn to.
'People are desperate'
Karen Skelton, 59, of Greensboro, North Carolina said in the days after the election several longtime members of the Guilford County Indivisible group she helps lead said they needed a break.
“They are despondent and burned out, and some of them are saying, 'I can't keep doing this. I just need to leave it alone and, you know, go take up rage knitting or something,'” she said.
But a flood of new people have contacted her about getting involved.
"It's giving me some peace,” she said. “We've got some new folks showing up now who weren't doing this in 2017.”
Heather Meaney-Allen, 61, of Williamsburg, Virginia said people are already calling her about joining her Indivisible chapter, which has held public rallies weekly for years.
“They're calling me in tears. People are contacting me on our Facebook page that live at least an hour away from here, saying we need a resistance group. We need a progressive group to join, and you are the closest one, and they're coming to us," Meaney-Allen said. "People are desperate.”
'It's a guide to how do we live to fight another day'
As people talk about being burnt out, it's important to remember that the resistance didn't suddenly appear the day after the 2016 election, Levin said. He and his wife Leah Greenberg wrote their guide to citizen activism over Thanksgiving weekend in 2016. The Google document, which Levin jokes was full of typos, went viral in early January 2017 when activists successfully used a barrage of phone calls to convince Republican representatives not to vote to cut funding to the Congressional Ethics Office. The guide teaches people effective ways to lobby elected officials, such as only having constituents contact them and asking for in person meetings.
The Women's Marches, which 2.6 million people turned out for nationwide days before Trump's inauguration catalyzed the creation of thousands of local Indivisible chapters where volunteers organize actions at the local level, such as encouraging their members of Congress to oppose certain legislation.
Over the four years Trump was in office, the coalition of resistance groups drew attention to ethical concerns that drove out several of Trump's Cabinet nominees such as Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and filed lawsuits to overturn policies like adding an immigration-status question on the Census, which the Supreme Court ultimately blocked. In several cases, people inspired by the protests ran for Congress and won, including California Democratic Rep. Katie Porter.
These efforts often proved futile, like when some Rep. Elise Stefanik's, R-N.Y., constituents protested outside her district office demanding she vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act ? and then tried unsuccessfully to defeat her when they failed to change her mind.
The resistance lost lawsuits aiming to stop Trump's Muslim ban, and to end separation of migrant families caught illegally crossing the border. Their efforts to convince Republicans to abandon sweeping tax cuts failed. Some Republican representatives installed locks on office doors and ignored the protests outside.
Theda Skocpol, a sociologist at Harvard and an expert on activist movements, told USA TODAY the local first-term Trump resistance groups powered Democratic gains in the 2018 midterms, but they could struggle to impact policy this time.
"The advocacy groups cannot stop the Trump actions now that the entire GOP supports his authoritarianism," Skocpol said. "Only economic disruptions can matter. Immigration raids may cause those."
The incoming Trump administration argues resistance activists are a threat to democracy.
"President Trump's historic victory sent a powerful message that America will be great once again. These groups sound like they are threatening democracy by working against the will of the people and the duly elected President," Trump's incoming communications director Steven Cheung told USA TODAY.
This time, the national resistance groups went into Election Day with plans for either candidate winning, and they knew that if Trump won they wouldn't be facing the same foe.
Many of the old-school Republicans who could be convinced to sometimes break with Trump have left office and were replaced Trump supporters. The incoming president has a stronger sense of how the government works and he's filling his administration with people he expects not to push back, the way some people in his first White House did, Levin said.
"I am under no illusion that they're going to be bumbling their agenda. They are well prepared, both on administrative policy and legislative policy. They have a good idea of what they want to get done, and not just the policy substance, but how they do it," Levin said.
The new Indivisible Guide was ready to go and is tailored to fit a situation where Republican members of Congress could be hard to persuade and focusing on Congress isn't enough, Levin said. For example, it urges people in red congressional districts to focus on changing state laws and policy, such as reversing an abortion ban.
The guide is also focused on positioning Democrats to win control of the House or Senate in 2026, potentially with the support of frustrated Republican voters, he said.
"It is not a vision for how are the next 10 years or decades of Democratic politics going to look. It's a guide to how do we live to fight another day," Levin said.
Having an existing infrastructure in place is important because it is there when people are upset by something and looking to get involved ? and it isn't always clear in advance when those moments will occur, he said.
