The United States grabbing land from an ally sounds like the stuff of a Netflix political thriller. But every American should contemplate three realities about Donald Trump’s aggressive desire to acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory. First, unlike his usual shtick, in which he floats wild ideas and then he and his aides alternate between saying he was serious and saying he might have been joking, he means it. The Danes seem to believe him, and so should Americans. When institutions begin planning based on the president’s directions, as the White House is now doing, it’s no longer idle talk.
Second, Trump is calling for actions that likely contravene American and international law. He is undermining the peace and stability of an allied nation, while threatening a campaign of territorial conquest. He refuses to rule out an unprovoked war of aggression, a violation of the United Nations Charter and an international crime that would be little different in kind from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to seize Ukraine. Finally, the almost-certain illegality of any attempt to seize Greenland against the will of its people and the Danish government means that if Trump directs the U.S. military to engage in such an operation, he could well precipitate the greatest civil-military crisis in American history since the Civil War.
How do we know Trump is serious? “One way or another,” the president crowed in his speech to a Joint Session of Congress last month, “we’re gonna get it.” A few weeks later, in case anyone missed the point, Trump told NBC: “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 percent.” Trump says a lot of strange things, certainly. He has mused about striking hurricanes with nuclear weapons, running for a constitutionally prohibited third term, staying in office even if he loses, and annexing Canada as the 51st state. But when a president publicly makes a vow to Congress to do something and then repeats that vow over and over, such statements are not trial balloons; they are policy.
And sure enough, Trump has followed up by sending Vice President J. D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, as unwelcome emissaries to Greenland. Vance—a neo-isolationist who apparently expresses opposition to the president’s plans only in Signal chats—has now embraced Trump’s old-school imperialism. Worse, Vance tried to press Trump’s case by boorishly criticizing Denmark’s relationship with the island, smarmily telling the Danes: “You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.” (Imagine the reaction in Washington if a European leader came, say, to Puerto Rico, castigated America’s management of the commonwealth, and urged the island to sever ties with the United States.) But at least he promised that military force, which to gain Greenland would have to be directed against Denmark, a NATO ally, was not going to be part of America’s efforts.
Trump, true to form, short-sheeted his hapless VP the next day by saying that military force was not, in fact, “off the table.”
On Monday, The Washington Postreported that the White House has begun work on estimating the costs of controlling Greenland in “the most concrete effort yet to turn President Donald Trump’s desire to acquire the Danish territory into actionable policy.” Once these kinds of meetings start taking place in the White House, the next step is usually to send out orders to the rest of the American national-security establishment, including the CIA and the Pentagon, to begin planning for various contingencies.
Even if the American people supported direct aggression against our own allies—by a large margin, they do not—public opinion is not a legitimate excuse for treaty-breaking. Treaties are the law of the land in the United States, and the president’s Article II powers as commander in chief do not allow him to wave a monarchical hand and violate those treaties at will. Just as Trump cannot legally issue orders to violate the Geneva Conventions or other agreements to which the United States is a signatory, he does not have the right to break America’s pact with NATO at will and effectively declare war against Denmark. When George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces into combat against Iraq in 2003, some of his critics claimed that his actions were illegal, but Bush at least had the fig leaf of a congressional resolution, as well as a lengthy list of UN Security Council resolutions. Trump will have literally nothing except his insistent greed and glory-seeking vanity.
If the U.S. military is given direct orders to seize Greenland—that is, if it is told to enter the territory of another nation, pull down that nation’s flag, and then claim the ground in the name of the United States—it will have been ordered to attack an ally and engage in a war of conquest, even if no shot is ever fired. These would be illegal orders, because they would violate not only our treaty obligations but also international prohibitions against unprovoked wars of aggression. At home, the president would be contravening the Constitution: Article II does not allow the commander in chief to run around the planet seizing territories he happens to want.
At that point, every senior commander, from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on down, has a moral obligation to refuse to accept or support such a command. Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a military-ethics professor at the Naval War College (where I also taught for many years) told me, speaking in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the Defense Department, that civilian leaders have “the right to be wrong,” but that if the United States moves against Greenland, especially if both America and Denmark are part of NATO, “senior military leaders have an obligation to advise against this course of action and resign if necessary.” Shanks Kaurin added that this obligation might even extend to a requirement to refuse to draw up any plans.
