On Saturday, groups affiliated with the National Women’s March held a series of sparsely attended protests across the country in opposition to the incoming Republican Trump administration. The protests, which were organized in dozens of cities, with the main event held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., paled in size compared to the massive rallies held in response to the first Trump administration coming to power in January 2017.
At the time, the 2017 event constituted one of the largest single day protests in world history, as more than 500,000 people protested in Washington D.C. alone the day after Trump’s first inauguration, in anticipation of the anti-democratic attacks his administration was planning to let loose on the public. Across the country, nearly 4.6 million protested Trump’s first inauguration.
Eight years later, Trump’s fascistic agenda has only intensified. He has threatened, among other things, to mobilize the United States military against immigrants and workers by sending troops to suppress protests, as well as to forcibly annex entire countries, as his government, stocked to the hilt with fascists, billionaires and sworn enemies of government social programs, prepares to launch an all out assault on the population at home and abroad.
These concerns were evident among people with whom the World Socialist Web Site spoke. “I’ve put in eight applications for Medicaid in the past year alone. It’s been denied to me each time even though I am below the income” level, stated Aubrey, expressing fear that as a transgender person she would be particularly targeted by the Trump administration.
Many protesters sported a kaffiyeh scarf, signaling their opposition to the US/Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. Many young people approached representatives of the Socialist Equality Party to discuss their perspective on the political crisis in the US and the necessity of building an anti-war, anti-capitalist movement within the working class as the way forward.
Despite the stakes, the Women’s March, Democratic Socialists of America and various other Democratic Party-affiliated groups struggled to assemble even a fraction of the crowd that attended previous protests. This is the outcome of their channeling of protests by millions over the past year against the genocide in Gaza behind appeals to the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.
In Washington D.C., event organizers had projected a crowd of 50,000 people, or 10 percent of the total from 2017. In Los Angeles, where uncontrollable urban wildfires which Democratic Party-led governments have failed to prepare for have left over 200,000 people homeless, barely 500 people turned out to the “People’s March” event. In 2017, the city had 750,000 protesters.
In Chicago, a few hundred protested in single-digit temperatures Monday, while New York City, whose event in 2017 saw over 200,000 protesters, struggled to bring out “a few thousand,” according to local reports.
The failure to mobilize significant popular protest against the incoming Trump regime comes as the Democratic Party has all but abandoned any opposition following the November 5 election. Trump was able to appeal to the working class’s hostility to the Democratic Biden administration, which combined indifference to the hardships of the working population at home with a homicidal focus on imperialist war against US targets abroad.
Even the New York Times, which wrote glowingly of the Saturday marches, was forced to admit that the events “paled in comparison to the Women’s March eight years ago.”
The politically bankrupt perspective was directly expressed in the events on Saturday. Despite one of Saturday’s themes being “anti-militarism,” no speaker dared criticize the Biden administration over its US/NATO war with Russia in Ukraine or the Gaza genocide.
Instead, speaker after speaker urged support for the Democratic Party. In Washington D.C., former Democratic vice president and 2000 presidential candidate Al Gore called for the day’s protest to “translate into action at the ballot box,” apparently unaware that the protest’s small size would hardly be enough to turn an election. Appeals of this sort were interspersed with mindless chants that “We will win.”
Events held independently of the Women’s March by various pseudo-left and protest groups were even more sparsely attended. The A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, an assortment of pseudo-socialist and “left” protest groups which has been lead organizer of a number of pro-Palestine marches over the last year, barely drew 1,000 people at its protest in Washington D.C. on Monday.
The organization, which is politically directed by the pseudo-left Party for Socialism and Liberation, reprised its role as an auxiliary prop of the Democratic Party, combining “left” and “socialist” protest slogans with political support for the Democrats.
In Washington D.C., this was highlighted by the organization’s embrace of the Democratic Party’s D.C. statehood campaign at its protest on Monday. The effort, which is being engineered as a way to create an additional Democratic Party-controlled state and give the party more seats in Congress, “has nothing to do with genuinely advancing the democratic rights of the people of the District,” as the World Socialist Web Site has written.
The adoption of the demand would do little more than hand the city over to the Democratic administration of Muriel Bowser, who has met personally with Trump to discuss collaboration. In December, the mayor wrote on X that she had a “great meeting to discuss our shared priorities” with the then president-elect.