After Donald Trump’s win in 2024, commentators declared the so-called Resistance “useless” and “futile.” The opposition motion in opposition to Trump had been embarrassing, ineffective, a performative failure that did nothing “apart from making the #Resisters be ok with themselves.” With the nation now 9 months into Trump’s second time period, although, stories of the dying of the Resistance prove to have been exaggerated. The motion seems completely different than it did the final time round. It’s extra hard-bitten. Nevertheless it retains the identical underlying idealism concerning the American venture that led first to the explosive progress of the coalition, after which to its dismissal by cynics.
As we speak, in a reprisal of the primary “No Kings” rallies that occurred in June, tens of millions of protesters will collect across the nation to precise their opposition to Trump. Over the summer time, protesters waved American flags, dressed because the Founding Fathers and the Statue of Liberty, and held indicators with quotes from the Structure and the Declaration of Independence. These rallies drew an estimated 2 million to five million individuals across the nation—on the size of the 2017 Ladies’s March that convened the day after Trump’s first inauguration, then a competitor for the most important single day of protest the US had ever seen.
Organizers are actually anticipating a good greater turnout. “We’ve got a aim for No Kings to be the most important peaceable protest in fashionable American historical past,” says Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible, one of many many teams coordinating the demonstrations. MAGA, no less than, is doing its half to deride the gatherings as uncool: “Anybody who participates in a No Kings rally is a dork,” one right-wing influencer wrote on X. Earlier reflections on the Resistance brushed it off as embarrassing pap. However such dismissals now danger ignoring the likelihood that earnest outrage, on the proper place and the appropriate time, is itself a strong tonic in opposition to the corrosion of American democracy.
The circumstances of Trump’s first presidency lent themselves naturally to the rise of a preferred opposition motion. Right here was somebody who had secured the White Home by way of the quirks of the Electoral Faculty regardless of shedding a majority of the vote, and underneath situations muddied by Russian interference. The motion that turned often called the Resistance grew quickly on this context, in what the political scientists Theda Skocpol, Caroline Tervo, and Kirsten Walters termed a “civic explosion” of native political engagement throughout the nation, largely by first-time activists impressed by their disdain for Trump’s insurance policies and character.
That motion’s on-the-ground organizing proved to be quietly, however strikingly, efficient. The early part of the opposition to the primary Trump administration—earlier than the racial-justice protests following George Floyd’s homicide, in 2020—was largely led by white, college-educated, suburban girls, and plenty of of them, sure, wore pink “pussy hats” and T-shirts with slogans comparable to It’s Mueller Time! However they helped safe the “blue wave” midterm victory in 2018 that flipped the Home of Representatives for Democrats and allowed the occasion to start clawing again Trump’s energy via legislative oversight. And although that congressional response had its limitations—neither impeachment of Trump, in spite of everything, efficiently barred him from workplace—the Resistance notched continued successes at a neighborhood degree in countering efforts to pull books from faculty cabinets and limit entry to reproductive well being care after Roe v. Wade was overturned. And, in fact, a Democrat gained the White Home in 2020.
Then got here 2024, and Kamala Harris’s failure to safe the presidency in opposition to the rising tide of inflation and post-pandemic malaise. Lara Putnam, a historian on the College of Pittsburgh who research grassroots activism in Pennsylvania, advised me that the progressive social politics and “deal with defending democracy” of the Resistance weren’t nicely aligned with the issues of much less engaged swing voters, who selected Trump for financial causes. Nonetheless, Putnam’s analysis reveals that native organizing that grew out of the Resistance made an influence in 2024: Activists have been in a position to assist Pennsylvania Democrats maintain on to manage of the statehouse, even because the state swung to the appropriate.
When Trump returned to the White Home in 2025, he did so with a brand new declare to legitimacy after successful a plurality—although nonetheless not a majority—of the favored vote. This time, the streets have been quiet on Inauguration Day and instantly after. Some on the appropriate noticed this as proof of a “vibe shift,” a broader flip towards right-wing cultural dominance and away from liberal and progressive concepts. The fast capitulation of main civic establishments, comparable to social-media firms and regulation corporations, solely emphasised the supposed shift.
On this surroundings, resistance appeared pointless. Possibly even worse than pointless: It had been type of cringe. That means: unself-conscious; overly honest; insufficiently insulated from criticism by the protecting layer of irony that permits an individual to declare, when mocked, “Simply kidding!”; and, worst of all, ineffective. Remembering the pussy hats, Liza Featherstone, a columnist for the left-wing journal Jacobin, mourned, “It’s triggering to even write this stuff down.” The progressive author Ross Barkan derided the “hysterics” of the first-term Resistance and hoped the brand new quiet would possibly “converse to the rising maturity of America.”
Because the reference to hysteria suggests, it’s troublesome to totally disaggregate the substance of this critique from gender politics, particularly due to the predominance of older girls in Resistance organizing throughout Trump’s first time period. Liberal politics, the humor author Clare Haber-Harris assessed in early 2025, had change into “middle-aged-women coded” and subsequently “uncool.” These Resistance aesthetics contrasted with the macho power of Trump’s second time period, itself a promise that People wouldn’t must take heed to these hectoring girls anymore.
However these dismissals each ignore the very actual victories of the Resistance and miss why cringe was important to the motion’s effectiveness. These organizers have been individuals “who mainly believed that there was such a factor because the rule of regulation, that there was such a factor as democracy,” Putnam advised me, “and that these have been issues that have been price preventing for.” They have been, in that sense, institutionalists—and subsequently inherently against MAGA’s devil-may-care want to burn the place down.