But what if the orders are less obvious? Trump long ago mastered the Mafia-like talent of making his desires evident without actually telling others to engage in unsavory acts. In that case, he could issue instructions to the military aimed at intimidating Greenland that on their face are legal but that are obviously aggressive.
Retired Major General Charles Dunlap, who served as the deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force and now teaches law at Duke, suggested that Trump could take advantage, for example, of the wide latitude given to the United States in its basing agreement with Greenland. The president, Dunlap told me in an email, could choose to engage in “a gross misreading of the agreement” and move a large number of troops to Greenland as “a show of force aimed at establishing a fait accompli of some kind.” Military officers are required to presume that commands from higher authority are legal orders, and so a series of directives aimed at swarming forces into Greenland would likely be obeyed, Dunlap said, “because of the potential ambiguity” of such directives “as well as the inference of lawfulness.”
In any case, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have taken important steps to ensure that no one is left in the Pentagon to tell them that their orders might be unlawful. All of the top military lawyers whose job is to provide independent legal advice on such matters have been fired. And, as Dunlap notes, courts are notoriously reluctant to get involved in such questions, which is why Congress must step in. “The military,” he said, “ought not be put in the middle of something like this.”
Americans used to take their presidents far more seriously. Before Trump, when a president spoke, his words instantly became the policy of the United States government—for better or worse. When President Ronald Reagan caught his own aides flat-footed by bungling a policy message during a press conference in 1983, for example, a Reagan-administration official later said: “You can’t say ‘No, he didn’t mean it’ or ‘That’s not really government policy.’ That’s out of the question.”
But those days are long gone. As a direct result of Trump’s many off-the-cuff ruminations and long stretches of political glossolalia, Trump has convinced many Americans not to take their president at his word until it’s too late. (Consider how many people, for example, refused to believe that he would impose massive global tariffs, a policy they can now examine more closely by the light of a burning stock market.)
I realize that this entire discussion seems like utter lunacy. War against … Denmark? But when the president says something, it’s policy. Trump insists that he must be taken seriously. Americans and their elected representatives across the political spectrum should oblige him.
White House staffers, it seems, had better hope that they stay in Laura Loomer’s good graces. This week, Loomer—a far-right provocateur who has described herself as “pro–white nationalism” and Islam as a “cancer on humanity”—met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. After she reportedly railed against National Security Council officials she believed were disloyal to the president, the White House fired six NSC staff members the next day. More firings could be on their way: Yesterday, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.”
Loomer doesn’t have an official job in the Trump administration, and the president has denied that she had anything to do with the NSC firings. But she is one of the president’s confidantes, and she has come to exercise a significant amount of influence over the White House. Lots of people in Trump’s inner circle have unlikely backgrounds (defense secretaries are not usually hired straight from Fox News), but Loomer’s is probably the least likely of them all. Over the past decade, she has earned a reputation as an unapologetically racist troll. In 2018, after she was banned from Twitter for criticizing then-incoming Representative Ilhan Omar and her Muslim faith, she famously handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter’s New York City headquarters. She was reinstated after Elon Musk bought the platform, and has continued to post racist things on X: In September, she suggested that a Kamala Harris election win would mean that “the White House will smell like curry.” (Loomer did not respond to a request for comment.)
Loomer’s power marks how little Trump now seems to care about being around people who have expressed racist and extremist ideas and kept racist and extremist company. She is a bit like the Forrest Gump of Trumpworld—an unlikely but persistent character who just keeps popping up during some of the right’s biggest moments. When Trump got off his private plane on his way to the presidential debate in September, Loomer appeared with him. The next day, when Trump traveled to New York for a 9/11-anniversary memorial, Loomer was again there with him. (She has called 9/11 an “inside job.”) As I wrote at the time, prominent Republicans did not like that their presidential candidate was associating himself with Loomer, and publicly challenged Trump over it. He seemingly has not listened.
Loomer has also played a role in directing discourse on the right. She was integral to drumming up the hoax that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets, which became one of the most prominent right-wing causes du jour during the presidential campaign. In December, she instigated a war on the right over high-skilled immigration after she criticized the administration’s hiring of Sriram Krishnan as an AI-policy adviser and called attention to his past comments advocating for expanding H-1B visas. Most workers on H-1B visas are from India, and Loomer posted that Indian immigrants are “third world invaders.”
