What Really Happened in the First Trump Resistance?

By Jeremy Brecher, Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

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As we grapple with how to live through and ultimately terminate the nightmare of the second Trump regime, we can gain a lot from examining the myths and the realities of the resistance to the first Trump regime.

Activist group SumOfUs’s Projection of “Resist Trumpism Everywhere” on London’s Marble Arch as part of protests during Trump’s July 2018 visit. Photo credit: SumOfUs, Wikimedia Commons, CC by 2.0.

During the first Trump presidency there was an outpouring of resistance to his rule that was

unique in U.S. history in the range of issues it addressed, the diverse constituencies it engaged, and the multiple forms of action it exhibited. In some ways it resembles the movements resisting dictators in eastern Europe and Latin America, which encouraged citizens to engage in every kind of resistance action available to them. It was, to borrow a term from the eastern European democracy movements of the 1980s, a form of “social self-defense.” [1]

Because the conditions prevailing in the second Trump regime differ in many ways from the first, the first Trump resistance is not something to be imitated today. But it can provide us with lessons, both positive and negative. And it can provide inspiration that social self-defense can blunt and eventually overcome Trumpian juggernauts.

There are three myths circulating about the resistance to the first Trump regime that are both false and deeply demobilizing.

• Myth 1: Demonstrations, marches, and other big national mobilizations detracted from a focus on local organizing. In reality, big national mobilizations like the Women’s March, the student gun control demonstrations, and Black Lives Matter saw a synergistic interaction between gatherings of millions of people and the formation of tens of thousands of local organizations.

• Myth 2: The resistance movements failed to wield power. In reality, they exercised enormous though often dispersed power through the expansion of participation in electoral politics, the definition of Trump’s policies, and direct actions like the government worker sickouts and the threatened general strike that halted Trump’s efforts to shut down the federal government.

• Myth 3: The resistance movements failed or were ineffective in countering Trump and ending his rule. In reality, they had a great impact, for example by preserving Obamacare and limiting the expulsion of immigrants; containing and eventually dethroning Trump and Trumpism in the 2018 and 2020 elections; and laying the basis for blocking Trump’s attempted coup after his 2020 election defeat.

The first Trump resistance had genuine weaknesses from which we need to learn. Although it exhibited a great deal of cooperation among different movements and constituencies, it was unable to form a visible, unified opposition that could present a common alternative to Trumpism. Of necessity it initially emerged primarily as a spontaneous response to what people were feeling and the conditions they faced; but it did not develop from a series of spasmodic uprisings to a continuous visible opposition. And it remained primarily an expression of outrage more than a movement based on strategic foresight regarding future possibilities, such as Trump’s impending coup attempt.

From the day Donald Trump was elected president, millions of people began to resist his agenda. Demonstrations against Trump broke out in U.S. cities; police chiefs, mayors, and governors declared they would not implement his attack on immigrants; thousands signed up to accompany threatened immigrants, religious minorities, and women; and technical workers pledged that they would not build databases to facilitate discrimination and deportation. Discussion of how to resist the Trump regime broke out at dinner tables, in emails among friends, on social media, and in community gatherings. Resistance involved every level of society from grassroots to governors and judges.

These actions and others that followed may well represent the greatest outpouring of civil resistance in U.S. history. They targeted nearly every aspect of Trump’s devastating and wide-ranging agenda—and succeeded in blocking much of it. Over the first years of the Trump presidency millions of people engaged in various forms of protest, including the Women’s March, the March for Science, the People’s Climate March, Black Lives Matter, the Fight for Fifteen, the March for Our Lives, the May Day immigrant rights marches, #MeToo, the red state teacher rebellions, the mass sick-outs against government shutdowns, and more. They constituted a mass popular intervention in the political arena.

From the day after Trump’s inauguration, a public interest group led by social scientists called the Crowd Counting Consortium began collecting data on protests. The consortium estimated that in 2017 there were between 6 million and 9 million protesters, and that nearly 90 percent were protesting Trump or his agenda. The largest single-day demonstrations in the first year of Trump’s presidency, with tens of thousands joining each, included the airport protests against Trump’s proposed immigration ban; the Day Without an Immigrant; the Day Without Women; the March for Science; the March for Truth; the LGBTQ pride marches; protests and rallies in support of the Affordable Care Act; gatherings to oppose white supremacist violence; and protests against the Republican tax bill. The early months of 2018 saw three mobilizations with well over one million participants each—the second Women’s March, the national student walkout, and the March for Our Lives. Between 2.5 million and 4 million people participated in more than 6,000 protests in March 2018 alone.

There was a widespread recognition of commonality among the diverse concerns that animated the Resistance. In the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration, prominent environmental, trade union, civil rights, progressive, women’s, gay, and other groups initiated a United Resistance Campaign based on a pledge of solidarity and resistance against Trump: “We pledge to stand together in support of racial, social, environmental, and economic justice for all, and against Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, homophobia, sexism, and all those forces which would tear apart a democracy of, by, and for all the people.” Signers pledged to “act together” in solidarity, whether in “the streets,” in “the halls of power,” or in “communities every day.” They concluded, “When they come for one, they come for us all.” Signers included Communications Workers of America, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Indigenous Environmental Network, MoveOn, NAACP, NARAL, National Domestic Workers Alliance, People’s Action, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, and dozens of others. [2]

This tendency toward convergence persisted, and the actions around issues like gun control, abortion, and immigrant rights won wide “crossover” support. Such convergence did not, however, develop into a unified opposition outside the electoral arena. Rather, the elements of the Trump Resistance were rather like “periods of mass strike” as portrayed by Rosa Luxemburg, in which forms of struggle “all run together and run alongside each other, get in each other’s way, overlap each other; a perpetually moving and changing sea of phenomena.”

