‘I’m exhausted by him.’ Why Trump resistance is fizzling.

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, narrowly defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton, it landed like a “gut punch” to Kim Whittaker, a party activist and fundraiser. To see her candidate lose to a man who boasted of groping women and promised to end federal protections on abortion rights was devastating.

Soon after, she began organizing a protest march in Boston against President-elect Trump that drew more than 100,000 people, part of an unprecedented show of defiance led by women across the country.

This year’s electoral defeat, while upsetting, didn’t feel quite as shocking, she says – though she believes the consequences could be greater. And unlike in 2016, Ms. Whittaker isn’t taking to the streets. Like many on the left, she’s asking, what’s the point?

The January 2017 Women’s March was “a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” she says. “Anything that we tried to do coming on the heels of that would just fall short, and what is the purpose of that? If it’s to show strength in numbers, I don’t think we’re going to get the same numbers.”

A presidential loss always packs a punch. But the second election of Mr. Trump, and his triumph over Vice President Kamala Harris, is rippling outward in a more profound and debilitating way among women who championed resistance to his first presidency. What had seemed like an aberration – a one-term president who twice lost the popular vote – now feels like a grim reality, one that no flurry of online or real-life protests can shake loose.

“There is definitely a camp of people that say, ‘I need to withdraw right now. Like, I can’t listen to the news. I can’t talk about this guy anymore. I am exhausted by him,’” says Ms. Whittaker, an events organizer in Winchester, Massachusetts.

A “People’s March” up next

Some participants in the 2017 Women’s March – which in total included more than 4 million people in towns and cities nationwide, making it the largest single-day protest in U.S. history – are now organizing a “People’s March” in Washington on Jan. 18, two days before Mr. Trump’s second inauguration. But their permit application is for up to 50,000 people, far fewer than the half a million participants in 2017, when the National Mall became a sea of women wearing knitted pink hats.

Organizers say they expect marches to happen in other cities on the same day. The president of the Women’s March Foundation in Los Angeles, however, has said that her organization – a separate group – doesn’t want to allocate its resources toward a large-scale protest and has no plans to mobilize for a march. In 2017, around 750,000 people marched to City Hall in Los Angeles.

The groundswell after Mr. Trump’s first election was driven not just by seasoned political activists but by first-time participants reacting to what they saw as a political earthquake, says Lisa Mueller, an associate professor of political science at Macalester College. “It was a uniquely galvanizing moment for people who don’t normally participate in street protests. We don’t have the shock and novelty this time,” she says.

President-elect Trump, who won the popular vote this time, appears far better prepared to implement his agenda in his second term, given his sway over a Republican Party that will control both chambers of Congress, and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. In the face of what seems to many like an impending juggernaut of conservative policy enactments, there’s far less optimism about the power of hashtags, petitions, and protests to push back.

Expansive coalition, vague agenda

This sense of futility isn’t universal. Organizations like Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others are asking donors to support them as they prepare to challenge the next administration’s policies, including on abortion access and immigrant rights.

But the rush to the barricades that accompanied much of Mr. Trump’s first term, from the first Women’s March to the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, has given way to soul-searching about what activism can actually accomplish. Similar doubts were raised in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, which popularized the slogan, “We are the 99%,” and, like the Women’s March, inspired protests in cities around the world.

What both of those grassroots movements had in common was a diffuse set of demands that didn’t cohere into a single political agenda, says Professor Mueller, who studies social movements and is the author of “The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists.” “It’s really difficult to point to any concrete outcome of either of these movements,” she says.

Standing on the Mall in January 2017, she saw signs for reproductive rights alongside others for environmental protection and transgender inclusion. That expansive coalition, and the appeal to participants who didn’t think of themselves as activists, was in some ways a strength. But it also meant the Women’s March lacked the singular focus of a social movement like the March for Life, an annual antiabortion event that began more than 50 years ago to oppose Roe v. Wade, says Professor Mueller. “There’s no mistaking their demand.”

Even when progressives rally behind a single cause, success isn’t guaranteed. Student-led protests that roiled campuses across the country earlier this year had little or no effect on U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza under a Democratic administration. President-elect Trump has meanwhile offered full-throated support for Israel’s military and said he would use military force at home to suppress civil unrest, something he talked about doing during the 2020 racial justice protests.

In general, governments around the world have become hardened against social movements that challenge their authority; nonviolent civil protests today are more likely to fail than they were a generation ago, according to an influential Harvard study. This trend cuts across different types of government but is more pronounced under authoritarian states.

“This election felt different”

When the election results came in this year, Vanessa Wruble, who helped organize the first Women’s March, was sitting in her living room in Southern California watching with friends. As Mr. Trump’s victory became clear, it felt to her “like something really deep has been lost. It just got very, very morose in the room, and basically everyone just stood up and left.”

That’s similar to how she felt in 2016. But this time, she’s not calling fellow progressives to mobilize in response. She has stepped back from full-time activism, having left New York City during the pandemic and set up an animal sanctuary and art space in a desert community. She also now keeps her distance from the Women’s March, which she left in 2017 amid internal divisions. Ms. Wruble, who is Jewish, faced what she considered antisemitism from other leaders – who have since drawn criticism from others on the left – further splintering the organization and dimming its appeal.

“This [election] felt different. The reaction was different,” she says. “I think people feel sad and people feel despair. But I don’t think that’s an unnatural response or even a bad response.”

She adds, “Right now is really a time for reflection, for diagnosing the problem rather than jumping into an action that I don’t think would be particularly effective.”

To Ms. Wruble, President-elect Trump’s victory this month doesn’t negate the successes of the movement she helped start. It led to more women running for political office, helped seed new grassroots groups like Indivisible, and contributed to a blue wave in the 2018 midterms and Joe Biden’s win in 2020. That energy and commitment were real and lasting, she says.

Indivisible, which was founded by two Democrats in 2016 who wrote a guidebook on how to pressure Congress, has urged supporters to come together locally and to think broadly about resistance to Mr. Trump’s agenda, including at state and local levels. Their message: Stay focused on the 2026 midterms and on building communities. “Trump wants us to believe that the presidency is all-powerful. It ain’t true,” the group’s founders wrote in a guide to “democracy on the brink.”

Ms. Whittaker is also thinking ahead, conserving her energy for what she expects to be a tumultuous political era. Progressives have to pick their battles, she says. “We need to be smart and effective.... The authoritarian playbook is to celebrate apathy. I think we need to shake off that momentary feeling of despair and resist apathy, and people will reengage.”