lodibet Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United Stateslodibet, it was too cold to go outside. An arctic chill had enveloped much of the country, and Trump, this time, joined history in the Capitol Rotunda. Thousands of supporters huddled in a nearby arena to watch him address the nation on a screen; there was no outdoor parade. The streets were mostly empty of his critics, and the weather could be blamed for that as well.

But if Washington had been so frigid eight years ago, it’s easy to imagine that liberals would have been willing to risk frostbite. Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, was countered by the Women’s March, which brought nearly 500,000 people to Washington alone, making fleeting icons out of its chief organizers and standing, at the time, as the largest single day of mass protest in American history.

Trump was a crisis and an obsession back then, and the “resistance” to his administration represented the high-water mark for a certain kind of liberalism: one that was sincere and totalizing, full of fury and a thirst for action. Almost every Democrat, from the ex-presidents to the junior staffers, had a blockbuster opinion on how Trump won, why Hillary Clinton failed and where the party had to migrate. They meted out blame: James Comey, the Russians, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, the white working class. Every Democrat seemed to have a plan for resisting Trump, too — for ensuring his presidency would never have the patina of normalcy.

Just a few months into Trump’s presidency, Al Green, a representative from Texas, called for his impeachment, and rank-and-file Democrats reveled in the speed at which the new,PESO99 official incendiary president might be undone. Not a day went by, it seemed, when there wasn’t a mass march or calls for a fresh demonstration. Twitter and Instagram were hothouses for anti-Trump activism. Causes were minted quickly: standing up for immigrants (which morphed into the drive to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement), or defending women (which fueled the Women’s March and, later, #MeToo), or sustaining Black Lives Matter (which reached its apogee after George Floyd was killed in 2020).

Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.

But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.

The 2010s resistance to Trump — that sprawling, seemingly irrepressible mass movement that joined everyone from Bush Republicans to Bernie socialists — was like little else in the modern era. It seems even more remarkable in retrospect than it did at the time. This was a period during which there was debate over whether Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, should even be served at a restaurant.

The Trump movement could be equally fervent. There were obvious policy components that attracted his supporters — nativism, protectionism, railing against elites — and Trump was wise enough to jettison unpopular parts of the old Republican platform, like slashing Social Security and waging new wars overseas. But much of his appeal is personal; to be MAGA is almost to inhabit an identity category. Ardently following Trump can mean caring, suddenly, about all his particular predilections and mounting a fight against the enemy wherever possible — in product boycotts or on street corners, on social media or in NASCAR chants, in school board meetings or at election sites.

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