The Resistance Sequel Flops

“If there is ever going to be a Resistance movement 2.0, it may have gotten a much-needed jolt of energy this week,” crowed left-wing Vox on Feb. 6.

What jolt of energy might that be?

Apparently it’s President Donald Trump’s newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rooting out waste and abuse in government agencies because if there’s anything that gets Americans fired up in the streets, it’s hearing the federal government is trying to spend their tax dollars responsibly.

The first #Resistance produced Inauguration Day riots; the largest single-day protest in history; the rise of Antifa; the explosion of left-wing grassroots organizations—albeit funded by the usual billionaire suspects—and the “In This Yard” sign, “the epitome of virtue signaling.”

Members of the permanent bureaucracy and Trump’s own appointees created alternate social media accounts for federal agencies to criticize his administration and reassured liberals through the press that they were running things behind the scenes.

After Trump’s second victory in 2024, Resistance 2.0 saw liberals withdrawing into their cocoons and tuning out their favorite propagandists. Their 2025 counterinaugural protest drew fewer than 50,000 Women’s March leftovers compared with the half a million that one-hit wonder garnered in 2017.

But the lack of mass resistance from the left doesn’t owe to Trump mellowing. If anything, everything they feared he’d do that he didn’t accomplish in his first administration, he completed in less than three weeks through over 100 executive orders.

So great is the left’s cultural rejection and collective dejection that perennial Democrat strategist James Carville told his party their best bet right now is to “roll over and play dead.”

The American Left’s impotency lies in being a coalition of angry factions, all vying for power for their respective “communities.” Resisters in 2017 attacked racism, xenophobia, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, ableism, and anything else they could conceive under the ostensible guise of feminism. This strategy worked briefly in riling the masses who could find some aspect of their personal identity that Trump allegedly wanted to erase.

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the entrenched bureaucracy and traitors within Trump’s own administration worked with Democrat operatives and the media to impede his agenda with the Russia Collusion Hoax and impeachment over a perfect phone call with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

Although this latter aspect succeeded more than the liberal arts majors and their adjunct lecturers in the streets, the public only followed this aspect of resistance sporadically. For example, despite getting what they allegedly wanted with Trump’s first impeachment, the left didn’t fill the streets to demand the Senate convict—either out of confusion over the process or because Kamala Harris had not yet explained what Ukraine is.

Would-be resisters can no longer cry wolf to the masses on identity issues. The more normal Americans learned about obscure academic mind cramps like intersectionality, DEI, and Critical Race Theory, the more they rejected them. And, after four years of Joe Biden’s inflation, working people just want to afford to live above a subsistence level.

Many liberals in California, the most resistant state of all during Trump’s first term, openly admit they have no appetite for a #Resistance repeat, which “distracted at times from other pressing issues within the state’s borders, such as the high cost of living.”

Even early #Resistance leader Leah Greenberg has few new tactics other than waiting for what she thinks will be an inevitable onslaught against Medicaid. But until her alleged Medicaid apocalypse happens, she and her comrades have no choice but to rely on their last lines of defense against a second Trump presidency—the bureaucracy and the courts.

Despite Vox’s attempt to rally the troops, it took “two dozen Democratic members of Congress” to mobilize “a few hundred protesters against Elon Musk.”

Even the liberal New York Times noted the ridiculousness of trying to hit a populist note with the claim no one elected Elon Musk to shrink bloated government agencies—after Trump campaigned with Musk to do just that.

Desperate for any bit of good Resistance news, The Guardian played up an anti-Musk rally in California attended by “dozens strong.”

The Resistance economy that flourished during Trump’s first term also lies dormant.

The non-endorsement from the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times previewed the layoffs and sagging ratings of mainstream outlets that flourished from 2016–2020.

The publishing world sees no boon either, as editors who benefited from Resistance books last time see no market for the same tired junk. If anything, the opposite is true. Journalists from former mainstream anti-Trump outlets are looking to cash in on the current thing by writing books bashing Biden instead.

The only area where the new Resistance can claim any ground is in the courts. “The lawsuit, rather than the protest, is the new Resistance,” claims Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-CA)’s former press secretary Andrew Koneschusky.

But even that will eventually hit the conservative fan at the Supreme Court.

The left’s fatigue and lack of appetite for anything resembling a faux revolutionary movement owes to the fact they threw everything at Trump for over eight years, and nothing stuck.

Slate put it bluntly: “The Resistance of 2017 is dead.”

Jacob Grandstaff is an investigative researcher for Restoration News. His newest deep-dive is “America’s Blueprint for Mass Deportations”