In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, a resistance movement emerged, sending thousands of people into the streets wearing pink hats and holding signs with snappy slogans.
The leaders of left-wing groups that emerged in response to Trump’s first election say they expect to be just as forceful in pushing back on the policy moves of a second Trump administration.
“I think people are very angry and are going to lash out,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March, told NBC News. But “2016 was a long time ago, a pandemic ago, two presidential terms ago. Things will be different. It won’t be the same.”
Following Trump’s re-election on Tuesday, scattered protests broke out in Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia and Berkeley, California, but have not attracted the attention — or the numbers — that similar protests in 2016 and early 2017 generated.
Women’s March is already organizing short rallies and protests in New York and Washington this weekend, plus a huge ‘People’s March on Washington’ the weekend before Trump’s inauguration.
But in the years since the Women’s March and other resistance groups formed to combat the rhetoric and policies of the Trump era, the movement has evolved beyond just rallies and marches, O’Leary Carmona said.
“I think this is a different movement – an older and more mature movement,” she said. “2016 was a volunteer-led tidal wave. … Now it’s a movement that goes beyond the moment – it’s not about visibility, it’s about building power.”
For example, Women’s March, a group that grew out of many women’s immediate reaction to Trump’s first election, has evolved into a group that seeks to “build a multiracial feminist future” by working to combat misinformation online , by fighting student debt forgiveness, promoting progressive paid parental leave policies, and more.
“We focus heavily on absorption,” O’Leary Carmona said. “It is not enough for people to just take to the streets, we need to build political power.”
This time, compared to 2016, “we have connections with people who are building policy,” she added.
Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a progressive group dedicated to mobilizing voters and organizers, echoed O’Leary Carmona in a post on X Thursday.
“If we are serious about winning, we need to learn some hard lessons and admit where we were wrong,” he wrote. “It is also not enough to dust off the ‘resistance’ playbook of 2016. It is time for a new script.”
In an interview with NBC News, Mitchell said that “far-right” political movements “rely on their brand of chaos to destabilize us so that we go from one fire to another putting out fires.”
He added: “In some ways, some of that happened in 2016. There was one manufactured crisis after another, and we were trying to limit the damage, and we were very much on the defensive, and in some ways we were flat-footed .”
In 2024, Mitchell said, “We actually planned this scenario.”
“We are not flat-footed,” he added. “We believe that our mandate is to go on the offensive. While we experience electoral defeat, we are reminded that tens of millions of people voted to reprimand this man, MAGA, against the Project 2025 rule book. And it is those people we must organize in the aftermath of this election.”
Still, in the days after this election, the anti-Trump movement seemed noticeably quieter online than in 2016, with some describing the resistance as “tired” or “dormant.”
During a video call on Thursday evening led by left-wing groups MoveOn, Indivisible, the Working Families Party and others, leaders told their communities it was OK to wait a while before continuing to fight.
“The one feeling we cannot allow ourselves to feel is hopelessness,” MoveOn director Rahna Epting told the 130,000 viewers gathered on the call.
“I know for some people on the phone it may be a struggle to ask you to keep hope alive,” she added. “But hope is the fuel we need, hope that there are more people who believe in love and peace instead of hate and division.”
Epting told NBC News she is hopeful about the movement’s future, pointing to the thousands of people who have joined the call and other numbers, such as the fact that more than 8,000 attendees Thursday expressed interest in organizing their own community meetings in the following weeks.
“Trump would like us to believe that our power evaporated overnight. We will not allow that mentality to take hold, so we will equip our base with tools to process what happened and put it into action instead of hopelessness,” Epting said in a statement to NBC News.
Mitchell also pointed to the fact that the 2017 Women’s March, where millions protested across the country ahead of Trump’s inauguration, was held months after the election, not days. “It just seems very premature” to suggest the energy isn’t there, he said.
“It’s not the end of the movement. We can’t fold up as picnic chairs because we’ve incurred a loss,” said O’Leary Carmona.
She offered a metaphor: “When you’re personally tired, it’s like a long choir note: one person drops out and the rest carry the melody. Rest, but do not remain at rest. There is a movement that is here, that is moving.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
