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The week after Election Day 2016, Shirley Morganelli, a women’s health nurse and lifelong Democrat, invited dozens of friends to her living room. at his home in Bethlehem, Pa., for a glass of wine. In fact, many glasses.
“Adversity likes cooperation,” he said.
Mrs. Morganelli’s friends, mostly women in their 50s and 60s, are teachers, nurses, artists and ardent supporters of Hillary Clinton. Some of them dressed in white to vote that day, hoping to celebrate the election of America’s first female president. Instead, they ended the night comforting their college-aged daughter.
“When he called me at three in the morning – I’m all choked up now, because for the first time I couldn’t say, ‘Everything’s going to be okay,'” said Angela Sinkler, a nurse. former school board member in Bethlehem.
The get-together — Ms. Morganelli called it “unhappy hour” — became a regular event. At the end of the month, sympathy turned into an organization. They started by writing postcards to elected officials calling on them to oppose Donald J. Trump’s agenda, then moved on to fundraisers for Planned Parenthood on -location and joined the public movement.
Local political candidates also began showing up at their meetings, and the group, now known as Lehigh Valley ROAR, turned to campaigning. In 2018, several members were elected to the Bethlehem City Council, and Susan Wild, the city attorney in nearby Allentown and a friend of Ms. Morganelli, was elected to the Congress with the support of the group.
Lehigh Valley ROAR is one of more than 2,000 similar grassroots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s first election — a moment of mass organizing larger than the Tea Party movement at its peak during the term. -President Barack Obama’s first job, said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University professor of government and sociology who has studied both events.
Most of the groups were led by women, and many followed an arc similar to Ms. Morganelli’s, their shock at Mr. Trump’s election leading to political activism and then, often, victory. in the election.
But Vice President Kamala Harris lost in November.
As Mr Trump returned to the White House on Monday with a majority of the popular vote and the governing trifecta in Washington, there were few signs of the kind of mass protests that have fueled the “backlash”. the last time he took office.
Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017 was met with the largest one-day public protests in American history. Although thousands marched in Washington Saturday and smaller protests were held in other cities, their numbers were far fewer than the hundreds of thousands who gathered eight years ago.
Organizers of the 2017 effort said the shift reflected lessons learned from the street protests that took place early in Trump’s first presidency, tactics that were quickly abandoned in favor of strategic planning. more – and opposition to Trump’s second term is unlikely. same shape.
But some agree that the opposition is no safer than it used to be. Democrats and governors in Congress are now publicly debating the wisdom of locking arms against Mr. Trump’s agenda, just as they did during his first term as president. And the Democrats still bear the scars of last year’s conflict over Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, their embrace of identity politics and the cancellation of the presidential election. President Biden.
In 2017, “everything felt bigger and more important,” says Los Angeles-based screenwriter Krista Suh. When the Women’s March was announced the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Ms. Suh, a novice knife maker, made a pink ear-splitting hat for the protest and posted it online.
In the past few days, the “pussy hat” has become a symbol of dissent against Trump.
Ms. Suh stayed on the political side; took a vacation for Ms. He was Harris in Arizona. But he had no plans to protest this weekend.
He said: “I feel very tired now.
‘He’s got the popular vote’
When Lehigh Valley ROAR members gathered in Ms. Morganelli’s living room again this month, days before Mr. Trump returned to the White House, few were sure of the on what to do next. They searched for Mrs. Harris by phone. “You name it, we did it,” Ms. Morganelli said.
Ms. Wild also lost her seat.
In the corner of the living room, Mrs. Morganelli still wore a pink hat from the 2017 Women’s March, which most of the group members attended, Mr. Obama’s cardboard hat. . But none of them went to Washington to protest the inauguration of Mr. Trump.
Some members came to question the success of the Women’s March. Others were more concerned about the safety of the demonstration. Last fall, a member’s car was broken into by someone who tore Harris’ yard signs off the back seat.
Four years after the riots in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Ms. Morganelli is skeptical about the way to challenge the true results of the election.
“This time he won the popular vote,” he said, referring to the president-elect. “As a good American and a good Democrat, you have to accept that, right?”
Instead of protesting, the group planned to drink wine together and write letters of thanks to Mr. Biden. “Moving forward, all we can do is try to be the best citizens we can be,” Mrs. Morganelli wrote on the group’s Facebook page.
Regretful opposition
At first, Mr. Trump’s opponents seemed to organize themselves. Grieving liberals poured their energies into every available vessel. People who have never protested in their lives are transformed into historic protest leaders, sometimes overnight, as was the case with Naomi Lindquester.
Shocked by Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Lindquester, then a 42-year-old elementary school teacher in Denver, created a Facebook event called the Women’s March on Denver. He thought he had to beg his friends to attend.
Instead, the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, an estimated crowd of more than 100,000 people came to the State House to denounce the new president. It was probably the largest demonstration in Colorado history.
The Women’s March drew an estimated 500,000 attendees to Washington and hundreds of thousands more across the country. But the groups that put on a body to organize them, often led by media-savvy young urban professionals, soon had trouble maintaining momentum and, at times, went to war.
The national organization of the Women’s March has split after one organizer accused others of anti-Semitism. Other groups were torn apart in a frenzy of conflict over priorities and selfishness.
“It was so bad, so fast,” said Ms. Lindquester, who has not spoken to her Denver march partners since she collapsed in late 2018.
Many of these groups, he said, have suffered from sudden popularity. He said: “To be honest with you, I really enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame.”
Since November, Ms. Lindquester has found herself questioning the impact of the march she organized. “The fact that we did this giant march is still him elected for the second time?” he said.
Most of them left public politics — a shift that resulted from their move from Denver to a small, conservative town elsewhere in the state, and increased scrutiny of the politics of teacher in recent years.
While he was proud of his role in the protests in 2017, “I don’t talk to anyone about it, because if I do, I will hear about it,” he said.
In a Facebook post this month, he proposed a list of actions that he says will make a bigger difference than the march: Plant trees. Volunteer in the community. “Engage with people who disagree with you and find common ground.”
New Message: ‘It’s hard.’
Some say the energy is still there, but the purpose is different. Ezra Levin, executive director of Indivisible, an organization co-founded in 2017 to air grassroots opposition to Mr. Trump, said the group has been writing new chapters locally since November because of at other times since 2017.
In a new campaign plan released shortly after the election, Indivisible urged its members to focus not only on Mr. Trump and Congress but also on local elected officials — especially the Democrats in the blue states that could be a bulwark against the policies of Mr. Trump. .
He admitted that “too often in Trump 1.0, we took the beauty of the protests instead of using them as part of the strategy.”
“You shouldn’t start with a plan,” Mr. Levin said. “You should start with a goal.”
In Ms. Morganelli’s living room, members of Lehigh Valley ROAR talked about more engagement when some family members left their politics in recent years: children who have come to love survival. the right wing or anti-vaccination during the coronavirus. pandemic, or against Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris for their support for Israel.
“I lost my beloved son and forward to Joe Rogan,” said one, while others nodded in sympathy.
They felt alienated from younger Democratic activists who seemed to see fighting Mr. Trump as a higher priority than issues of ideological purity.
“If you’re not left-wing enough, they’re willing to sacrifice their vote and throw it away,” either by not voting or by voting for a third-party candidate, said Lori McFarland, a member of ‘the group that is now the chairman of the Democratic Committee in Lehigh County. “And they brought us back.”
Ms. Suh, the creator of the “pussy hat,” did not seek to reprise her role in the protest. He thinks a unifying event like his hat is still possible — but the message should be different from the defiance of early 2017.
He said: “I think it should be like, ‘I hear you. It’s hard.’”
