For Trump's Implacable Adversaries, the Right Road for 'Resistance'

Eight years ago, at the first inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States, massive marches of angry “resistance” mobilized in Washington and around the world, easily upstaging the festivities associated with the installation of the new Republican administration.

The day after the recently elected leader of the Free World took his oath of office in 2017, at least 470,000 resentful protesters thronged to Washington, assembling seven million more in 500 other locations in all seven continents across the globe. The official goals of these gatherings expressed more than disgust and disapproval regarding Trump’s arrival at the White House. In the lofty words of the organizers, they pledged “to advocate legislation and policies regarding human rights and other issues, including women’s rights, immigration reform, healthcare reform, disability justice, reproductive rights, the environment, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, freedom of religion, workers’ rights and tolerance.”

No one expects comparable demonstrations or spasms of rage when the MAGA Man returns to power on January 20, 2025, and it’s important to understand why not. At the end of November, Axios offered an analysis under the wistful headline “The Resistance to Trump Goes Quiet.” The laundry list of declarations and demands that animated the huge crowds of 2017 seem dated and almost quaint this time around, and it’s not due to any moderation in either the style or the substance of the Trump campaign.

If anything, the agenda of the incoming administration has been more detailed and far more radical than the vague program on offer in the battle against Hillary Clinton in 2016. In that electoral struggle, the featured promise of the MAGA movement involved the erection of a “big, beautiful border wall” financed entirely by untold billions of pesos generously provided by the Mexican government. That notion, as events proved, may have been fanciful but it never threatened the wrenching, cataclysmic change involved in forcing “the greatest mass deportation in all of American history” with between nine million and twenty million undocumented immigrants apprehended, detained and forcibly transported from their long-time homes.

The 2024 Trump campaign also provided far more detail on the crushing, inflationary tariffs, to be imposed immediately on Mexico and Canada in particular, not to mention the promised $2 trillion of cuts in government spending pledged by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy through DOGE, their new “Department Of Government Efficiency”.

One can view such commitments as bold, visionary and constructive, or decry them as fanatical, polarizing and dangerous, but no observer can interpret them as reflecting a new willingness to compromise or retreat on the part of Team Trump. If the “resistance” that produced such passion in 2017 represented a principled, ideological objection to the new president and his prospective governance, it’s hard to understand or justify the far less militant and indignant reaction to the programs that enabled his electoral victory in 2024.

The unequivocal and decisive nature of that victory represents one of the most important explanations for the dramatically different responses by Democrats and other voices on the left when it comes to accepting the outcome. In 2016, part of the rage expressed by the resistance reflected the sense that the election had been unfair and unrepresentative in its outcome. Hillary Clinton won the national popular tally by nearly 3,000,000 votes, drawing 48.2% to Trump’s 46.1%. His success in the Electoral College was helped by more than 5% that went to third- and fourth-party candidates, led the heart-broken Clintonistas in their pink, feline-eared “pussyhats” to march by their hundreds of thousands in indignation at Trump’s anomalous advantage in the electoral college. In 2024, on the other hand, pollsters had predicted a close race from the beginning so the Republican success came as much less of a shock, and Trump’s advantage of 1.5 million in the popular vote, along with his healthy electoral college dominance, left no real question or contention as to the national winner within twenty-four hours of the balloting.

Another factor that served to prevent the sort of impassioned protest that had greeted Trump’s first success in 2016 reflected the greatly enhanced familiarity that assisted him in his third campaign. Mitchell Brown, a professor of political science at Auburn University, cites the important role of what psychologists describe as “habituation.” She says “when you first see something unexpected, it’s really jarring and you react strongly. But the more you see and normalize something that was unexpected… the more habituated you become to it.”

This doesn’t mean that Democrats should suddenly settle down to make themselves comfortable with the excesses and eccentricities of Trumpian governance, but it does suggest that they will feel less impulse to view his latest rise to power in apocalyptic and absolutist terms. After all, we previously survived four full years of his prior presidency and, as the election indicated, for most Americans the memories of that term of office could be classified as mixed, at worst.

Of course, it’s no sure thing that the latest effort to Make America Great Again will prove in any way acceptable to moderates, independents and progressives who recall and condemn the president-elect’s bulging collection of flaws and foibles. But resistance to those weaknesses must involve more than marching in the streets, listening to inflamed orations by armies of Hollywood celebrities, and fantasizing over new efforts at impeachment (they’ve tried that—twice—and it’s a self-defeating strategy).

Instead, the right road for resistance involves the traditional map for a viable opposition party: gearing up to challenge the incumbent’s fragile Congressional majorities in the upcoming midterm elections, while responding to his excesses with compromise where possible, or principled and energetic opposition when necessary. This may not prove as flashy and attention-getting as the project of rousing hordes of your party’s furious faithful to cast a shadow on the lavish celebration of the upcoming inaugural merriment, but it is the healthy American way, and most effective means, to lead the nation in a better direction.