I won't be posting tomorrow because I've made plans to go to D.C. for a rally at the Washington Monument. When I made these plans -- which, for various reasons, I can't change -- I hoped that this would be the biggest anti-Trump demonstration in Washington so far. Sadly, the demonstration is unlikely to be "the big one," simply because there'll be hundreds of other demonstrations taking place simultaneously all over the country, including many right here in the New York metro area. Around here, there's going to be a rally in midtown Manhattan, another rally uptown at Columbia University, and yet another rally on Staten Island. A bit upstate and on Long Island, there'll be rallies in Mamaroneck, Hastings-on-Hudson, Mineola, Nanuet, Mount Kisco, and Stony Point. In New Jersey, there'll be rallies in Weehauken, Jersey City, Teaneck, Upper Montclair, Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Maplewood, West Caldwell, Metuchen, Morristown, Red Bank, and Piscataway. There'll be a rally in Greenwich, Connecticut, and also in Stamford. And that's an incomplete list.
Is this a good idea?
On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump's first inauguration, the Women's March in D.C. drew close to half a million people. There was also a very large rally in Manhattan. I know there were smaller rallies all over the country, but the protests weren't localized to this extent. I'm sure there weren't three rallies in New York City alone.
This bothers me because the media has spent much of its time since Election Day proclaiming that "the resistance" seems like a spent force, and one of its key metrics is the fact that there hasn't been a large national protest like the Women's March.
Discontent at congressional town halls and protests at Tesla dealerships -- which, obviously, are localized and relatively small -- has led journalists to conclude that there's some life in the resistance, as have the results of recent off-cycle elections, the crowds at rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Coertez, and even the response to Cory Booker's round-the-clock speech on the Senate floor. But the media still argues that the country is rallying around Trump now -- or at least was rallying around him until the "Liberation Day" tariffs -- in a way that it didn't during his first term. The Women's March impressed the media. Also, it helped plant the seeds for electoral victories in 2018 and 2020.
We need another big, undeniable, centralized protest. But we're in an atomized world now. When a major media outlet bends the knee to Trump, the response online is "Cancel your subscription to The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times/New York Times and subscribe to my one-person Substack instead." Many of these are great, but you need to subscribe to dozens of them to replace what you got from a legacy media outlet. It's as if we've all made a virtue of the isolation we experienced in 2020.
We need to break out of that. We need to band together -- and to be seen banding together -- to fight Trump.