"Folks voted for lower prices for eggs. They didn't vote for fascism. They didn't vote for Project 2025," Levin added, referring to the right-wing policy agenda crafted in part by many officials from Trump's first term. "I think a lot of folks ? obviously the folks on our side, and also many non-MAGA Trump voters ? are going to look at what they're prioritizing and and not just feel disappointed, but feel a sense of betrayal. And I think if we're doing our job, we're building a majority coalition that's made up of all those folks, including Trump voters."
Public Citizen's co-president Lisa Gilbert said instead of people organically taking to the streets in shock like in 2016, the coalition of groups are working together to channel the "manic organizer energy" to ensure all possible lanes are covered; not just protesting and speaking with lawmakers but also monitoring Cabinet officials' ethics filings and pursuing lawsuits. Public Citizen is a non-profit progressive consumer rights advocacy group based in Washington that sued Trump's first administration repeatedly and helped form one of the largest coalitions of groups opposing Trump called the Not Above the Law Coalition. Gilbert said they are primed to file public information requests about Cabinet officials Trump doesn't want the Senate to vet and sue over moves he tries to make through executive order.
“The first Trump administration was just marked by these countless abuses of power and trampling on the Constitution and obstructing Congress. And because of that, as horrible as it was, it gives us a little bit of a game plan and a roadmap on what to push back on,” she said.
Litman said the interest Run for Something has received is why having an infrastructure is so important, even if she was hoping for a different election outcome.
“You build the machine so that when the moment calls for it, you can turn it on,” Litman said. “After Election Day in 2016, there wasn't somewhere you could go if you were thinking about running for office. To see the response this time around, and to know that we are ready for it is like the saddest, most energizing thing.”
'Come January, the gloves are coming off'
Many liberal grassroots activists are indeed too shocked and emotionally exhausted to be involved in politics right now, but they say they'll be ready to engage once Trump takes office.
Rachel Roberts, 50, of Benzonia, Michigan was ready to give up in the days after the election. She had spent months knocking on doors in Michigan, and even traveled to Philadelphia to convince swing-state voters to support the Democratic nominee.
"I felt a little gobsmacked," Roberts said. "I spent probably a good week, not so much crying like I did in 2016, but more in like a state of bewilderment and shock."
She'll take the holidays off to rest and reassess.
"We're heading into sort of the season of dark and contemplation, and I want to be in a quiet place between probably now and the new year, and then come January, the gloves are coming off and we're getting started."
Roberts' plan echoes what activists across the country told USA TODAY.
Valerie Stoehr, 63, said the about 100 people in her indivisible group in Afton, Minnesota will probably focus on social activities for a little while.
“People are taking a break from the news cycles. People are talking about music and art as this restorative place to go to right now. And we've been brainstorming just about bonfires or a book club, and kind of what that mix will be between social activities versus calls for action and kind of classic political organizing,” she said.
But she expects the push toward activism will resume quickly, especially as people start paying attention to the news again.
“I thought that period might last months, but I think that shift is going to happen more quickly than we think. People are like, 'Okay, I played my guitar, we had our bonfire, we did our social,” Stoehr said. "There's a little bit of shift, even right now, where there's more energy for getting ready for a fight."
Liz McGeachy, 66, of Norris, Tennessee said the Norris Area Indivisible Group won't meet again until January. She compared the break to the time she needed after Trump won in 2016.
“We put in a lot of work. And so with the reelection of Trump, we feel pretty depleted and tired, exhausted, disappointed,” she said. “We're definitely not disbanding. We're not giving up. I guess I would call this a period of rest, mostly; rest and grief.”
'There's too much worth fighting for'
Sherry Kloha, 66, of Bemidji, Minnesota said as many as 20 people have asked to join the Indivisible Bemidji 300-person mailing list in the last few weeks. For now the group is taking a break after an election that “set us back on our heels,” she said.
Members met at a local bed and breakfast Nov. 13, sipping wine and eating appetizers as they talked about what happened.
“Obviously, some people feel like they just want to be alone and not think about anything or talk about it. And then there's others that are grieving and a lot of times when you grieve, you feel like you want to be together,” Kloha said. “It gave people hope that, you know, we're in this together and we're going to be okay... There's too much worth fighting for.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump resistance groups now have an infrastructure missing in 2017