There is perhaps no one with direct access to the president who has been as outwardly and vociferously racist and bigoted. For all of the arguments that critics of Musk make about how he has boosted white supremacy on X, he has maintained a level of plausible deniability by never disparaging minority groups in a manner as direct as Loomer has. Someone like Loomer likely would not have had access to Trump in his first term. Richard Spencer never made it into Trump’s administration, and the president went out of his way to disavow the white nationalist. In 2018, when CNN reported that Darren Beattie, then a White House speechwriter, had spoken at an event that also featured a white nationalist, he was fired. But now Beattie has been hired to a senior role in this administration.
The president has already clearly established that his second term will be more extreme. Instead of the limited Muslim travel ban, he is pushing for mass deportations and has effectively shut down USAID, an agency largely devoted to helping poorer countries. But by welcoming Loomer into his inner circle, Trump is offering an even starker glimpse into how this administration is different. She is a testament to how much further to the right Trump has moved since his first term, and how much further he may be open to going.
Déjà vu: TikTok’s time was nearly up, and then President Donald Trump stepped in to save it. This happened in January, and also earlier today, when Trump said that he will sign another executive order to delay a possible ban on the social-media app.
Out of concern about the app’s possible weaponization by the Chinese government, Congress passed a law in April 2024 that required TikTok to spin off from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or else stop operating in the United States. When the deadline for such a sale initially arrived earlier this year, American TikTok users had the hallucinatory experience of losing access to the app … for 14 hours. Trump intervened for the first time then by pushing the deadline for a sale back for 75 days—an extension he is now doubling—and the app soon came back. Months of news coverage, analysis, discussion, viral memes, and even some widely covered “Keep TikTok” protests outside the U.S. Capitol culminated in a brief shutout and a punted deadline. The app reappeared with a pop-up message thanking Trump for the reprieve: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!”
TikTok went back to business, mostly as usual. Many American companies and rich people have been rumored to have an interest in acquiring the app. These have ranged from the interesting but unserious (YouTube personality MrBeast or one of the Shark Tank guys) to the serious but uninteresting (current TikTok U.S. data-center operator Oracle) to the obvious names that would pop up no matter what big tech acquisition we were talking about (Elon Musk, Amazon, Microsoft). In his post today, Trump alluded to a pending deal without specifics. “My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” he said. “The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed.”
This drama is getting tiresome. It’s just an app, and many Americans—at least those who are old enough to vote—don’t actually care that much about it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that TikTok’s popularity was second only to YouTube among teenagers, but it’s far from the country’s most popular social-media app overall, despite its salience as a conversational stand-in for “internet culture” or “annoying thing that young people like.” “It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic in January, pointing out that only a third of U.S. adults interviewed for another Pew survey said they’d ever used it. (More of these people say they use Pinterest!) Among young adults, she added, Snapchat and Instagram are more popular.
More recent polling from Pew shows a country with negative but not-very-strong feelings about the ban. Fifty percent of adults supported the idea in March 2023, and that number has now dropped to 34 percent. The percentage of Americans who oppose it has grown from 22 percent to 32 percent. But the percentage of Americans who say they’re not sure about it has risen as well, from 28 to 33 percent. We have approximately a three-way tie on the issue, with opposition and support about as prevalent as shoulder shrugs. Pew didn’t see a big partisan divide on this, either—39 percent of Republicans support the ban, compared with 30 percent of Democrats. People who oppose the ban tend to do so on free-speech grounds, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. They also tend to say they’re unconvinced by arguments about TikTok’s threat to national security.
Perhaps the problem is that these arguments were abstract in the way that data protection is always kind of abstract. They also seemed hypothetical, because as far as the public knows, the U.S. currently has no evidence that Chinese intelligence has ever accessed Americans’ data en masse via TikTok. That’s not to say there’s no chance that TikTok could be used for some nefarious purpose, but the app is not exactly an outlier in this regard; ByteDance employees have been caught using it to track journalists, for example, similar to the accusations more than a decade ago that employees at Uber were using their app’s “God View” to track individual users. The government has also made it seem like we have bigger problems on our hands when it comes to China (and not just a trade war). For instance, the Biden administration accused the Chinese of intelligence efforts to gain control of American power grids and water pipelines, which sounds acutely terrifying; the vague notion of China pushing propaganda on social media falls more into the bucket of “not ideal.” Trump acknowledged this disconnect in January with his signature wild directness: “Is it that important for China to be spying on young people? On young kids watching crazy videos?”
