Anti-Trump march set for 18 January

The Women’s March has called street protests against Donald Trump for 18 January 2025, two days before he takes office as President.

The similar protest in January 2017 drew almost 500,000 people in Washington, and maybe four million across the USA.

The build-up is slower this time round. A big online meeting on 7 November called for in-person community meetings, to start organising local united fronts, across the country. But from Vermont, one of the most anti-Trump areas of the USA, Traven Leyshon tells me that, on his information, take-up has been limited. His local meeting on 20 November in Vermont’s biggest city, Burlington, was a disappointment.

“It turned out to be a small meeting at a person’s house. Once the organiser had 18 people signed up, all the house would hold, she stopped. And I didn’t really see any organising capacity coming out of that meeting”.

The Vermont Progressive Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, who form the base of Bernie Sanders’ operation in Vermont (though Sanders himself is a member of neither VPP nor DSA) did not show. They are organising to recruit people to themselves, but not really to build united fronts.

The Working Families Party has set up nationwide “mass calls” on Tuesdays and Thursdays in December and January, under the headline “Making meaning of the moment”.

There are still a lot of online meetings. Some have been sponsored by Surj, Showing Up for Racial Justice, who have some organising capacity and some skill. The meetings have been mostly about recruiting people to Surj and then setting up small local groups who know each other and will be prepared to do something as things develop.

Developments will probably be slow for the next week or so, with the Thanksgiving holiday from 28 November to 1 December. There is a promising-looking online meeting on 12 December, but things could be slow until January.

Traven Leyshon told me that for now many people “are just tuning out, even the kind of people who would be out demonstrating or marching in 2016 and 2017... People are just more demoralised and it’s going to take more time to develop resistance”.

There’s a lot of talk of legal action to block Trump — by unions, by non-profits, by Democrat states and cities — but as yet little talk of mass action.

Vermont and Chicago and many other places have declared that they are sanctuary cities or sanctuary states, and passed legislation saying that the police are not to collaborate with immigration cops on deportations.

How much sand the legal resistance throws in the gears of Trumpism will depend on how much mass action there is to push it along and to defend local officials who may get locked up for defiance.

• Thanks for information for this article to Traven Leyshon in Vermont