What Activism Will Look Like in Trump’s Second Term

The reaction to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was one big primal scream: women raced to the streets to protest, march, carry signs, chant slogans — and yes, wear pink knitted hats. Eight years later, the response to his second victory has been no less anguished, but significantly less visible. When lawyer Jill Wine-Banks posted a link to the Women’s March website on X the day after the election, presumably suggesting a second go-round, she received so much backlash that she deleted the tweet. And when the Women’s March organization posted on Facebook asking if their followers were prepared to take action, a number of them responded that they’d rather stay home. Nevertheless, the organization is planning to go ahead with a rebranded People’s March on Washington ahead of Inauguration Day; they’re predicting 50,000 people will attend, a tiny sliver of the more than 500,000 who attended the original Women’s March in 2017.

Those who marched and chanted and donated their way through the first Trump presidency — who resisted, to use the buzzword of that time — are now grappling with the fact that despite their efforts, Americans have returned him to power a second time. What are they supposed to do now? Below, we asked 11 women who organized against his first administration how they’re feeling, and where they see anti-Trump activism going from here.

Milka Milliance, DEI consultancy founder

When Trump got elected in 2016, there was a sense that people were going to start organizing. I was one of those people. I was very involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. I was involved in more grassroots organizing efforts in my area. There was a this sense of, “Can we help to turn the tide?” And then we voted him out of office. Now it feels very different. Normally my phone is ringing, people are texting, friends and family. This time around, it was just silence. No one in my circle is even talking about it. Even professionally, it’s quiet. People don’t really know what to say or do.

When I have a chance to talk to other women, I’m like, please take a step back and focus on your own mental health and physical health. If you wanna regroup in a few months or a year from now, okay. But give yourself a chance to just grieve this loss and then focus on rebuilding yourself. I think on an individual level, but also collectively, we need to take a step back and focus on the self for a while before joining and organizing the next movement. I’ve seen some people making those calls, and I’m like, can we just stop and pause? I know the right thing to say is to say I’m hopeful, but that would be dishonest. I don’t feel very hopeful right now. What I am thinking about is finding ways to build community and reconnect with people. Even thinking about, What can I do in my own area, in my own neighborhood? It doesn’t have to be on a larger scale.

Ai-Jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance

I spent the last few days resting and recovering. A lot of us left it all on the field and worked incredibly hard, and I have no regrets about that. I was pretty devastated by the outcome, but I also know that we have to keep the work moving forward. Two days after the election result was announced, the National Domestic Workers Alliance had a call with about 500 of our leaders and domestic workers from around the country, many of whom are immigrants. The feeling on that call was heartbreak and frustration, anger and fear, but also an overwhelming feeling of readiness to fight.

The difference between this year and the last time around is that we have survived four years of Trump and a global pandemic. We have built a lot of strength through community. We are gonna need to double down on that strength and fight smarter, not just harder. But we need to take a beat to think about what happened on multiple time horizons. It’s not just about what happened this election cycle, and it was not a function of the 107-day campaign that Kamala Harris executed brilliantly. What unfolded was decades in the making, and we have to understand all of that in order to grab back hold of the arc of history.

Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something

In 2016, I worked for Hillary Clinton, so I was imminently unemployed and professionally devastated. I barely remember the weeks after Election Day. This time around, I have been running Run for Something basically since Trump’s first inauguration day. I’m on maternity leave with my second daughter. I came back for two weeks after Election Day. And in the week since, 6,000 people have signed up to run for office. As a point of comparison, in all of 2017, we had 15,000 people sign up. So in that sense, I’m optimistic. Now there’s an open question: People are ready to run. Are the donors ready?

My mantra here at Run for Something is to build long-term sustainable power. I have to be able to keep doing this work. My team needs to be able to keep doing this work. It’s one of my frustrations with the “What Democrats need to do is XYZ” discourse at the moment. All that costs money. I have been trying for years to convince some of the biggest Democratic donors that this is work worth investing in, and we’ve made a dent. But it’s been hard. We are doing layoffs, unfortunately, in part because there was a strong decrease in giving from 2023 up until June 2024. It is terrible, but to ensure the organization is sustainable for the long haul, I have to structure it in such a way that I know I can raise money for it. It’s about ensuring we’re at a budget level that we know we can raise for the foreseeable future, as opposed to being at the whims of the donors.

Valerie Burchfield Rhodes, retired TV advertising director

I went to every march from 2016 to 2020. There was so much positive energy, it was joyful to be there. In retrospect, I think the marches serve a purpose where people who are feeling left behind or angry or sad feel that sense of community. That feels really good in the moment, but I think a lot of women just went home after the marches and went about their business. That’s not gonna get it done. I’m really frustrated with my friends who don’t participate in the process any more than performative stuff like the marches. I’m pretty active and involved and outspoken, and I don’t know how much more I can do, other than keep talking to my friends about how it’s important that they step up too.

Sage Carson, communications director for If/When/How

I did a lot of organizing against Brett Kavanaugh and I burned myself out in ways I didn’t know were possible. That completely restructured my understanding of how to do political work. I know now that organizing my community will have a much greater impact than showing up to the Women’s March once; I recognize that I can’t spend my political energy on brief moments to create a press response to something that Trump does. There’s so much online panic right now, which is very fair. But I’m seeing folks panic about how the Trump administration is going to respond to homelessness — as if things were good around homelessness during the Biden administration, or as if California governor Gavin Newsom isn’t personally going and breaking up camps. All of the actions that happened around children in cages — those didn’t go away with the Biden administration. But actions against them stopped. What would it look like to engage in principled organizing that wasn’t about who was in federal office? How can our organizing work be reflective of the world we hope to see, not just our anger against who is in power?

