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Resistance Is Cringe

October 18, 2025
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Resistance Is Cringe
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After Donald Trump’s win in 2024, commentators declared the so-called Resistance “dead” and “futile.” The opposition movement against Trump had been embarrassing, ineffective, a performative failure that did nothing “besides making the #Resisters feel good about themselves.” With the country now nine months into Trump’s second term, though, reports of the death of the Resistance turn out to have been exaggerated. The movement looks different than it did the last time around. It’s more hard-bitten. But it retains the same underlying idealism about the American project that led first to the explosive growth of the coalition, and then to its dismissal by cynics.

Today, in a reprisal of the first “No Kings” rallies that took place in June, millions of protesters will gather around the country to express their opposition to Trump. Over the summer, protesters waved American flags, dressed as the Founding Fathers and the Statue of Liberty, and held signs with quotes from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Those rallies drew an estimated 2 million to 5 million people around the country—on the scale of the 2017 Women’s March that convened the day after Trump’s first inauguration, then a competitor for the largest single day of protest the United States had ever seen.

Organizers are now expecting an even bigger turnout. “We have a goal for No Kings to be the largest peaceful protest in modern American history,” says Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the progressive organization Indivisible, one of the many groups coordinating the demonstrations. MAGA, at least, is doing its part to deride the gatherings as uncool: “Anyone who participates in a No Kings rally is a dork,” one right-wing influencer wrote on X. Earlier reflections on the Resistance brushed it off as embarrassing pap. But such dismissals now risk ignoring the possibility that earnest outrage, at the right place and the right time, is itself a powerful tonic against the corrosion of American democracy.

The circumstances of Trump’s first presidency lent themselves naturally to the rise of a popular opposition movement. Here was someone who had secured the White House via the quirks of the Electoral College despite losing a majority of the vote, and under conditions muddied by Russian interference. The movement that became known as the Resistance grew rapidly in this context, in what the political scientists Theda Skocpol, Caroline Tervo, and Kirsten Walters termed a “civic explosion” of local political engagement across the country, largely by first-time activists inspired by their disdain for Trump’s policies and character.

That movement’s on-the-ground organizing proved to be quietly, but strikingly, effective. The early phase of the opposition to the first Trump administration—before the racial-justice protests following George Floyd’s murder, in 2020—was largely led by white, college-educated, suburban women, and many of them, yes, wore pink “pussy hats” and T-shirts with slogans such as It’s Mueller Time! But they helped secure the “blue wave” midterm victory in 2018 that flipped the House of Representatives for Democrats and allowed the party to begin clawing back Trump’s power through legislative oversight. And though that congressional response had its limitations—neither impeachment of Trump, after all, successfully barred him from office—the Resistance notched continued successes at a local level in countering efforts to pull books from school shelves and restrict access to reproductive health care after Roe v. Wade was overturned. And, of course, a Democrat won the White House in 2020.

Then came 2024, and Kamala Harris’s failure to secure the presidency against the rising tide of inflation and post-pandemic malaise. Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who studies grassroots activism in Pennsylvania, told me that the progressive social politics and “focus on protecting democracy” of the Resistance were not well aligned with the concerns of less engaged swing voters, who chose Trump for economic reasons. Still, Putnam’s research shows that local organizing that grew out of the Resistance made an impact in 2024: Activists were able to help Pennsylvania Democrats hold on to control of the statehouse, even as the state swung to the right.

When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he did so with a new claim to legitimacy after winning a plurality—though still not a majority—of the popular vote. This time, the streets were quiet on Inauguration Day and immediately after. Some on the right saw this as evidence of a “vibe shift,” a broader turn toward right-wing cultural dominance and away from liberal and progressive ideas. The rapid capitulation of major civic institutions, such as social-media companies and law firms, only emphasized the supposed shift.

In this environment, resistance seemed pointless. Maybe even worse than pointless: It had been kind of cringe. Meaning: unself-conscious; overly sincere; insufficiently insulated from criticism by the protective layer of irony that allows a person to declare, when mocked, “Just kidding!”; and, worst of all, ineffective. Remembering the pussy hats, Liza Featherstone, a columnist for the left-wing magazine Jacobin, mourned, “It’s triggering to even write these things down.” The progressive writer Ross Barkan derided the “hysterics” of the first-term Resistance and hoped the new quiet might “speak to the growing maturity of America.”

As the reference to hysteria suggests, it’s difficult to fully disaggregate the substance of this critique from gender politics, especially because of the predominance of older women in Resistance organizing during Trump’s first term. Liberal politics, the humor writer Clare Haber-Harris assessed in early 2025, had become “middle-aged-women coded” and therefore “uncool.” These Resistance aesthetics contrasted with the macho energy of Trump’s second term, itself a promise that Americans wouldn’t have to listen to those hectoring women anymore.

But these dismissals both ignore the very real victories of the Resistance and miss why cringe was essential to the movement’s effectiveness. These organizers were people “who basically believed that there was such a thing as the rule of law, that there was such a thing as democracy,” Putnam told me, “and that these were things that were worth fighting for.” They were, in that sense, institutionalists—and therefore inherently opposed to MAGA’s devil-may-care desire to burn the place down.

