Trump 100 days: after tepid start, protest movements – and Democrats – find footing

Those opposed to Donald Trump’s agenda started his second term on a worse footing than the beginning of his first term.

This time, the social media platform owners who previously tried to tamp down on false claims stood with him at his inauguration. Some major media outlets attempted to stay in Trump’s good graces. Democrats were wrecked by a popular vote loss, believing they lacked the backing to lead an opposition. The courts were stacked in Trump’s favor and had ruled the president had absolute immunity from criminal punishment for “official acts”.

“Strategically, we are objectively worse off this time than we were last time,” said David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University who studies political advocacy and strategy.

While Trump’s first term began with the massive Women’s March, which drew millions from around the country, the second term’s resistance grew more slowly and deliberately. As Trump passes his 100th day in the White House, the pushback to his agenda has grown considerably, and both Democratic lawmakers and people across the US have ramped up their actions in opposition to Trump and his policies that have struck directly at the established norms and practices of US governance.

This opposition has included street protests across the country that have grown in size since February. The largest single day of protest since Trump retook the White House came on 5 April, dubbed “Hands Off”, when several million people rallied in cities and towns nationwide.

The courts have also proved a potent avenue of pushback against the second Trump administration. Legal advocacy groups and Democratic attorneys general have hit Trump with lawsuit after lawsuit over his executive orders and policy directives. The Democratic attorneys general, in particular, have had a high level of success in stalling Trump’s policies.

Despite the common refrain that the Trump 2.0 protests have been tepid, research from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium showed that there were twice as many street protests between 22 January of this year and March than in the same period in Trump’s first term. The 2025 People’s March on 18 January, the Women’s March successor, marked the most protests in a single day in over a year, the consortium found.

These large demonstrations have come as the Trump administration cracks down on protesters, trying to deport some who participated in pro-Palestinian protests at their colleges.

“The fact you can get that many million people turning out shows that they are not all afraid enough yet,” said Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard political scientist in the Crowd Counting Consortium. “It’s important to have moments where there are breakthroughs on the public awareness – if you feel like what’s going on is wrong, you’re definitely not alone, and actually there’s a lot of people who agree.”

Growing street protests and economic resistance

Vincent Bevins, who wrote a book about mass protest movements around the world in the 2010s and how those protests often did not lead to durable change, said the Women’s March in 2017 was an important moment for the anti-Trump opposition, but that it didn’t get in the way of Trump completing his first term and then winning another one.

He said he thought the strategy that protesters are using this term – demonstrate against Trump’s overreach instead of his inauguration – was an effective one.

“A repeat of the Women’s March would have likely been read in larger society as saying, we wish that Kamala Harris would have won,” and that message does little when Trump already won the White House, Bevins said

Though inauguration weekend was quiet in Washington – a drastic change from the estimated half-million people who came to the nation’s capital during inauguration weekend in 2017 – people started taking to the streets again by February. The burgeoning, often decentralized anti-Trump protest movement began in part on Reddit. Established advocacy groups also began to rally outside government agencies in Washington as the so-called “department of government efficiency” moved from agency to agency to slash programs and staff, calling attention to the cuts.

Musk, the world’s richest person who is cutting government programs through his Doge agency, proved a potent target for protesters, who derided the oligarchy and chanted against kings. An economic boycott of Tesla, Musk’s car company, and protests at his dealerships tanked the company’s revenues, showing the power of withholding dollars. Some acts of vandalism marked the boycott, leading the government to install harsh penalties for “domestic terrorism” against the company.

Protests grew in size over the next two months, with a 5 April protest dubbed “Hands Off” drawing several million people to big cities and small towns alike. The protest served as a catch-all for anti-Trump coalitions, and messages calling for Trump to stop meddling with social programs, the courts, immigrants and trans people.

In one red area in Minnesota, a newspaper columnist said 5 April was the biggest turnout she or others who attended could remember seeing. “Politicians from this area might not change their votes or their rhetoric but they had to have taken note of the crowd size,” the Minnesota Star Tribune columnist wrote.

The grassroots nature of the current protest movement is beneficial at a time when many don’t think the Democratic party has a lot of credibility, said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“I think that actually has the potential to be more effective in the long run,” said West. “The fact that it’s ordinary people from across the country actually gives the protests more authenticity.”

Democrats find a spine

Elected Democrats have followed, not led, as grassroots opposition materialized, grasping the energy in the streets and starting to launch opposition movements of their own.

Earlier this year, some protests targeted Democrats, asking them to unify as an opposition party. Some elected Democratic leaders said those efforts were misdirected. “What leverage do we have?” the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, asked out loud in February. Some Democrats said they should work with Trump and Republicans when their priorities aligned.

Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, helped allow for the passage of a Republican spending bill, spoiling what little structural opposition the Democrats had in Congress. The missed opportunity led to ongoing calls for Schumer’s resignation, which he has rejected.

But other Democrats more quickly took up the resistance mantle. The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have toured the states on a “Stop Oligarchy” tour that has drawn tens of thousands of people. Other elected Democrats and the Democratic National Committee have held town halls in Republican districts, and angry constituents showed up to the few Republican town halls armed with pointed questions.

“What you want to do when you lack the ability to actually stop the madness is provide a vessel for effective outrage and, like, vibes,” Karpf said. “Vibes aren’t enough, but vibes are worth a bit.

“The thing that I like about AOC and Bernie going on tour isn’t that that’s going to be the turning point that changes it all, because nothing will be right now. But it allows people to come together in solidarity and feel not alone.”

As crowds kept showing up to oppose the Trump administration, elected Democrats started finding ways to meet the moment. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker gave a record-breaking 25-hour speech on the Senate floor to draw attention to the harms of Trump’s agenda. A group of Democrats, including the Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen, went to El Salvador to call attention to the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a man deported against court orders. Booker and Jeffries held a sit-in on the steps of the US Capitol on Sunday, inviting other elected officials to join them.

“People have complained Democrats have been too passive, and Booker very effectively made the point that he’s really upset about the things that are happening, and he’s willing to put himself on the line,” West said.

Where does it go from here?

Trump’s 100-day approval ratings are the lowest in 80 years, and polls are showing growing opposition to his agenda. But the next opportunity to retake Congress isn’t until 2026, and the opposition’s most potent adversary, Musk, is reportedly leaving his government role soon.

Protests are expected to continue and to grow, organizers say. The next collective day of protest is set for 1 May, May Day, focusing on labor and immigrants’ rights.

Indivisible, the progressive advocacy group formed during the first Trump administration, has seen its numbers rise considerably since Trump won again in November. Run for Something, an organization that helps progressives run for office, said in April that nearly 40,000 people had reached out to get information on how to launch a campaign since the November 2024 election.

While the protests themselves might not succeed in stopping Trump’s agenda, they could inspire defections from Trump supporters.

Defections help movements grow and then win, said Chenoweth, of Harvard. It’s not getting the most diehard Maga people to sour on Trump; it’s getting people on the periphery to move one notch over and stop going with the status quo.

“One of the things that’s hard for folks is to figure out how to pull apart what looks like this very monolithic extreme group,” Chenoweth said. “And they’re never as monolithic as they look. There are a lot of people in the periphery who are not as extreme as they come across.”