Why would peaceful protesting be of any use against Trump and MAGA?

Politics & Elections
1

The idea of peaceful protesting is that “If we protest, then Trump and MAGA will listen to us and change their ways.” But if Trump and MAGA were like that, they wouldn’t be MAGA in the first place. The whole “point” of MAGA is that they do not care what non-MAGA folks think - especially liberal folks.

There have been a considerable number of peaceful protests during Trump’s presidencies - notably right after he was elected in 2016, and also the No Kings protest in June this year. But neither of them have led to any noticeable reform in Trump or MAGA’s ways.

Even more to the point, Trump can’t be reelected, so he has even less incentive to listen to what any protesters have to say in protest. He won’t be facing voters again in 2028, so why would he need to listen to voters - especially, voters who are in the blue camp and weren’t ever going to vote for him anyway?

One might argue that peaceful protesting is a tacit threat to Trump that “Hey, if you don’t listen to us, the Republicans will lose in the midterms in 2026.” But we already saw how the GOP suffered a midterm loss in 2018 and it didn’t budge or change Trump’s ways one bit. Furthermore, November 2026 is a very long distance away (in the Trump era, time drags on like a crawl) and there is immense damage Trump can still do before any Democratic majority is sworn in in 2027.

One might quote the “3.5 percent rule” to justify peaceful protesting. But this axiom doesn’t really work here. First off, 3.5 percent of the U.S. population is about 12 million Americans. The No Kings protest never got even close to that number in America. Secondly, it takes continuous, sustained, never-ending protests to get a ruler out of power (look at how Indonesia got Suharto to resign in the 1990s, for instance.) The anti-Trump protests in America aren’t at all a sustained, continuous force of protesting - they’re sporadic one-off events. Having two No Kings protests in one year - just two separate days on the calendar - is going to achieve nothing. In other words, instead of having 12 million Americans continuously and relentlessly protest for months without end, it’s having 4-5 million Americans protest twice a year.

Additionally, there is no leverage. Peaceful protests against Trump aren’t putting any meaningful inconvenience on the administration. They aren’t disrupting the economy, they aren’t preventing ICE from handcuffing people, they aren’t physically stopping the administration from doing anything it wants to do. Why wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, the Trump administration and MAGA just ignore it and carry on?

It doesn’t do anything about the “What’s in it for me?” factor. When Trump and MAGA see a bunch of liberal protesters holding placards and signs, their response is - “So?” They know liberals were always anti-Trump and anti-MAGA to begin with. They have no incentive to give the liberal protesters what they are demanding. There is no reason why Trump, Vance, Stephen Miller, Patel, etc. would see folks on the opposite side of the aisle protesting and cave in. What would they gain from doing so? When the protesters are liberal, and the only people who care about the protests are liberal, then it’s preaching to the choir. It would take right-wing or MAGA people protesting against Trump to catch Trump’s eye.

In order to believe that peaceful protesting will change Trump and MAGA, you have to believe that Trump and MAGA are fascist enough to be fascist, yet somehow democratic enough to care about protests and listen to what protesters (on the opposite aisle) want. That’s a mighty thin tightrope to stand on, and I’m not convinced Trump and MAGA are standing on it at all.

So, in a nutshell: Peaceful protests right now 1) involve far too few Americans, 2) are far too few and infrequent, 3) exert no meaningful pressure or obstruction, 4) pose little threat to a president who knows he won’t face any future elections, and 5) give Trump and MAGA no incentive to cave in.

Granted, I don’t know what would exert meaningful change pressure on Trump or MAGA. I don’t pretend to know answers any more than anyone else does. But I don’t see how peaceful protesting against Trump are changing his or MAGA’s ways one bit. It seems like performative feel-good theater; something that makes anti-Trump protesters feel like they’re making real change without actually making any real change.

2

But no real downside. And, frankly, not nearly as futile as posting your grievances with Trump on a message board.

3

They aren’t yet. Thats absolutely true of demonstrations on the scale of the ones we have seen. They are not in any way an inconvenience to the Trump administration.

But that’s not true of all peaceful demonstrations. There is a point where they become not just a inconvenience but a existential threat to the regime. Its an entirely plausible aim to say force the administration into stopping all ICE detentions, we are just a long long way from that. We would need one or two orders of magnitude larger protests for that to be a possibility. But it could happen, it should happen.

4

Protests are also meant to raise awareness and draw more numbers for the cause. The more people that are against something, the more power that they have. And if the people that are protesting attract significantly more people to their cause, politicians that up for re-election are more likely to take notice.

5

No. It’s so that others will see the protests and realize they can do likewise — and can vote accordingly, run for office accordingly, work accordingly to support others in need and/or apply for help that they need, and not just hide in fear.

(And Trump doesn’t change his ways; though he changes his mind all the time, sometimes in midspeech. But he caves, oh, he caves.)

Each round’s been bigger than the last. Last round hit five million.

Wanna bet?

Yeah, I know what the Constitution says. Trump doesn’t care. And if he keeps on flouting the Constitution and there aren’t any protests — do you still have faith in Congress or the courts to stop him, if they think they’ve got no popular backing?

But in any case, whether Trump himself can stay in office isn’t the main issue. The problem isn’t only Trump; he’d never have gotten elected even once if it were.

So you want to argue people out of going to them and out of planning them, so that they’ll stay small and infrequent?

If you actually want anything to work, that certainly isn’t the way to go about it.