Cringe “implies a type of naïveté that so typically will get coded as female,” wrote the New York Occasions columnist Lydia Polgreen, “a foolish perception that human beings, via honest effort, would possibly truly enhance themselves and the world.” Such a perception might sound uncool. However it may be a strong software with which to chop via the nihilism of Trump and people round him, which attracts its energy from its insincerity, its refusal to tell apart between reality and falsehood, its willingness to mock and degrade beforehand treasured beliefs. As one protest signal put it at an illustration early in Trump’s second time period: BE CRINGE. SHIT MATTERS.
Idealism helped inspire Trump’s opponents throughout his first time period. Nevertheless it has the potential to hold much more weight throughout his second, given how the president’s anti-democratic venture isn’t as constrained because it was the primary time round. As Levin of Indivisible advised me, “The true enemy in an authoritarian breakthrough second is nihilism and cynicism and fatalism.” This concept was an everyday topic of the thinker Hannah Arendt, who famously argued that totalitarian regimes rely on eroding their topics’ sense of political chance. Such governments, she wrote, intention not “to instill convictions however to destroy the capability to type any.”
“I didn’t like resistlib cringe content material within the first Trump administration,” wrote Adam Gurri, the editor in chief of Liberal Currents, in a social-media publish two months after Trump’s second inauguration, admitting: “I used to be incorrect. I used to be simply being a snob.” As Gurri suggests, the administration’s insistence on irony and insincerity has given a brand new energy to plain, previous, corny symbols. Just lately, a photograph revealed within the Chicago Tribune went viral, displaying a Marine veteran protesting amid clouds of tear fuel in entrance of an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, stoically holding not one however two American flags. Even the identify of the No Kings protest is a reclamation of foundational American heritage which may have felt tacky a yr in the past, however right this moment carries a brand new seriousness.
Nonetheless, for “resistlib cringe content material” to have energy, it must be welded with concrete motion. In any other case it dangers undercutting itself and breeding mistrust, an unwitting imitation of MAGA’s nihilism. Final spring, Senator Cory Booker held the Senate flooring for a record-breaking 25 hours in a speech railing in opposition to Trump—arguably the primary time in Trump’s second time period {that a} congressional Democrat sought to harness the power of the Resistance previous. Demonstrators wrote out traces from Booker’s speech on placards at protests held later that week. However these hoping that the speech would herald a newly confrontational Democratic Social gathering have been upset when Booker voted to verify Trump’s nominee for ambassador to China weeks later.
Organizers right this moment are acutely aware of the hazard of talking the language of resistance with out wielding any energy to match. In a pamphlet revealed shortly after the 2024 election, Indivisible acknowledged, “Too typically in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests as an alternative of utilizing them as a part of a technique.” Theda Skocpol suggested would-be Trump opponents prematurely of his inauguration that the best elements of the earlier Resistance weren’t the showy marches, however what occurred after the pink-hatted demonstrators went residence and set to work: the “persistent, community-based efforts” that centered on constructing help for Democratic candidates and sharing details about the native results of deliberate Trump insurance policies. These activists weren’t involved with ideological purity assessments, however with the sensible constructing of energy. Even on the time, this organizing work obtained comparatively little consideration from commentators sneering on the overly earnest aesthetics of Resistance “wine mothers.”
“The best resistance is perhaps investing in issues that Trump’s rhetoric tries to delegitimize: neighborhood solidarity, mutual help, and bottom-up organizing,” one contributor wrote to a postelection symposium organized by the left-leaning journal Democracy. This suggestion turned out to be a markedly correct forecast of what opposition to Trump seems like right this moment. The sequence of rallies that culminated in No Kings has taken the type of distributed protests organized by native activists throughout the nation, with out one single point of interest. (The June No Kings rally didn’t even function an occasion in Washington, D.C., avoiding tangling with—or giving additional consideration to—Trump’s army parade that very same day.)
For the reason that summer time, Trump’s technique of shifting ICE and the Nationwide Guard from metropolis to metropolis magnified this localism. Every focused jurisdiction has responded with its personal character: Protesters gathered to confront ICE en masse in the midst of a Los Angeles freeway, or have danced in frog costumes in Portland, Oregon. With the notable exception of a protest held a month into the federal occupation of D.C., the District’s residents have opted in opposition to the big gatherings that the town noticed throughout the Ladies’s March and the George Floyd protests. As a substitute, lots of them centered on serving to each other as neighbors—chasing away ICE brokers and strolling the youngsters of immigrant dad and mom to high school within the morning. “The individuals getting meals to households of migrant neighbors kidnapped by ICE is resistance,” the D.C. mutual-aid collective Remora Home defined. In Chicago, David Black, a Presbyterian pastor whom ICE brokers shot with pepper balls, described protests exterior Illinois ICE amenities as not “resistance” however “world constructing”: “We’re making ourselves into the world we wish to give to the subsequent seven generations.”
This sentiment is, arguably, cringe. However it is usually, on essentially the most primary degree, the work of politics. And exactly for that cause, it’s an try to countermand the senses of loneliness and unmooring from actuality that Arendt recognized as components of tyranny.
Organizers of right this moment’s No Kings rally have emphasised that the gatherings are only one a part of this broader motion, a possibility to loudly and collectively voice the defiance already occurring on the bottom. The Trump administration seems to have observed. Though June’s No Kings protests gained comparatively little consideration from Trump and congressional Republicans, the occasion has busied itself over the previous week with attacking the upcoming demonstrations as a “Hate America Rally.” The temper this time is darker than in June: The federal government is shut down, extra Nationwide Guard troops are deployed on the nation’s streets, and the administration is intent on portraying its political opposition as un-American. However the protesters are coming with the Stars and Stripes in hand.
