The Girls’s March is now the Folks’s March, and teams working to oppose Trump’s agenda are highlighting particular actions volunteers can take.
By Candice Norwood and Jennifer Gerson for The nineteenth
Former President Donald Trump as soon as once more received a presidential election. Once more, his opponent was a extremely certified girl. And once more, intense rhetoric about gender and race outlined his candidacy.
However for a lot of who discover themselves fascinated about what it means to mobilize towards MAGA, this second feels very completely different from Trump’s first win in 2016. Then, it was pink pussyhats and the Girls’s March, loud requires public motion, and visual outcry. Right now, progressive leaders and coverage specialists say, issues really feel quieter, extra contemplative, extra targeted on sensible, on-the-ground neighborhood motion—at the same time as girls, folks of shade, and queer folks face actual fears about their futures in mild of a second Trump presidency.
A Folks’s March on Washington is deliberate for January earlier than Trump’s inauguration by the identical organizers of the unique Girls’s March in 2017. For some, this type of public motion doesn’t really feel like a solution. March organizers, nonetheless, stress the necessity to mark the second with some type of extremely seen collective motion.
The organizing staff behind the Girls’s March and Folks’s March sees its work as rather more holistic than a single headline-grabbing occasion. Many individuals who come to Girls’s March occasions have by no means organized or protested, however need to do one thing to get entangled, stated Tamika Middleton, managing director at Girls’s March.
“There is no lower barrier of entry than making a sign and coming to the march. There’s no easier way to get involved and to get activated,” Middleton stated. “It is an entry point for new people. And then we keep organizing after the marches.”
The 2017 Girls’s March drew about 4 million folks to demonstrations around the globe. Audio system included celebrities like America Ferrera, Scarlett Johansson, and Ashley Judd, along with big-name activists like Gloria Steinem.
The Girls’s March staff, which is primarily girls of shade, stated it has developed their method since 2017. In renaming its pre-inauguration march to the Folks’s March, the group seeks to construct a giant tent the place folks of various backgrounds really feel welcome to take part. The staff can be fascinated about how they’ll capitalize on moments of mass mobilization and prolong it past protests. This contains connecting people who find themselves new to organizing with native efforts they’ll get entangled with and coaching them on issues like combatting on-line disinformation, Middleton stated. They’ve additionally developed “women’s protection teams” to assist folks assess threats of political violence and develop early intervention methods.
However different observers worry repeating the identical playbook from 2017.
“We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome,” stated Staci Fox, a longtime chief of progressive coverage and advocacy teams in Atlanta. In 2017, Fox was a speaker on the satellite tv for pc Girls’s March occasion held in Atlanta whereas the top of a reproductive rights group primarily based there.
Right now Fox is offended. Democratic losses up and down the poll in Georgia are weighing closely on her as she thinks about what the long run might appear to be for marginalized folks within the state. Fox hopes that organizers and coverage strategists alike will take time to reevaluate: not solely how they message to voters, however how they develop significant, community-based actions which can be poised to finest serve, and assist defend, marginalized communities who’re going through the best potential threats beneath a second Trump time period.
She’s concerned in conversations in her neighborhood about passport festivals and different types of documentation evaluate for transgender folks earlier than Trump is sworn into workplace once more. One factor she does know for certain is that she received’t be attending the second Folks’s March in Washington, D.C. She sees it as one thing that may make folks, particularly white girls, really feel like they’ve completed one thing with out having any actual affect.
“I definitely think we’ve got to do away with performative activism,” Fox, a white girl, stated of what one of the best subsequent steps are for these working to form progressive organizing.
As liberal advocacy teams brace for the subsequent administration, additionally they really feel higher positioned to organize for what’s subsequent. One in all Trump’s most notable achievements was his appointment of federal judges, together with three Supreme Court docket justices who have been key to overturning federal abortion protections in 2022. Whereas he has said that he doesn’t see a motive to go a nationwide abortion ban, many specialists and reproductive rights advocates fear that his administration may transfer to limit entry to abortion in different methods.
For a lot of abortion teams across the nation, the work stays the identical. In Texas, which has a complete abortion ban, the Texas Equal Entry Fund informed The nineteenth it’s coaching volunteers to assist shoppers trying to find abortions. They’re educating them methods of responding to medical mistrust in communities of shade, difficult deceptive info from anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers,” and the specifics of legislative efforts to extend abortion protections. TEA Fund stated that since Election Day, it has seen greater than 80 volunteer functions when it usually receives one or two per week.
The Nationwide Girls’s Legislation Middle, which beforehand sued the Trump administration on points starting from pay knowledge assortment to the Training Division’s modifications to Title IX guidelines, is gearing up for extra assaults on reproductive rights, stated Emily Martin, the middle’s chief program officer. Martin additionally stated that they count on one of many first huge fights of Trump’s administration to be round tax coverage and tax cuts for billionaires and rich firms.
“Maybe the sense of shock is different this time around, but what I am seeing from partners and from the broader public is a deep understanding of the stakes and the need to engage because the stakes are so high,” Martin stated. “We’re all coming having learned lessons from the first time around, but one of the lessons we have learned is the seriousness of what’s before us.”
The progressive Working Households Occasion might be looking for Trump’s immigration insurance policies. Throughout his first time period, Trump applied a brief journey ban on folks from seven predominantly Muslim international locations and used household separation as a deterrent for undocumented immigrants, which resulted in additional than 5,000 migrant kids being separated from their households. Trump has promised to start a push for mass deportations from Day 1 of his second time period.
Jennifer Knox, organizing director of the Working Households Occasion, stated she believes organizing work since 2017 has matured as advocates grow to be extra intentional about their work—from being selective in regards to the actions they take to making sure that they attain teams exterior of White college-educated, middle-class folks.
“I think that people are interested not just in being in a reactive space and doing the same playbook as 2016 but trying to figure out how to fight for the long term and how to be more successful,” Knox stated.
Taylor Salditch, the manager director of Supermajority, a gaggle that organizes younger low-propensity voters round progressive points, stated she additionally thinks now could be the time for listening and never reacting.
“Rest is important. Going slow is important. Taking our time is important,” she stated.
Whereas many progressive teams are engaged in finger-pointing about what points, messages, methods, and demographics are accountable for Democrats’ losses, Salditch stated that dialog doesn’t really assist defend those that stand to be most impacted by what’s to return within the second Trump time period.
In lieu of huge public shows, she want to see extra time outlining what Democrats see as their wants and objectives earlier than midterms in 2026. Salditch hopes that folks act with “compassion and curiosity and fundamentally a belief that people are good and worthy” as Democrats take into consideration the best way to rebuild their coalition.
From the place she sits, Salditch stated that one main consideration must be that younger girls can not by default be assumed to be the Democratic base—particularly with out funding by the bigger progressive ecosystem in reaching them as voters. The occasion can also contemplate what messaging to girls as a demographic means past specializing in “mom” as an id.
Salditch stated what feels extra essential proper now could be the understanding that with regards to speaking to and about girls, variety of thought—and points—issues.
“If you are reaching for contempt over curiosity, you’re doing bad organizing,” Salditch stated.
