Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety (Health and Safety), a brilliant memory exercise on Donald Trump’s first presidency and one of the most celebrated 2024 trials in the United States, says that when he first took office she bought a shipment of markers and cardboard to all the demonstrations I planned to attend. She began by traveling to Washington to participate in the Women’s March, which brought together some 400,000 people on the Mall on January 21, 2017, the day after her inauguration. Attendees not only outnumbered those at the inauguration, but also broke the record for the largest civic gathering in the history of the country. Later, Witt joined other protests, which, he remembers, lost strength over the months, until in April he put the markers and cardboard in a drawer and did not take them out again “for a long time.” “The country got used to the new reality. “Each new Trump scandal buried the memory of the previous one.”
This Saturday, when a new Trump presidency is about to bury the memory of the last one, the organization that was behind that protest called, along with other associations, a new event in Washington. They baptized it as the “People’s March,” to emphasize that this time they are also fighting for other issues such as democracy, climate justice and the autonomy of the District of Columbia, and against the “genocide” in Gaza and the “oligarchy.”
The organizers had obtained permission for a certainly more modest gathering, of, at most, 50,000 people, to leave for the Lincoln Memorial from three downtown squares with signs lamenting “the death of American democracy” or taking the exits with humor. Trump’s xenophobic and misogynistic tone, like the one who said: “I’d rather an immigrant eat my pussy than a president fuck me by the pussy.”
The participants, who beat the cold and the rain, were torn between admitting, like Caroline Lapan, that this time “people are exhausted, after realizing that nothing they do is of much use” and thinking, like Sue Keller, a Women’s volunteer March, that the fact of having expanded the focus of the demonstration shows that the opposition movement to the president “is even stronger.” “Every group except rich white men is represented today,” Keller warned. “This time we will resist in a different way. Not so much with grandiloquent marches, but with silent and determined work in the courts and state parliaments.”
The Links drove seven hours the day before to get there from Athens, Ohio. “The temptation to indulge in indulgence is great,” acknowledged mother Melissa, “but we must exercise our rights and remember the promises on which we built this country.” Rachel and Maeve O’Toole, mother and daughter who flew from Massachusetts, said for their part that they had come so that the 18-year-old girl could “recover her voice.” “I feel,” she said, “that in the elections, the first in which I was able to vote, it was stolen from me.”
The lesser involvement of Hollywood celebrities, who were decisive then and who these days have more pressing concerns about the Los Angeles fires, may have influenced the participation. Or that a polar cold front hits Washington, a city armored for Trump’s second inauguration, to whom “in an act of poetic justice,” as Amy, who arrived from California to the demonstration, defined it, the adverse weather has forced move the swearing-in ceremony inside the Capitol. “For someone so obsessed with crowd sizes, that will have been a low blow,” he added with a smile.
Still, a few hours before the big moment, it is not entirely clear what the 250,000 people who, according to the organization of the events, have secured a ticket for the event are going to do. But despite the 10 degrees below zero expected on Monday, it is assumed that this time the president’s triumphant spirit will overcome the mood of protest in the city.
Also, during the days following the inauguration. In the weeks following the Republican’s first arrival at the White House, “resistance,” also as hashtagbecame a talismanic word among those who opposed his vision of the country. Then, Hillary Clinton lost by surprise in an election that not even her rival himself expected to win and in which Trump failed to win the popular vote. This time, he has gained two million votes and the Democrats are still lying on the canvas almost three months later, after a knockout that they saw coming in slow motion.
Trump also has control over both chambers, where an air of inevitability reigns: he may not have received the “enormous mandate from the American people” that he boasts (the majority in the House of Representatives is too tight to justify the hyperbole). , but it is undeniable, as a Democratic congressman explained this week, that “the people have spoken,” and that what they have said is “that they want what Trump has promised them during the campaign.”
This Tuesday’s hearing in the Senate for the confirmation of the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense made at least two things clear. On the one hand, the Republicans, who in 2017 registered some pockets of resistance, are now willing to close ranks behind the leader, even if the candidate offers as many doubts as Hegseth, a Fox News host and war veteran, harassed by a sex scandal who has no prior management experience and is about to lead the Pentagon’s 23,000 employees. On the other hand, they had agreed to a show of force to welcome the new president. It was an act of “anticipatory obedience” to Trump, according to what he writes in the magazine New York Rebecca Traister. “Republicans,” he considers, “want their opponents to believe that resistance is futile (…) and millions of people feel exactly what Trump and his party want them to feel: petrified and helpless.”
From resistance to cooperation
The effects of that strategy were summarized in an analysis this week by The New York Times, according to which the old #resistance has given way to #relativecooperation. This change would explain why governors and other authorities from liberal bastions are seeing the best way to “coexist” with Trump 2.0, and thus see if the storm passes quickly. The theory would also serve to justify the Democratic vote for a law that toughens immigration policy by allowing the deportation of undocumented immigrants for the commission of minor crimes.
Trump based his successful campaign on the promise to “close the border” and expel millions of undocumented migrants through an executive order that he plans to sign on his first day in the Oval Office. Tom Homan, signed as border czar of the new Administration, confirmed this Friday that on Tuesday the “massive raids” will begin in cities throughout the country, and especially in two, considered “sanctuaries”: Chicago and New York.
Organizations defending migrant rights have been preparing for months for the arrival of that moment, without knowing how far Trump’s men will be able to go, and with the hope that it is an operation so complex that it will be difficult to solve it. successfully. One of the attendees at Saturday’s demonstration, Tom Kulpinski, hoped that activists from civil rights organizations “like the ACLU” and the States will be able to delay Trump’s measures, “hopefully, until the next elections.”
Meanwhile, Washington (whose electorate supported Kamala Harris with more than 92%) looks the other way as if he had to stay in his own home to attend the enemy’s party, a ceremony that has raised $160 million, according to The Washington Post, 60% more than last time. The hotels have been decked out to welcome the ultra-rich friends of the new Trump Government with luxurious suites, caviar and helicopter trips, which has a dozen billionaires among its ranks and will have the three richest men in the world, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as guests.
During Trump’s first presidency, the city was another focus of resistance to the Republican Administration, such as when a group of protesters interrupted the dinner of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, in a Mexican restaurant after she defended family separations in the border. It is not clear if this time the MAGA landing will generate those angry reactions or if, as the economist and sociologist Jeremy Rifkin, who has lived in the city for half a century, considers, it will not change so much, and everything will be reduced to that “they will be seen by the “more cars with license plates from states like Texas on the streets.”
Everything could depend on how far they go with another of Trump and Musk’s promises, which threaten to fire or force tens of thousands of federal officials to leave the city. One of them, a Justice Department worker, recently explained, on condition of anonymity, that the mood at his job has been gloomy since Trump’s victory, and he has warned that he is coming with a list of enemies with whom than to retaliate. “We all know that they are going to fire us to hire their own, but even so, we have preferred not to leave and finish the pending matters against the clock,” added this lawyer, who awaits a more lucrative job in the private sector. That is, he said, his “great little act of resistance.”
