Eight years ago, a sea of angry women, many wearing “pink pussy hats”, descended on Washington a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, in one of the largest political demonstrations in US history.
Vanessa Wruble was a driving force behind the Women’s March in the US capital, inspired by the perceived threat Trump posed to reproductive and civil rights. For now, though, she is done marching.
“What would it actually accomplish?” she said from the animal sanctuary she now runs near Joshua Tree in the California desert. “Our strategy didn’t work last time, so let’s not keep doing the same thing.”
Wruble’s scepticism is replicated in the muted response Trump’s return to the White House has elicited from the American left. Where his first inauguration triggered outrage, uproar and a wave of resistance, now there is barely a whimper.
Trump’s opponents appear cowed into submission, stunned by the sheer speed and scale of his actions since re-entering government. The “shock and awe” of his first executive orders — revamping immigration policy, gutting renewables, abolishing birthright citizenship, pardoning the January 6 2021 rioters and ending diversity, equity and inclusion programmes — have left them dazed, unsure what to focus on first.
“He is flooding the zone,” said Patrick Gaspard of the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “There will be many distractions.”
Without an organising issue to rally around, Democrats have descended into confusion. “This is a target-rich environment but I just don’t see anyone shooting,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist.
Civil society, too, seems unsure about how to respond. There has been no repeat of the demonstrations in airports and courthouses in 2017 that challenged one of Trump’s first anti-immigration directives, a controversial 90-day ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority nations.
The scarcity of anti-Trump voices outside a few prominent congressional Democrats has been so notable that the one woman willing to confront the president directly in recent days — an Episcopalian priest — has become a minor national celebrity.
At an inaugural prayer service in Washington on Tuesday, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde asked the new president to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now”, including immigrants, asylum seekers and families with LGBT+ children.
But in a sign of the public obloquy risked by the president’s critics, Trump denounced Edgar Budde as a “radical left hardline Trump hater”, who had “brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way” and now “owe[s] the public an apology”.
Trump’s opponents have not been idle. On the day of his inauguration, attorneys-general from 22 states sued him in two federal district courts to block an executive order that refused to recognise children born in the US of unauthorised immigrants as citizens. They argued birthright citizenship under the US constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment is “automatic”. On Thursday, they won a minor victory when a federal judge temporarily blocked the order.
Skye Perryman, head of Democracy Forward, a legal group that launched a number of challenges against Trump’s policies during his first term, argued the lawsuits are a sign the nature of opposition to him has changed, rather than any unwillingness by his adversaries to take action.
“The reaction this time is much more sophisticated and organised opposition to what is now a very far-right movement in the US,” Perryman said. “You’re seeing an opposition that’s focused on exploiting this administration’s over-reach and disregard for the law.”
Some polls back her claim that Trump’s most radical policies lack popular support. A Quinnipiac University survey from last month showed 55 per cent wanted to give undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status, while 63 per cent said all children born in the US should continue to be automatically granted citizenship.
But there is still little consensus in Democratic ranks over how best to confront Trump and mobilise opposition to his policies. After his first term, a simple call for “resistance” to Trumpism proved enough to rally voters — particularly swing voters in suburban districts — to their side. It helped propel Joe Biden to victory in the 2020 election and gave Democrats control of the US Senate in 2021.
In 2022, they outperformed in the midterm elections too, spurred by the Supreme Court’s decision to end federal protections for abortions.
But in 2024, both Trump’s temperament and the issue of abortion rights were clear to voters nationwide — and Democrats still lost the presidency and both houses of Congress.
That electoral hat-trick appears to have convinced some in the party to move closer to Trump on issues such as border control. Senator John Fetterman, an iconoclastic Democrat from Pennsylvania, visited Trump in his Mar-a-Lago resort before the inauguration.
Others on the Democratic left, such New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, argue that only by clearly drawing distinctions with Trump — on issues such as immigration and his cosying up to wealthy corporate leaders — can the party regain its footing.
But some are nevertheless unimpressed by the timidity of the party’s initial response. “Last time the Democrats brought a knife to a gunfight,” Marsh said. “Now there’s not even a knife.”
In particular, she said, there was “no one voice leading the charge against Trump and what the Republicans are doing”. Democrats lack a figure with the stature and authority of Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker who dominated her party when he first took office in 2017.
And there is no automatic mechanism for them to select a new leader who could be Trump’s chief antagonist. Some polls show Kamala Harris remains the country’s most prominent Democrat, but she has been wounded by her defeat to Trump in November, holds no elective office, and has been keeping a low profile in recent months.
Low morale continues to dog the party. “The word that gets thrown around a lot right now is exhaustion,” said Kyle Kondik, a non-partisan analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
Much of the resistance provoked by Trump’s first victory arose because “it was seen as a fluke”, he said. This time he “won much more clearly”, gaining a plurality of the popular vote.
Democrats also understand American public opinion has shifted rightward since Trump’s first term. Four years ago there was widespread — and bipartisan — disgust at the January 6 2021 siege of the Capitol. But a poll by CBS this month showed only 30 per cent of Republicans strongly disapproved of the attack, compared to 51 per cent in January 2021.
Activists admit to being in a state of shock. Transgender groups, for example, are still reeling from a Trump executive order that said it was the policy of the US to recognise only two sexes, male and female.
Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, head of Advocates for Trans Equality, said transgender people were “worried and anxious rather than outraged . . . but the outrage will come”.
“Resistance will grow as people understand the scope and scale of all these executive orders,” he said. “Sometimes it takes time to realise what’s at stake.”
Yet Wruble thinks the next wave of resistance will look a lot different from the last one. “Our methods of intervention failed us,” she said. “We need a period of reflection. We need to come up with new responses.”
Additional reporting by James Politi in Washington
Data visualisation by Sam Learner
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