The New York Times suggests that Trump’s second electoral win represents a defeat for the protesters who mobilized against him, and demands a severe rethinking of strategy. The Times presents a simplistic vision of the recent past and a naïve view of how protest works.

Let me explain:

When Donald Trump was first elected, opponents spilled out into the streets almost immediately. Inauguration day 2017 was marked by confrontational protests in Washington, DC, where demonstrators scuffled with police and broke some windows. Some cars were burned and more than 200 protesters were arrested. (I started writing about it here.) The next day saw the Women’s March, the largest DC demonstration in American history. Plus sympathetic sister marches around the country. I wrote about it here and elsewhere.

Both styles of protests featured the common laundry list of demands, and the Saturday demonstration was the product of a particularly broad coalition addressing abortion, climate, immigration, labor, and science—among much else. Opposition to Trump linked them all together. The big question was whether any of it would matter. (Short answer: it did. It does.)

The inaugural demonstrations were the opening act in the Resistance, which included a weekly parade of protests on specific issues, virtually every weekend in Washington, DC. And not just in DC. The following week, when the Trump administration suddenly attempted to implement a poorly considered

travel ban for Muslims, tens of thousands of Americans assembled at virtually every international airport, voicing opposition to the ban and support for travelers. It was easy to spot the trademark pussy hats that appeared throughout the Women’s March crowds. Organizers used contact lists collected at each event to organize the next one. The Resistance continued in different forms throughout the first Trump term, and repeatedly confronted and confounded the Trump agenda. (Sid Tarrow and I edited a book about it, and thought we were done when Joe Biden got elected. Sigh!)

The Resistance didn’t lose, even if activists didn’t get near all they wanted. The protests accompanied and inspired other acts of resistance, including lawsuits filed by ambitious politicians challenging the legality of the ban. Washington’s Attorney General, Bob Ferguson, was one of them. The protests were one demonstration that Ferguson could count on a base of public support for his challenge and sustain a political career. He found legal support as well. The courts twice forced the Trump administration to pare back the ban and limit its scope. Ferguson, by the way, was just elected Governor. Summary: the aiport protests helped stall, if not stop, the policies they challenged, and built support for institutional challenges.
Protest movements can matter, but not by themselves, and not on a timescale that makes for easy stories. And protesters never get all they want.

Simpler, shorter stories limit how well we understand the politics of protest. Grade school accounts of Rosa Parks, for example, tell about her courageous refusal to move to the back of a segregated bus. But the decade of siimilar protests and Parks’s own long history of activism often get edited out of those stories. We often neglect the year of bus boycotts in Montgormery, Alabama and the court decision that eventually desegregated buses. And that effort marked an acceleration of the Freedom movement that continued for a decade, even as some goals still remain on the horizon. (Read some of Martin Luther King’s speeches and see the much broader agenda he articulated.)

The Resistance didn’t get nearly all the activists demanded, but try to imagine how politics would have played out without it. Trump was unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), for example, and it’s hard to think he would have been stopped without widespread opposition to his much larger agenda. Democrats recaptured a majority of the House in 2018, and won the Senate and the presidency in 2020.

It’s heartening to remember that things could always be worse.

And it’s critical to recognize that even when activists don’t get what they want, they can still stop some things they don’t want. Successful social movement stories are much longer and more complicated than the dramatic event that can be recounted in a movie, a song, or around a campfire.

Donald Trump’s second term will surely face another round of Resistance, with higher stakes and more difficult circumstances than the earlier rounds. No one will miss where those rounds fell short, but it’s essential to remember the accomplishments as well.