Cringe “implies a kind of naïveté that so often gets coded as feminine,” wrote the New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen, “a silly belief that human beings, through sincere effort, might actually improve themselves and the world.” Such a belief might seem uncool. But it can be a powerful tool with which to cut through the nihilism of Trump and those around him, which draws its power from its insincerity, its refusal to distinguish between truth and falsehood, its willingness to mock and degrade previously treasured beliefs. As one protest sign put it at a demonstration early in Trump’s second term: BE CRINGE. SHIT MATTERS.

Idealism helped motivate Trump’s opponents during his first term. But it has the potential to carry even more weight during his second, given how the president’s anti-democratic project is not as constrained as it was the first time around. As Levin of Indivisible told me, “The real enemy in an authoritarian breakthrough moment is nihilism and cynicism and fatalism.” This idea was a regular subject of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who famously argued that totalitarian regimes depend on eroding their subjects’ sense of political possibility. Such governments, she wrote, aim not “to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“I didn’t like resistlib cringe content in the first Trump administration,” wrote Adam Gurri, the editor in chief of Liberal Currents, in a social-media post two months after Trump’s second inauguration, admitting: “I was wrong. I was just being a snob.” As Gurri suggests, the administration’s insistence on irony and insincerity has given a new power to plain, old, corny symbols. Recently, a photo published in the Chicago Tribune went viral, showing a Marine veteran protesting amid clouds of tear gas in front of an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, stoically holding not one but two American flags. Even the name of the No Kings protest is a reclamation of foundational American heritage that might have felt cheesy a year ago, but today carries a new seriousness.

Still, for “resistlib cringe content” to have power, it needs to be welded with concrete action. Otherwise it risks undercutting itself and breeding distrust, an unwitting imitation of MAGA’s nihilism. Last spring, Senator Cory Booker held the Senate floor for a record-breaking 25 hours in a speech railing against Trump—arguably the first time in Trump’s second term that a congressional Democrat sought to harness the energy of the Resistance past. Demonstrators wrote out lines from Booker’s speech on placards at protests held later that week. But those hoping that the speech would herald a newly confrontational Democratic Party were disappointed when Booker voted to confirm Trump’s nominee for ambassador to China weeks later.

Organizers today are conscious of the danger of speaking the language of resistance without wielding any power to match. In a pamphlet published shortly after the 2024 election, Indivisible acknowledged, “Too often in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests instead of using them as part of a strategy.” Theda Skocpol advised would-be Trump opponents in advance of his inauguration that the most effective aspects of the previous Resistance were not the showy marches, but what happened after the pink-hatted demonstrators went home and got to work: the “persistent, community-based efforts” that focused on building support for Democratic candidates and sharing information about the local effects of planned Trump policies. These activists were not concerned with ideological purity tests, but with the practical building of power. Even at the time, this organizing work received relatively little attention from commentators sneering at the overly earnest aesthetics of Resistance “wine moms.”

“The most effective resistance might be investing in things that Trump’s rhetoric tries to delegitimize: community solidarity, mutual aid, and bottom-up organizing,” one contributor wrote to a postelection symposium organized by the left-leaning journal Democracy. This suggestion turned out to be a markedly accurate forecast of what opposition to Trump looks like today. The series of rallies that culminated in No Kings has taken the form of distributed protests organized by local activists across the country, without one single focal point. (The June No Kings rally didn’t even feature an event in Washington, D.C., avoiding tangling with—or giving further attention to—Trump’s military parade that same day.)

Since the summer, Trump’s strategy of shifting ICE and the National Guard from city to city magnified this localism. Each targeted jurisdiction has responded with its own character: Protesters gathered to confront ICE en masse in the middle of a Los Angeles freeway, or have danced in frog costumes in Portland, Oregon. With the notable exception of a protest held a month into the federal occupation of D.C., the District’s residents have opted against the large gatherings that the city saw during the Women’s March and the George Floyd protests. Instead, many of them focused on helping one another as neighbors—chasing away ICE agents and walking the children of immigrant parents to school in the morning. “The people getting food to families of migrant neighbors abducted by ICE is resistance,” the D.C. mutual-aid collective Remora House explained. In Chicago, David Black, a Presbyterian pastor whom ICE agents shot with pepper balls, described protests outside Illinois ICE facilities as not “resistance” but “world building”: “We are making ourselves into the world we want to give to the next seven generations.”

This sentiment is, arguably, cringe. But it is also, on the most basic level, the work of politics. And precisely for that reason, it is an attempt to countermand the senses of loneliness and unmooring from reality that Arendt identified as ingredients of tyranny.

Organizers of today’s No Kings rally have emphasized that the gatherings are just one part of this broader movement, an opportunity to loudly and collectively voice the defiance already happening on the ground. The Trump administration appears to have noticed. Although June’s No Kings protests gained relatively little attention from Trump and congressional Republicans, the party has busied itself over the past week with attacking the upcoming demonstrations as a “Hate America Rally.” The mood this time is darker than in June: The government is shut down, more National Guard troops are deployed on the country’s streets, and the administration is intent on portraying its political opposition as un-American. But the protesters are coming with the Stars and Stripes in hand.

The post Resistance Is Cringe appeared first on The Atlantic.

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