18-04-2025
Heard the resistance was dead? You've been reading too much.
Amy Hollyfield is the managing editor of the Dallas Morning News — the very honest managing editor of the Dallas Morning News. When confronted earlier this month as to why her newspaper hadn't covered Dallas's version of the nationwide 'Hands Off' protests on April 5, Hollyfield admitted that 'we didn't realize the protest was going on.' She acknowledged it was 'a large event' and called the oversight 'a big miss' for her newspaper.
Your average managing editor might have spun up a story about scarce resources or coverage priorities. But Hollyfield's candor opens the door for a broader question about the Trump resistance: Does the media know what it's up to?
I have some doubts.
'Resistance' is a catchall term that encompasses all manner of opposition to President Donald Trump. If you're looking for anecdotage to shore up the claim that this cohort is flailing, there's a whole coward's buffet to choose from: Too many law firms have knuckled under to Trump's threats. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) declined to fight his Republican peers in the government shutdown showdown. Reporters too often fail to puncture official propaganda at White House press briefings.
Outside of the vibes realm, however, there's an outbreak of data that upends the picture of a limp Trump resistance. In a March 19 analysis in Waging Nonviolence, Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam reported that this movement is alive and generating heat. Their findings are rooted in the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut. The idea is to catalogue protests around the country, the better to reach substantiated conclusions on how much activity is taking place. In February, for example, the group counted more than 2,085 protests (supporting federal workers, LGBTQ+ rights, Palestinian self-determination, etc.) versus 937 in February 2017.
'The data that we've collected thus far is not consistent with the idea that the resistance is moribund or weak,' said Pressman, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut and a founding co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium.
'This is the most mobilized I have seen the American people in my lifetime,' said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), a veteran of two Obama presidential campaigns and Sen. Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign.
The American people must have mobilized mighty quickly, considering that reports on flagging opposition have been circulating for months. 'What happened to the Trump resistance?' asked a Feb. 5 headline from the New Yorker. Compare that formulation to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's: 'What happened to 'The Resistance'?' Or to this from Barron's: 'Trump Is Back. But What Happened To The 'Resistance'?' Or to UnHerd's: 'What happened to the resistance?'
More: Democrats are 'exhausted.' 'Liberals have all but stopped resisting.' They're 'dispirited' and 'humbled.'
If you haven't read something about the faltering opposition movement against Trump, you're not spending enough time on the internet. According to Chenoweth, the civil rights protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 appropriately made front pages across the country. The current mobilization has not reached that level. It's still robust, yet 'you can barely find word of it in the major outlets,' said Chenoweth, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and founding co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium.
The major outlets did cover the April 5 protests, though homepage and dead-tree placement of those articles drew condemnation. 'For weeks and months, I've been reading stories and analyses in major news organizations about how the public resistance to Trump is so much quieter now than in 2017,' noted veteran media critic Margaret Sullivan. 'But when the protests did happen, much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.' (Emphasis is hers.)
Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, a project dedicated to fighting the 'right-wing takeover of American government' and a key organizer of the April 5 protests, credits outlets such as the Guardian, the Contrarian, MeidasTouch News, USA Today's Sarah D. Wire and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow with strong protest coverage.
'It's a significant event if it shows an outpouring of public anger or discontent, no matter the outcome,' Guardian US editor Betsy Reed told me via email, adding that the paper's readers are 'intently focused on this administration and in particular on the question of whether Americans will stand up to Trump.'
Levin, however, scorns most mainstream coverage of anti-Trump protests. He cited an article in The Post that ran on the day of the 'Hands Off' mobilization; it's about a woman who protested against Trump in 2017 but is now tuning out political news — a case study in how 'Democrats are struggling to match the massive 'resistance' movement that sprang up in Trump's first term,' it reads.
That claim, said Levin, has 'no basis in reality.' (The Post declined to comment on the matter.)
'People are turning to noncorporate podcasts in the media space and influencers on social media because they can't trust what they read in the Washington Post or the New York Times anymore,' said Levin, who rips the papers for not having placed their April 5 protest stories on the front page.
Well. The Post and the Times have produced much of the cold, factual coverage fueling the protests in the first place. Another consideration is the zone, which is flooded: In the news cycle around the April 5 protests, for instance, The Post and the Times covered: honest-to-goodness flooding in the Midwest and South, Trump's trade war, the Justice Department's move to suspend a lawyer who acknowledged a deportation mistake, concerns over Trump's cuts to health and safety agencies, a fight between New York state and the Trump administration over DEI programs in public schools, wariness in Ukraine over a minerals deal with the United States, the Trump administration's firing of aid workers assisting in Myanmar's earthquake zone, Trump's upcoming meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a cancer breakthrough being delayed by layoffs and restrictions at the NIH, the National Park Service rewriting the history of the Underground Railroad, Trump appointees defending tariff announcements, former president Barack Obama exhorting fellow Americans to resist Trump, a federal judge pondering whether to hold Trump officials in contempt of court, the impact of Trump's funding cuts on Kenya, the impact of Trump's funding cuts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. citizens getting snared in Trump's immigration crackdown, the Trump administration rejecting a proposal for Medicare to cover weight-loss drugs, tariffs hitting Big Tech in the wallet, China deriding U.S. tariffs, Democrats eyeing congressional gains in the midterms, the Senate moving toward extending Trump's tax cuts, the Justice Department challenging a judge's order to return a mistakenly deported man, a conservative-backed group challenging the legality of Trump's tariffs, the Trump administration ordering half of national forest land open for logging, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warning Russia on Ukraine, the firing of the National Security Agency's director upon the recommendation of Laura Loomer, U.S. negotiators being outmatched by their Russian counterparts in peace talks, the worldwide reaction to Trump's tariffs, more workforce cuts at the Social Security Administration, clean energy projects being canceled under the Trump administration, China's global strategy amid the Trump tariffs, Trump's attack on collective bargaining, Attorney General Pam Bondi downplaying the need to investigate the Signal fiasco, tariffs forcing Nintendo to delay preorders for its Switch 2 console, the tariff on China scuppering a TikTok deal, the IRS planning to cut 20,000 jobs, the Supreme Court allowing Trump's freeze of teacher training grants, a judge barring the NIH from limiting funding for universities and medical centers, the Senate passing Republicans' budget plan, and Trump erasing pages from the White House's official website and other government sites.
And that's all in addition to coverage by The Post and the Times of the protests themselves and agility-training tips.
How to triage the chaos? Scramble! 'As with any major news event, we closely monitor and make judgments on the best way to distill news to readers,' a New York Times spokesperson said in a statement. The April 5 protests, the statement continued, 'were no different and were covered fully and prominently across our platforms.' The Times presented a preview, a review, and audio and video content.
Neither the Times nor its competitors are likely to duplicate the work of the Crowd Counting Consortium, which requires the labor of a research director plus five or six assistants who are forever scouring news clips, social media and other sources to build a durable record of protest activity. The group is still trying to nail down attendance at events associated with the April 5 'Hands Off' protests, though Pressman said preliminary indications refute the notion that people 'are asleep or too fearful.' According to Levin, there were more than 3 million participants in 1,300 communities across the globe.
That's a lot of people eager to be interviewed. 'I wish someone would go around the country and talk to people standing in lines and ask: What makes you do this? Why aren't you cynical? What is motivating you to give up half your weekend, hours of your time, to speak out, to show up?' said Khanna.
