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The #Resistance is no more. But a quieter fightback to Trump 2.0 is growing | Jon Allsop

In January 2017, the day after Donald Trump was first inaugurated as US president, hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Washington for a “Women’s March” that was actually a broader-based vessel for popular rage. Not that the atmosphere was uniformly angry: I covered the march for a US radio network and found pockets of joy among the crowd. “It’s really exciting,” a teenager from New York told me. “It’s democracy in action.”

The march, and parallel events around the country, was emblematic of what came to be known as the #Resistance, a loud liberal movement in opposition to Trump that took the form not only of mass protests, but court fights, adversarial media coverage (and increased consumption thereof) and grassroots organising. The movement made cult figures (not to mention merchandise) of figures seen as standing up for institutions, from the Trump-probing special counsel Robert Mueller to the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Now though, as Trump’s second term is under way, a consensus has formed that the #Resistance is dead. Almost as soon as Trump won in November, media leaders swore off the term, and liberal news consumers appeared to tune out. Titans of tech and culture who criticised Trump last time around either openly backed him or grovelled at his feet; even staunch Democrats suggested that they would find areas of common ground with his new administration. Protests around the inauguration were much smaller. Ross Barkan argued recently in the New York Times Magazine that the era of “hyperpolitics” – or politics as an all-consuming social battleground – is now over.

Why? The principal answer might simply be fatigue. Trump is an exhausting figure, and American politics has now revolved around him for nearly a decade. And hopes that the burst of first-term energy against him would exile him from public life proved forlorn.

The opposition to Trump also appears rudderless. The institutional Democratic party might technically have a new leader – Ken Martin, a little-known apparatchik – but for now, it lacks towering political talents. Many supporters doubtless feel disillusioned after watching Joe Biden cast the last election in existential terms, then fail to do everything in his power to ensure that the Democrats won it, before welcoming Trump back with warm words and a cuppa.

And, if the Democrats are palpably diminished, there is a sense that Trump stands astride the political landscape as a colossus. In 2016, he won the electoral college but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, making room for the conclusion that his win was a fluke or somehow illegitimate. This time, the country knew the threat he posed, and he won decisively anyway. Trump and his allies have seized on that fact to claim a huge mandate.

As the influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted, Trump’s victory has percolated down into US culture. Big tech firms and other industries may have submitted to Trump’s will this time out of fear that he would otherwise use the power of the state against them. But it seems equally likely that they are using the clarity of his victory as a permission slip to distance themselves from pesky liberal imperatives (diversity! Workers’ rights!) that they never liked, while seizing on areas of interest alignment and ideological affinity. For all his populist rhetoric, Trump has always been a slasher of tax and red tape at heart.

The vibes, as the saying goes, have shifted since 2017. Trump has proved to be a lasting reflection of deep currents in American public opinion, not an accident. Peppy Obama-era liberalism is discredited. The #Resistance really does appear to be dead.

Get rid of the hashtag and capital letter, however, and a small “r” resistance to Trump is still visible, as the Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr and New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister have argued. In-person protests are kicking back into gear – albeit still on a smaller scale – as are Democratic blocking moves in Congress. There’s evidence that liberals are tuning back into the news.

None of this matches the mass energy and ubiquitous liberal iconography of 2017. But the less flashy work that undergirded the #Resistance – civil society groups suing to block Trump’s policies; local-level organising – is very much in evidence again this time. The Women’s March was a headline-grabbing show of force, but the courts were the most important brake on Trump in the early days of his first term. That’s already been the case again.

And Trump is more vulnerable than he might appear to be, for two main reasons. First, if it was an overreaction to think that his 2017 win was an aberration, it’s also an overreaction to see him as an electoral Goliath now; he won the popular vote last year only narrowly and with a plurality, not a majority. Second, he might be enjoying a honeymoon, but his radical and chaotic early moves in office are already likely eating up his political and cultural capital.

In part, this is by design. Trump and his allies want to overwhelm their opponents, as has been well documented. But I think they also want to provoke them. Trumpism as a political project is about conquest, yes, but it’s also about conflict – it needs resistance in order to thrive. It is a politics that will keep on pushing until opponents can’t not fight back.

The past few weeks might have heralded the death of a specific brand or aesthetic of oppositional politics. But the underpinning idea is alive. It might not feel exciting any more, but democracy is still in action.