On Saturday, April 5, millions of people attended more than 1,400 protests around the country and around the world. My Bluesky feed was filled with gorgeous pictures of Americans standing up for democracy.
Here in Syracuse, it was of course 48 degrees and raining as many of us started to gather. That never stops us, and we filled Forman Park with about 4,000 people, including LOTS of first-time protesters and LOTS of students. Only 1,900 people had registered in advance, which means that there was LOTS of decentralized organizing (flyers, word of mouth, etc.) happening in the preceding days and weeks.
Through the first couple months of Trump 2.0, there’s been a sort of conventional wisdom that the anti-Trump resistance had gotten tired and gone home. The best available social science data on protest activity does not support this conventional wisdom, and neither do my direct observations on the ground.
My experience with grassroots organizing in Central New York since January 20 has in some ways mirrored my experience from this time eight years ago. Then and now, the network of local Indivisible and allied groups has featured a great combination of seasoned activists and folks who were newly activated by Trump administration abuses.
Here’s what feels different: Eight years ago, we were building the infrastructure of the anti-Trump resistance more-or-less from scratch, both locally and nationally.
Nationally, Indivisible, the Women’s March, March 4 Our Lives, Swing Left, Run for Something, and a number of other key organizations were born. Some of these organizations are still going strong and have been able to ramp up their activity during Trump 2.0 without reinventing the wheel.
Likewise locally, CNY Solidarity Coalition and Indivisible Onondaga County (then known as Indivisible NY-24) were born less than a week following Trump’s November 2016 election (weeks before Indivisible launched nationally, at which point we latched onto the Indivisible name). Back then, we spent many hours deliberating (and sometimes arguing) about what to call ourselves, where to meet, where to host our email lists, and what issues and actions to prioritize.
Today, everything is imperfect, but all of these things are established. In other words, organizations that already exist (and that have persisted for eight years) don’t have to spend time arguing what their name should be, or where to host their email lists.
This combination of local and national infrastructure has made it easier to quickly incorporate hundreds of new members into productive organizing work. Still hard, but easier than it was. Eight years ago, when we were organizing a rally, we typically posted it as a Facebook event, and our rule of thumb was that the number of people who signed up as “going” or “interested” was roughly twice the number who would actually turn up. Today, we typically post our rallies on Mobilize (or similar national platforms). They are accessible to everyone online, not just Facebook users, and Indivisible and other affiliated national organizations regularly push our events out to all known local supporters. MoveOn did this for some of our meetings and actions as far back as January 2017, but the platforms were not as functional and the networks not as large. This year, our rule of thumb has been that the number of people signed up is half the number who actually turn out; in other words, the ratio has fully flipped.
The second Trump administration’s actions to date have directly harmed immigrants, federal workers, trans people, recipients of foreign aid, and others. As the year progresses, these harms are likely to spread ever more broadly. Just this week, the Trump tariffs have started to tank the global economy, and if Elon Musk and congressional Republicans proceed with their current budget plans, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security recipients are likely to face benefit cuts and/or service disruptions before the year is out. For this reason alone, I expect protests to continue to grow, both locally and nationally.
If these protests reach 3.5 percent of the population, the Trump administration is in trouble. That means we need to get 12 million Americans into the streets for peaceful, nonviolent resistance. I’ll post more on this front as the year proceeds, but my main point for the moment is a different one.
The growing protests are amazing, but the vast majority of ongoing organizing activity takes place outside of public view. And my sense is that its scale, scope, and sophistication are underappreciated by journalists and scholars. Here in Syracuse, CNY Solidarity and Indivisible Onondaga County alone have hosted three organizing meetings in 2025 that each featured 100+ new attendees–i.e., 100 new people in January, then a different group of 100 new people in February, and again in March.
Many of these new members have attended trainings on nonviolent protest strategies, both in-person (organized by us) and online (organized by our national affiliates). And many of them have already become active on our email lists, in Discord and Signal chats, and on the phone. I hate(!) talking on the phone, but have been happily doing it on the daily, partly because new members have reached out so eagerly with ideas. Some of this organizing leads to publicly visible protests, but much of it leads to private meetings with legislators and their staffs, electoral support work nationwide (postcards to voters!), and laying the groundwork for local electoral campaigns this year and next (ballot petitioning!).
Social movement scholars will eventually field surveys, participant-observation studies, and the like. Until then, any pundits (or scholars) who comment on the muted scale of the resistance this time around are likely just revealing their own limited frames of reference.
Tom Keck
Indivisible Onondaga County