Of course, he was also the one to have first proposed the ban, back in 2020. At that time, some of his more important allies were anti–social media, arguably anti-tech Republicans such as Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who argued strenuously that TikTok was an urgent threat to national security. This was a time-limited approach—years passed and nightmare scenarios remained hypothetical. And Trump’s commitment to the ban disappeared when he was out of office. While campaigning in 2024, Trump made a TikTok account that now has more than 15 million followers; in his second term, his administration is tightly knit with the tech industry.
During President Joe Biden’s term, Congress followed through on the ban seemingly because it represented a quick and dramatic intervention to ease anxieties about social media in general. (This is the logic behind the billionaire Frank McCourt’s bid to acquire the app and strip it of its famous recommendation algorithm.) But Americans don’t currently appear to care very much about the narrative that TikTok is addictive, either. Fewer than half of the Pew respondents who said they support a ban cited people spending too much time on TikTok as a major reason. It wasn’t among the top three reasons overall.
The law on the books now reads as the semipermanent result of a political moment that has ended. The whole years-long debate may soon feel like a hallucination, too.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Baseball, perhaps fittingly for America’s pastime, is a game of stubborn tradition and incremental change. This year, the Yankees will allow their players to don beards (and their fans to eat tiramisu out of little helmets). But women remain unable to play serious baseball, no matter how much they adore the sport. My colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany asks in our April magazine issue: “In a game in which everything matters, in which we who love it wish to see every possible outcome unfold, how can we stomach the absence of women’s baseball?” Today’s newsletter explores the changes to baseball in recent years, and what has stayed the same.
On Baseball
Why Aren’t Women Allowed to Play Baseball?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
Women have always loved America’s pastime. It has never loved them back.
Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule: “The New York Yankees have abandoned their half-century prohibition of beards, a policy that was archaic even from its infancy,” Steve Rushin writes. “Now I find myself strangely, unexpectedly bereft, stroking my own beard in contemplation.”
How AI baseball explains the limits of AI: The iconic Yankees broadcaster John Sterling reminds us that what makes us human cannot be imitated, Yair Rosenberg wrote last year.
Last Saturday, I paid a visit to a little slice of the resistance in its current, attenuated form. Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, there have been many street protests, but they have been small and diffuse: a few hundred people angered by the defunding of USAID, or a couple thousand in support of national parks. The most organized effort so far, the 50501 movement (for “50 states. 50 protests. 1 movement.”), is a coalition of activists whose name telegraphs breadth much more than depth.
At an intersection outside a Tesla showroom in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, about 200 people were gathered on the sidewalk. They banged tambourines and clanged cymbals, trying to get passing trucks and cars to honk against Elon Musk, Trump’s most important adviser and a purveyor of electric cars. Of all the responses to the new administration, the anti-Tesla protests have left a bruise—as of this writing, the company’s stock has declined by about half since December. There were signs demanding Musk’s deportation, and one that asked drivers to Honk If You Think Elon Is a Dork. Someone in a gorilla suit held up a placard that read He Kills Monkeys, Too.
For all the energy on the street—and it was energetic—there was a preponderance of gray hair, and not many young people or strollers in evidence. Those who showed up seemed to have a highly developed muscle memory for activism, going back perhaps to the anti–Iraq War demonstrations in 2003, or even Vietnam. This appeared to be a protest by and for a committed core. Maybe the most revealing poster was one that declared The Protests Will Get Bigger Until the Constitution is Respected. This was a threat, of course, but also an acknowledgment that there was plenty of room to grow.
Nevertheless, for those in the exhausted anti-Trump coalition, these bursts of opposition are giving hope. Today, a coalition of liberal groups under the banner “Hands Off!” is planning hundreds of such actions around the country. This is the kind of activity that has led members of Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks acts of civil dissent, to conclude recently that the resistance is “alive and well,” with protests “far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest.” They have what at first glance seems like an unexpected finding: In February 2025, twice as many protests took place as in February 2017, during the tumultuous beginning of Trump’s first term: 2,085 versus 937. The major caveat is that what they count as a protest event could be a couple of people handing out flyers on campus. Altogether, the number of actual protesters is far, far below what it was eight years ago.
The best estimate for this past February was somewhere from 125,000 to 184,000 participants, according to Jeremy Pressman, one of the consortium’s co-directors and a professor at the University of Connecticut. This would put the average protest size anywhere from 60 to 88 people. In March, Pressman said, those numbers increased significantly, but the per-protest average stayed roughly the same.