6

Why not? Why are you trying to discourage it? Peaceful protests remind anyone who cares to see and hear that there are deep objections to the current direction of this administration. That alone is reason enough to continue and expand them.

7

We aren’t going to have an ameliorating effect on Trump, not in the sense of appealing to his concern for what the citizens want.

Things that a large widespread peaceful protest can have an effect on:

• Congresscritters. A decent contingent of Democrats and a small scattering of Republicans have opposed him in various ways. Large protests might make them more likely to do so, or to continue doing so.

• Judges. Judges who back his administration’s power plays must at some point do so only by ceding their own powers. If they don’t hold him accountable for illegal acts, especially illegal acts against judges whose opinions he doesn’t like, they’ll soon wake up to a world where the only decisions they can reach are the ones he has ratified. It’s dangerous to cross him — judges and politicians alike have been targeted by him and assaulted by his zombies — but it’s dangerous not to, and large noisy protests that underline how many people oppose him may make them feel less alone in standing up and doing their job

• The media — their default behavior is still to cover events such as public protests, although they’ve faced retaliations too. They have to market their news shows and along with them their sponsor’s products to the citizenry, and if a lot of the citizenry is showing up in angry protest against the administration, the media is more likely to cover it and comment on and discuss it

• The rest of the world, and each other — Showing up to engage in peaceful protest won’t automatically make us feel like we’re doing anything useful, but it does communicate to us that there are a lot of us who feel strongly about this. That’s important. And it conveys to the rest of the world that America is divided and that there is a resistance.

8

It’s not meant to directly stop Trump or really anything - it’s to signify publicly opposition and resistance, both to show that it’s possible and to signify to others that it’s safe to disagree and oppose Trump.

9

They need a chance to snowball and get bigger and bigger and bigger and then a protest can become a movement and movements can shift politics.

I’m not really a protester. I didn’t know anything about the No Kings protest or what is was about until I saw it on TV after. Now I know. There’s another No Kings protest this weekend. I think I’ll go.

10

Peaceful protests against Trump so far have little to no impact. They are feel good parties and nothing more.

Anti-Trump protests need substance. It’s past due to have daily rolling protests blocking roads to airports, blocking major downtown intersections at rush hour, blocking access to sports venues, and the like. A march of 10,00 people is one thing, but ten simultaneous marches of 1,000 each across the same city would do more. The point is Couch Potato America needs to be inconvenienced, even disrupted. Yet, that means confrontations with police, even the Guard, but it’s needed. The very survival of the Constitution, of democracy, of our freedom is at stake.

I’m just concerned when there will be a Kent State event, because that will be the telling point. If it occurs and everyone melts after that, the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” will be reduced to the “land of the controlled and the home of wimps.”

11

I went to the last No Kings protest and will go to this one too, but I sincerely believe we need a country wide walk off from our jobs if we want to get their attention. Two hour crowds are not much of an inconvenience to anyone. But it is fun to stand with large groups of like minded people and cheer for the same thing. You can also laugh at all the maggots that drive by and flip a middle finger at you. They hate being laughed at so a lot of laughter gets to them.

12

We had basically this same discussion back in June, and everything I’d say here I already said there.

13

By the end of this process, they had collected data from 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns. And their results – which were published in their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict – were striking.

Strength in numbers

Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.

This was partly the result of strength in numbers. Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed because they can recruit many more participants from a much broader demographic, which can cause severe disruption that paralyses normal urban life and the functioning of society.

In fact, of the 25 largest campaigns that they studied, 20 were nonviolent, and 14 of these were outright successes. Overall, the nonviolent campaigns attracted around four times as many participants (200,000) as the average violent campaign (50,000).

14

An obvious “use” would be Trump and company committing a massacre of peaceful protestors that galvanizes the general public against him. Which I’m actually a little surprised hasn’t happened yet (and am somewhat skeptical that the general public would care about a few thousand dead “liberals, pedophiles and homosexuals”, anyway).

I rather hope it doesn’t come to that, though.

15

The 3.5 percent “rule” is just a starting point. It’s not a be all, end all. Protests and involvement must constantly build. I don’t see that happening in America. I so want to be wrong on that.

16

Yeah this. The current protests will not change anything except they could be a step on the road to bigger protests that will change things.

Not that protesting will definitely change anything but they stand more chance of doing so than almost anything else we can do, certainly nothing before the 2026 mid terms at the very earliest.

17

Protests are also aimed at their own party, reminding the world that their politicians have done little or nothing. They are embarrassing to those in power.

18

This is exactly what the risk is, and not in a good way. If anti-Trump people did this sort of thing, they result wouldn’t be winning people over to the anti-Trump side, whether that be couch potatoes that didn’t vote in 2016 or 2024, or MAGAs deciding to switch sides*. The result will be couch potatoes getting pissed off at those hippy / commie / liberal / whatever protestors who inconvenienced them, and saying to themselves “you know what, maybe I’ll show up to vote for Vance (or whoever the Republicans nominate in 2028) and show them not to mess with my conveniences”. It would also motivate the MAGAs to show up to the polls on election day.

*. See Richard Nixon winning in 1968 (and LBJ deciding not to run even though he was the incumbent) as evidence against the hypothesis that protests of that sort would be of any actual benefit. I agree, our Constitution and our democracy is at stake, but driving the couch potatoes into the arms of Trump and MAGA by pissing them off is a terrible strategy.

19

Yep, Saturday October 18.

This is the official site, and gives details on the closest event to where you are, etc.:

20

See you there!

(well, virtually; we’re probably not doing the protest in the same physical location on Saturday.)