When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, an angry opposition immediately rose to meet him. News outlets, including Slate, saw spikes in subscription numbers and published roundups of practical actions people could take to mitigate the harms of his presidency. Planned Parenthood saw 40 times more donations in the wake of Trump’s win than in a typical week. Perhaps most memorably, the day after the election, a grandmother in Hawai’i started inviting her friends to join her for a demonstration after Trump’s inauguration—an event that would become the Women’s March, which drew millions into the streets for the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

Over the next couple of months, the so-called resistance swelled. Groups like Indivisible and Run for Something sprang up to offer direction to the newly politically enraged. Existing organizations, like Greenpeace and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, enjoyed surges in volunteer interest. EMILYs List saw sign-ups for candidate trainings increase 22-fold as tens of thousands of women considered running for office.

The fledgling resistance movement in 2016 was decentralized and expansive, without a single unifying principle save for stopping Trump’s agenda. And with a few years of hindsight, it has become clear that it wasn’t really a movement at all. It was a pervasive shift in left-leaning America’s orientation toward politics—“protest is the new brunch”—and a mass awakening of people who’d suddenly come to the realization that they couldn’t just sit by and allow the arc of the moral universe to take care of itself.

But this time around, the post-Trump-election vibe has a different quality. In place of frenzied calls to action on the Facebook group Pantsuit Nation, there are meme accounts posting ironic, detached jokes about the end of democracy. Rather than slapdash plans for protests, there are more calls for self-care and self-preparation, like stocking up on Plan B and gender-affirming hormones. I contacted several organizations that saw bumps in donations after Trump’s 2016 win to ask how the 2024 response compares. A few didn’t answer my inquiry, and the ones who did wouldn’t tell me how their fundraising was going.

There are a lot of reasons for the change in reaction for Trump’s second victory. First of all, his election was not a surprise in the same way it was eight years ago. And the singular horror of imagining someone like Trump in the White House, or controlling the military, has dulled a bit. (Credit to him—he has successfully expanded the Overton window of what we believe a president can be.) In 2016, there was a sense that the Trump era might be a temporary, four-year nightmare. After all, he’d lost the popular vote; most of America didn’t want this.

This time, it’s tough to argue that America doesn’t want this. And we know exactly what we’re getting into. We’ve lived through an entire Trump term, an insurrection, and a yearslong denial of the past election’s results. His unfettered dominance in the Republican Party has made clear that he is a lasting force who has permanently reshaped the GOP. He was exactly himself all campaign long, and he is poised to win the popular vote.

In 2016, the mandate for an opposition movement was simple: stopping the agenda of an ill-prepared, inexperienced president. In 2024, it is much broader: beating back a well-orchestrated conservative plan to usher us into a punitive authoritarianism, all under the control of a Supreme Court and federal judiciary packed with right-wing Trump loyalists. It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing a spate of protests and donations can stop.

So, no, there will be no re-creating the energy of the moment when America first realized that it was capable of electing a President Trump. It would be preposterous to expect otherwise. But it’s worth figuring out what a public effort against Trump’s agenda in 2025 could look like. And despite the bleak feeling of the present moment, there is reason to believe that a resistance impulse will emerge, even if it looks different than it did before.

It’s easy to forget just how quickly the postelection outrage transformed into something tangible in 2016. By just two weeks after Trump’s first win, the Women’s March had already coalesced out of several disparate Facebook events—and been criticized for its haphazard planning and whiteness. In those first two weeks, women in nearly every state created Facebook pages for coordinating charter buses and ride-shares to Washington, D.C. The city’s police department was already fielding calls from women asking if the march........

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