What this suggests, at best, is a different model of protest movement: highly decentralized, moving at a snail’s pace, more a slog than a resistance. “Something is happening,” the journalist Ali Velshi wrote on MSNBC last week, “a different kind of movement building right now, one that has had steady and sustained momentum.” In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last emphasized the strategic advantage of a movement that makes its way from the hinterlands toward Washington.
It is different, but is it better? Is a single protest of 100,000 people equal to 1,000 actions with 100 people at each? I posed this zen koan of a question to Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor and Consortium co-director who coined the idea that if any protest movement drew 3.5 percent of a country’s population, it could achieve its goals. (That would equal nearly 12 million people in the United States today.) Does it matter how you get to this figure, all at once or bit by bit? “We don’t really know,” Chenoweth told me, “and conceivably either path produces momentum.”
So far into Trump 2.0, though, the path of decentralized slowness has had a paradoxical effect: It’s giving activists lots to do but is leaving a much larger population of dissenters without an expressive outlet. What makes a disaffected Gen Zer or a busy Millennial parent drop what they are doing and head into the streets is very different from what motivates hard-core protesters to pick up their cymbals. That much larger group needs to feel both the safety and the collective impact that comes with a mass march. “Power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition. Most people join protests to express that power, not to emphasize their marginality. And it is precisely this type of action that, in the face of one barrier after another, feels more difficult than it ever did.
Trump’s first term was punctuated by a series of monster gatherings: the Women’s March that greeted his inauguration (estimated at as many as 4.6 million people all over the country), the March for Our Lives following the 2018 Parkland shooting (1.2 million), and—dwarfing all previous American protest movements—the Black Lives Matter demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd (anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people, according to polls taken at the time). The Women’s March was highly organized and concentrated, while the protests in June 2020 were largely spontaneous and spread out. But what made all of these significant was the measure by which protest has long been judged: the overwhelming numbers of people who took part.
On its face, the slackening of interest in demonstrating against Trump in his second term—despite the preponderance of issues that trigger his opposition every day—can be understood simply as a change in the political atmosphere. Trump’s 2017 win was a shock for liberals expecting to inaugurate the first female president. His failure to win the popular vote made his election feel contestable, even illegitimate. And powerful people, even a number of Republicans, were ready to stand up to Trump’s overreach. All of this created a sense that there was a door that protest could push open. None of these factors operates in 2025: Trump is not a surprise, he won the popular vote, and both his party and the business elite are fully on his side. Pressman wondered if this has created “a different kind of shock,” one that is more destabilizing than motivating: “Maybe people were just kind of pushed on their back feet. And it takes a while, or ever, to be involved in it.”
After the University of Glasgow lecturer Michael T. Heaney surveyed participants from both the Women’s March and January’s much shrunken People’s March, he emerged with a clear contrast. There was a 12 percent drop in enthusiasm about politics, he told me; “hope” as a motivator for protesting fell by 10 percent, and “pride” by 9 percent. What rose from 2017 to 2025? “Frustration,” by 3 percent, and “anger,” by 8 percent.
Alongside demoralization runs justifiable caution; the act of protest itself has become more dangerous. Not only has the president said that he would have little compunction about using the military to deal with “the enemy from within,” but the tactics of surveillance—including facial recognition, geolocation tracking, and AI-enhanced identification—have gotten more pervasive and sophisticated. The police and the FBI have long used and abused tools for monitoring protest—this sordid history goes back to COINTELPRO in the 1960s. But the average protester at a peaceful 20th-century gathering could at least assume that they would melt into a sea of indistinguishable people. Technology has made that impossible. There is no safety in numbers. You cannot disappear.
Simply being present at a protest makes you vulnerable, as Chris Gilliard, a Just Tech fellow at the Social Science Research Council, told me: “All the devices that people carry and wear are constantly extruding data, from the car they might have used to get there to the cameras in subway stations to their watches and their phones and everything else you can imagine.” Among the safety instructions provided by an organizer of today’s nonviolent demonstrations was the bolded sentence “Do not assume you are safe.” Also: “MASK. UP … disable location, biometrics and data on your phone, at the very least. Have your emergency contacts written on your body.” This is not a welcoming message for an infrequent protester or a citizen looking to voice her concern for the first time. No wonder that a smaller, local protest is more of a draw at the moment. “It’s easier to control; it’s just easier to call it off suddenly if you need to; it’s easier to get away,” Chenoweth told me. “There’s lots of reasons why smaller, more nimble groups would feel more safe.”