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action

After 2016, a lot of us were in disbelief that the most qualified candidate could lose. The marches, the pink hats, the safety pins, the new organizations popping up — it was a response to that loss. What white women didn’t reflect on was that we were part of the problem. And because this time, it was the loss of a Black and South Asian woman, those things that we felt called to do in 2016 now are performative: the blue bracelets showing that they voted the right way, or the Women’s March already saying that they wanna hold an event, even white women who are leaning into these conspiracy theories about whether the election was rigged.

Win With Black Women founder Jotaka Eaddy, who is my mentor and who I modeled White Women: Answer the Call after, tweeted basically, “Yeah, I’m not joining a Women’s March.” I’m seeing women say, don’t give your money to Women’s March merchandise. Give it to abortion organizations. Give it to bail bonds to get Black women out of jail. Give it to these different causes that are actually going to move the needle. Deportation of immigrants may be our Anne Frank moment, when we have to decide who are we helping and how — and that isn’t going to be by going to Washington, D.C., and listening to speeches and musical acts.

Jenna Dewitt, queer Christian editor, writer, and resource curator

Right now, I am trying to lean into rest and to boundaries and intentionality. I cannot spend all of my time on Twitter. I cannot spend all my time on BlueSky or Threads or Instagram trying to change people’s minds or correcting everyone’s facts. You need to have time offline. You need to have enough time for rest. You need to have time to just watch Netflix with friends, in person, when you’re not talking politics. There’s a lot to be said for touching grass, for doing things in person with real people that have nothing to do with activism or anxiety.

Feminism did not start with Trump’s presidency. In whatever movement you’re building — queer liberation, disability justice, anti-racism — you have to be connected to the previous generations who’ve gone before you. And not just in reading books, but actually having relationships with them, talking to them, serving your community together side by side. If we’re gonna have the next generation of feminists, or the next generation of queer people, whatever it is — you have to have strong intergenerational relationships. And that starts with mentors who are healthy.

Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of We Testify

I love a protest, don’t get me wrong. But one of the things that was always challenging for me with these marches is how often they made signs with coat hangers and shit on them. Why are you living in the past and showing people an unsafe method, when you could do so much more good by putting the self-managed abortion protocol on that same sign? It’s easy for people to think, I don’t want this. But what do you want? And why do you need a court to give that to you? The only way to get out of this is abolition. This is where our connections to community networks and mutual aid becomes super important. These distribution networks of abortion pills in communities are really important, and it’s so important that people understand the self-managed abortion protocol and what to do in case of emergency. What we need is more people to refuse to engage with the system, ignore the lines of legality, and be willing to put themselves on the line to protect people and help them continue to get abortions.

Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible

I do think that there’s this emerging desire to say people are just gonna be resigned this time around. That is not tracking with any of our inputs right now. We have a whole wave of people who got activated this year around Kamala Harris. What we are hearing from them is that they are incredibly sad, and they’re also extremely eager for next steps. We had a call that had about 10,000 people on it the night after the election. People who had stepped back at some point over the last year are back and re-engaging; people who have been involved are trying to build out new strategies and are eager for new ideas. There are also a lot of people who are new, who are showing up and saying, “Where is my individual group? And how do I start one?” All of our organizers are swamped right now with people who are asking for guidance and support.

The imperative for all of us is gonna be about making sure that there’s a clear theory of the case in what we’re asking people to do. This is not protest for the sake of personal expression. What we don’t wanna do is burn people out by asking them to take actions that don’t make sense to them. We do wanna ask people to go through an arc of building and leveraging local power. If you’re in a blue state, are your governor and your attorney general doing everything that they can do to protect people inside of that state? To push back on what the federal government is capable of doing and to protect the policies that we care about?

Ola Ojewumi, disability-rights activist

On Election Night 2016 I was in my house, watching the news, tweeting, angry and despondent. This time around I am still angry, but it feels different. It’s like an out of body experience. I definitely expected Kamala to win. Felons can’t vote in many states, but now we have a felon president. We don’t need another march to make people feel good, with pussy hats and — remember the safety pin? And the blue bracelets, those are a joke. It’s all performative. “I’m one of the good white women who voted for Kamala Harris.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s the bare minimum.”

I need to take more of a breather this time, along with a lot of other Black women. My activism will focus more on local politics than national politics. There’s more work I need to do outside of the system and in community. The Trump administration and the GOP will work at the national level to roll back many rights, but working with local legislators will make it so we can protect rights on a local level.

Molly Jong-Fast, Vanity Fair special correspondent and host of the Fast Politics podcast

The first time Trump got elected, there was a feeling that, How can a guy who was accused of all of this stuff against women become president? And now I think we all know how. We have a lot more information. I hope that people will show their resistance to Trump, because he’ll be less likely to do crazy stuff if he knows that the American people won’t tolerate it. But I don’t think that the problem with him is stylistic. In 2016, there was a sense that he was vulgar and uncouth, but the reality is the guy is trying to dismantle our system of government. We have to be very focused on that. The problem is not that he’s not appealing, or that he paints himself orange. That stuff was a distraction from the actual fundamentals of the case, which is American democracy surviving. In 2016 there was a feeling that the more aesthetic talk about him was helpful, and I think that the sense in which he was a caricature — the idea that he was like Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi — was a real mistake. Having an aesthetic problem with him is not the right way to address him. It’s not about aesthetics. It’s about our system of governance.