LGBT Solidarity Rally, Feb. 4, 2017. Photo credit: Mathiaswasik, Flickr, CC by-SA 2.0.

The Resistance helped block many Trump initiatives, ranging from the gutting of the Affordable Care Act, to the Muslim Ban, to the building of a wall on the Mexican border. Perhaps its most dramatic success was forcing an end to Trump’s shutdown of the government and using the threat of a general strike to keep the government open. When president Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill that did not fund his proposed Mexican border wall, the result furloughed 400,000 government workers without pay, forced 400,000 others deemed “essential” to work without pay, and put over 500,000 federal contract workers out of work. It was the largest lockout in U.S. history. The shutdown continued for 35 days.

Trump and the Republican Congress were forced to reopen the government when TSA screeners stopped showing up for work, air traffic controllers called in sick closing major airports, and opponents of the shutdown mobilized to occupy airports and congressional offices. As the flight delays spread, President Trump unexpectedly reversed himself and agreed to a Congressional resolution to fund the government for three weeks—without his border wall.

When Trump threatened another shutdown three weeks later, the president of the flight attendants union Sara Nelson announced that her members would demonstrate at major airports around the country on February 16. She hoped that all airline workers and the public would take part. Airline flight attendants announced a new website called “generalstrike2019.org.” Its headline read, “Imagine the Power of Working People Standing Together to Demand That Our Government Work for Us.” It called on all Americans to “join us in protest at our nation’s airports to show what workers united can achieve.” At the last minute, Trump backed down and allowed the government to remain open.

The Trump resistance helped expose the illegality, corruption, and antidemocratic intentions of Trump and his allies. It helped show the breadth and continuing power and conviction of those opposing the Trump regime. But it was unable to prevent military aggression, accelerated climate destruction, terrorizing of immigrants, erosion of labor rights, and intensified injustice to women, people of color, and other disadvantaged and vulnerable groups. It slowed though it did not halt or reverse the erosion of the right to vote and other democratic principles.

In the first Trump era, direct action and political action often became synergistic. People working inside and outside the system often worked together. The same people might vote one day and participate in a sit-in the next. As the 2018 congressional elections approached, much of the energy of the Trump Resistance flowed into electoral campaigns. That mobilization played a significant role in the election of a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and the ending of one-party rule. It also contributed to the election of a new breed of Democratic representatives, primarily women and people of color, who viewed popular mobilization outside the conventional political arena as essential to countering the Trump agenda and establishing an alternative one.

According to an article in the Guardian, “The single most important player in the midterm elections may well have been the grassroots resistance to Trump.” The paper reported that there had been “more protests over the past two years than during any comparable period in U.S. history.” The Democratic sweep was due to “extraordinary and historic levels of volunteer engagement, for which the resistance can take much of the credit.” The millions who had marched in protest turned to “phone-banking, text-banking, and canvassing door-to-door in record numbers,” generating record voter turnout. “Local resistance groups” had formed “crucial nodes” and created “thousands of pop-up canvassing headquarters in homes and offices”—in what may have been the largest get-out-the-vote operation in U.S. history.

The momentum from the Trump resistance was ultimately successful in defeating him in the 2020 presidential election and in defeating his January 2021 attempted coup.

Of course, today’s conditions are in many ways different from the first Trump regime.

• The global polycrisis has deepened, exhibiting unrestrained Great Power conflict, proliferating wars, economic nationalism and trade wars, further gutting of democratic institutions, galloping para-fascism, and burgeoning climate catastrophe.

• It has been widely noted that Trump is better prepared this time for the realities of politics.

• Trumpism has evolved from a generic right-wing program and a bundle of personal hobbyhorses toward a fully para-fascist program.

• There is now a committed, hardened, armed para-fascist movement.

• Trump has formed a partnership with Elon Musk and a clique of tech billionaires, and has supported Musk in seizing control of government agencies and critical governmental technology.

• Trump and the Trumpians have a greater claim on legitimacy because they were legally elected, though only by a minority of the enfranchised electorate.

• There has been a general rightward shift in popular attitudes, with increased sympathy for many of Trump’s themes, particularly anti-immigrant and anti-women sentiments.

• Trump is conducting a far more radical attack on all obstacles to autocracy, including Republicans and Congress.

• Trump’s state of mental and physical health makes a full term less likely.

• Trump appears even less sane and more out of touch.

• Trump has surrounded himself with an even weirder collection of accomplices.

• Media are more concentrated and more dominated by MAGA supporters.

• Many early accounts suggest that those who oppose Trump, however outraged they may be, are also discouraged about the prospects for action to counter or remove him.

The strategy for Social Self-Defense proposed in my upcoming commentaries will take these factors into account.

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[1] For a fuller account of the first Trump Resistance, with references, see Jeremy Brecher, Strike! 50th Anniversary Edition (Oakland, PM Press, 2020) Chapter 12. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1085

[2] United Resistance Campaign, “Unstoppable Together,” United Resistance Campaign, January 2017.

http://www.unstoppabletogether.org

; Nadia Prupis, “Groups Nationwide Create Campaign of ‘United Resistance’ to Trump,” Common Dreams, January 10, 2017. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/01/10/groups-nationwide-create-campaign-united-resistance-trump