My memories of President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, back in 2017, are still burned into my brain.
I was working for D.C.’s storied alt-weekly, Washington City Paper, and was assigned to cover the many inauguration protests around the city that day. I biked around downtown, stopping to interview various Trump supporters and protesters, until I found one of the larger protests marching toward the National Mall. I was no stranger to covering protests — social justice was one of my main beats, which had me covering large and small demonstrations throughout D.C., almost weekly. But this day was different.
For weeks, the fear, anxiety and tension of the incoming Trump administration had evolved into righteous anger. D.C. may be a transient city — and one that’s often (and wrongly) portrayed as nothing more than the playground for the politicos and their staff in Congress — but for the hundreds of thousands of people who call it home, there’s a sense of pride and ownership about it. From go-go to mumbo sauce to the Washington Color School, the city has a rich, storied cultural history and one that its people fiercely fight to preserve. And so, with the threat of the incoming administration, people took the streets to let Trump know: you’re not welcome.
At times, it felt like the people protesting the inauguration outnumbered the people actually attending it (which may have been the case!). At a certain point, the protest I was following — which would later be known as the DisruptJ20 protest — was violently attacked by police, who eventually kettled them to the corner of 12th and H Streets NW. I stood there, along with a slew of reporters, watching police drag and arrest dozens of protesters one by one.
And then all hell broke loose.
Pro-Trump supporters started pushing protesters. A skirmish broke out. Hundreds of riot police went into action, pepper-spraying peaceful protesters and firing tear gas, pepper balls and flash-bang grenades into the crowds. It was a grisly scene and one that, in my eyes, came to define the next four years.
I wasn’t at Monday’s inauguration, but from the coverage I read, the scene seemed a stark opposite of Trump’s 2017 inauguration. On Saturday, two days before the inauguration, thousands of people marched on the National Mall for The People’s March. But in all, the protests were markedly quieter than before.
The cynical reading of this is that it’s because Trumpism won and people, even those who don’t support him, have accepted this new reality. I don’t think that’s accurate. To me, it feels like the resistance to the second Trump term isn’t so much a “take to the streets” approach than it is a more thoughtful and organized opposition using legal means to fight back. There’s a network of pro-democracy organizations that spent years preparing for this moment and are challenging Trump’s flurry of executive orders in the courts almost as soon as they’re signed. That’s huge.