There are also an increasing number of laws targeting protest. The volume of federal and state legislation has spiked in the past few years, and particularly since January; 41 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 21 states and in Congress in 2025. This crop includes bills by Congress against protesters “deliberately delaying traffic,” disrupting in any way the construction of a pipeline, or wearing a mask that “oppresses” another person. Among the Trump administration’s demands on Columbia University in return for restoring $400 million in funding was a ban on masks, which many peaceful protesters wear not to menace others but to avoid being identified by facial recognition.
Most of the movements we now consider heroic were originally perceived as lawless nuisances, but Trump has reframed and stigmatized protest in novel ways, conflating nonviolent gatherings with destructive mobs. The reactions to the killing of George Floyd, which did include acts of vandalism and looting, were overwhelmingly peaceful, according to a study by the group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data. But the Black Lives Matter protests of that summer are now remembered by Trump and his supporters as nothing more than a series of riots. The pro-Palestinian activism of the past year and a half has been characterized at times by intimidation, which may have undermined the reputation of protest. But Trump has gone further by painting all legitimate expressions of distress over mass death in Gaza as “pro-Hamas” and moving to deport noncitizens who had anything to do with it. Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia graduate student whose deportation is now pending, became an obvious target for the government precisely because he openly protested, unmasked.
As recently as two years ago, the act of picking up a sign and walking out your door to join a march could feel affirming, even joyous. Now it comes with the fear of surveillance and recrimination, the possibility of felony arrest, and, as a result, a deep sense of resignation.
Why does size matter when it comes to protest? Chenoweth’s magic number notwithstanding, the reasons are less tangible than a simple equation. Large demonstrations are a performance of plurality, with individuals transcending their own individuality to express a larger will. This can happen only when the public around you is more than just the person in the gorilla suit who usually shows up to these things. The experience can be bolstering. It can reassure you not just that you aren’t alone, but that you are a citizen among citizens. The sociologist Émile Durkheim had a wonderful phrase for this: collective effervescence.
And for those watching from on high—senators, judges, CEOs—mass protests are physical manifestations of public opinion. They might make a singular person in the throng invisible, but they make their opinion super-visible. Whatever one feels in retrospect about the 2020 BLM protests, every sector of society had to contend with their enormity—it was a moment when even the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, seemed to feel compelled to take a knee. Trump’s crusade to root out DEI is, in many ways, a backlash to the changes these protests spawned. Outside the U.S., consider a recent textbook example of mass mobilization leading to a successful outcome: the 2023 marches in Israel in response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms. These protests effectively shut down the country and forced Netanyahu to relent.
The most optimistic story activists tell about what is happening now is one of incubation: You can’t get to big unless you go through small. Groups are forming coalitions, developing organizational structures, testing the waters locally. This is crucial work for any movement that wants to be long-lasting. One of the major critiques of the protests that blazed so brightly in Trump’s first term is that they largely flamed out very quickly. So this time could be different. Hunter Dunn, a student at Pepperdine University who is also a national press liaison for the 50501 movement, told me that he is a rarity at these protests because he isn’t a Gen Xer or a Boomer. But as a young person fighting what he described as the hopelessness of his fellow young people, he too has visions of the movement culminating in a classic 1963-style march on Washington. “I don’t think we can just get millions of people there tomorrow if we announce that,” he said. “We have to build towards it over weeks, months, even maybe over a year, because it takes that long to build a movement that is strong enough to go to Washington, go there peacefully, but go there unafraid of the government.”
Yet there is also a pessimistic version, one the activists are not telling: that this is a slog without end. Not a slow gathering with a grand finale, but a defanged alternative to mass mobilization; not the prelude to an eruption, but a reliably timed release valve.
There is no reason yet to think that this will be the story of protest in Trump’s second term. Last week, Senator Chris Murphy said that Democratic Party resistance might require “mass-scale mobilization.” This weekend’s protests may well be an early inflection point in that direction—or they may just continue the scattered pattern seen so far. A few activists also pointed me to the large rallies that have greeted Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their ongoing “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. What was remarked upon was the size of the crowds—more than 30,000 in Denver—the kind of “surprising number,” as Chenoweth put it, that matters for creating momentum.
On a Reddit post drumming up support for the country-wide April 5 protests—more than 1,000 are planned—one user had their own unequivocal answer to the question of how best to build momentum. “We ask you to make it to the largest planned protest you are able to,” protectresist wrote. “200 people each at 100 protests will not make the news. 20,000 people at one protest will.”
