Trump Has Reawakened the Resistance

Opinion|Trump Has Reawakened the Resistance

Before this Saturday’s enormous nationwide No Kings protests, Leah Greenberg, a founder of Indivisible, one of the groups behind the demonstrations, worried that too many people had lost faith in their collective ability to stop Donald Trump from remaking America in his tawdry autocratic image. Her group realized that they needed “to reverse the sense that Trump is inevitable, that he’s going to win,” she told me.

When Trump first took office in 2017, it seemed to much of the country a shocking fluke caused by the democratically dubious Electoral College, and his stunned opponents rose up in furious rejection. Trump’s inauguration weekend set the tone for the years to follow: Turnout at the event itself was underwhelming, while millions of impassioned people attended the Women’s March, at the time the biggest single-day protest in American history. The energy of the resistance was so strong it reached into Trump’s own administration, where several officials devoted themselves to trying to curb his worst excesses.

This time around, there’s less hope and more resignation. In the last election Trump won the popular vote, and most demographics shifted rightward. The resistance has seemed exhausted and demoralized, and leaders in business, law and academia have adjusted accordingly. “One of the dominant differences between 2017 and 2025 is the degree of elite collapse in particular,” said Greenberg. “People who have power in different institutions that have some role in upholding democracy overwhelmingly, from November on, have been operating to secure their own safety and position under the Trump administration.”

Tech barons lined up to kiss the ring at Trump’s swearing-in. In response to Trump’s flimsy lawsuits, media conglomerates offered millions in what seemed like protection money. Law firms and college presidents buckled.