How Trump 2.0 Protests Compare to His First Term

Newsweek

2 days ago

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It's been nearly six months since the reelection of President Donald Trump, and so far during his second term, the headlines have been filled with news of protests across the country.
From "Not My President's Day" demonstrations in February and the coordinated "No Kings Day" protests in June, which coincided with the president's 79th birthday, to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles last month, thousands of people have turned up at demonstrations across the country.
But how do these protests compare with those during Trump's first term? With sweeping "Free America" protests due over the July 4 weekend, Newsweek spoke to experts to find out more about activism under Trump 2.0.
How Have Protests Movements Changed Under Trump 2.0?
"The simplest thing is, a much larger number of protests," Sid Tarrow, an associate member of the law faculty and Maxwell M. Upson Professor Emeritus Government Department at Cornell Law School, told Newsweek in a phone call.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty/AP/Canva
Dana Fisher, director of the Center for Environment, Community & Equity and a professor at America University, echoed this, telling Newsweek via email that although "Resistance 2.0 has taken longer to build momentum," there have been "more protests during the first six months of Trump 2."
These have also been widely attended. The American Civil Liberties Union estimated that over 5 million people attended "No Kings" protests, of which it was an organizer, on June 14. The ACLU also reported that there were 2,100 protest events on that day alone.
G. Elliot Morris, former editorial director of political polling website FiveThirtyEight, reported in a post on his Substack that there have been nearly triple the number of political protests at this point in Trump's second term than there were the first time around—15,395 in 2025 compared with 5,043 in 2017, according to data he cited from Crowd Counting Consortium.
A Trump balloon floats above a "No Kings" protest on June 14, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
A Trump balloon floats above a "No Kings" protest on June 14, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.National data from the American National Election Studies survey points to a general increase in protest participation from 2016 to 2020. It looked at youth participation and found that 18 percent of people aged 18 to 34 had participated in a protest, with another 29 percent saying they would do so in the future.
Fisher told Newsweek that protests and resistance movements are often made up of people who are older and highly educated, with less of a change in this respect this time around.
"Resistance 1 was clearly made up of highly educated, middle aged white women (and men)," Fisher said, adding: "Resistance 2.0 continues to be peopled by the same demographic, but more so: the participants are less diverse and more highly educated than Trump's first term."
Meanwhile Asef Bayat, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, highlighted a difference in the background to protest movements.
"What distinguishes his second term is an unprecedented repression that...the U.S. has seen in the recent decades. Americans cannot simply take for granted the kind of freedom of expression and protests they once had," Bayat told Newsweek.
The Trump administration has taken measures to crack down on protests during his second term, including deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles in June, without the consent of California Governor Gavin Newsom, as protests against immigration raids escalated.
The president has consistently defended these crackdowns and emphasized a need for law and order.
The Issues Driving The Action
"Young people's participation in protest movements is driven largely by a major dissatisfaction with the state of politics and democracy," Alberto Medina, communications team lead at the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), told Newsweek via email.
"Only 16 percent of youth (ages 18-29) think democracy is working well for them," Citing Medina said, citing research from CIRCLE, adding: "There is also major distrust in institutions—especially major national institutions like the presidency, Congress, and the major political parties."
"Young people are seeing a democracy that they don't believe is working and institutions that they don't trust to fix it, so they're taking to the streets to express their dissatisfaction, exert political pressure, and demand change."
"The topics of protests are much, much broader," Tarrow said of the drivers under Trump 2:0. "It was as if people were waiting for the policy shoe to drop in order to protest against it."
"The repertoire of contention has considerably broadened compared to Trump's first term."
In June, there were anti-war protests following the U.S. strike on Iran. March brought Stand Up for Science rallies in response to cuts on science research funding. In May, tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the Trump administration's labor and immigration policies.
People protest the involvement of the U.S. in Israel's war against Iran near the Wilshire Federal Building on June 22, 2025, in Los Angeles, California.
People protest the involvement of the U.S. in Israel's war against Iran near the Wilshire Federal Building on June 22, 2025, in Los Angeles, California."The widened range of the protest movements against Trump are direct response to the widened and the more rapid range of policy moves that the Trump administration has made," Tarrow said.
Whereas there was "a real focus on large centrally coordinated demonstrations" during Trump's first term, Fisher said.
However, this time around, "The focus has been on more distributed actions that connect local people who are embedded in their communities," Fisher said, adding that "this structure makes it harder to see how big the mobilizations" are, apart from when they are "huge, like during the No Kings day of action."
One thing that has remained consistent is the tactics of the protests, which—despite some instances of violence—"continue to be focused on peaceful activism," according to Fisher.
How Might Protest Movements Continue To Evolve Throughout Trump 2.0?
Tarrow said that while it's hard to predict events over a three-and-a-half year period, the key date to observe will be the 2026 midterm elections.
"Protests will become more and more institutionalized, more and more aimed at particular Republican politicians," he said.
However, he said: "The magnitude of the threat has been perceived and worried about by people who are generally not protesters," adding, "I think we need to understand better, the degree that there's a transfer of protest energy into electoral energy, which I think there will be in November 2026."
Bayat shared a different possibility. "If repression continues, we might even see the rise of some kind of 'hidden sphere' (as opposed to public sphere) where people might remain silent or pretend to comply in public, but act or express views the opposite in private."
"This would have serious implications for political process," he added.
Fisher, meanwhile, said that while "Resisters the first time around thought that electoral politics could fix everything and that Trump 1 was a just a blip in the system or a mistake," this time round "everyone realizes that Trump's success was the product of a political system" and society "does not grant equal access to everyone."
"Fewer people are speaking about how [an] election will solve the problem this time around. Instead, the focus is on the need for systemic changes that fix the system that is not working for the majority of Americans and has expanded inequality in our country," Fisher said.