When Rachel Izzo woke up on Saturday morning, she wasn't sure protesting was in the cards. It was chilly, her friend had canceled and it had been a long week at work. But she decided she needed to go.
"I said, If I don't go to this, I'm going to be mad," Izzo admitted, as she gripped a poster of a coat hanger, a longtime symbol of the abortion rights movement. "If I don't show up, I'm going to be just ... sitting back and letting it happen. And I don't want to be a part of that."
She's one of several thousands who protested on the National Mall as part of the People's March, a mobilization put together by a coalition of left-leaning and progressive organizations opposing President-elect Donald Trump's incoming second-term agenda.
It comes nearly eight years after hundreds of thousands came to Washington for the Women's March, just one day after Trump's first inauguration. It stands as the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.
This year, as Democrats and left-leaning voters grapple with the reality of a second Trump term, many are also working through what effective opposition may look like moving forward.
'I am tired of fighting. But who's going to do it?'
For Izzo, who works as a nurse in the District of Columbia, Trump's second election win stung. She told NPR that as a sexual assault survivor, she's worried about how the president-elect may control the Department of Justice. She's part of a federal inquiry into the policing of sex crimes in New York City.
"If Trump shuts that down, it'll be really hard. So that's one reason why I'm out here. I'm saying I do not want them to win," she said. "I am tired of fighting. But who's going to do it?"
Izzo is not alone in that exhaustion. Multiple protesters and organizers spoke about feeling tired or knowing others in their community who felt resigned following Trump's decisive win last fall.
It's something that may have played a factor in turnout on Saturday. Organizers told NPR that more than 50,000 attended. It's a tenth of the crowd seen eight years earlier when half a million people congregated in Washington, D.C., and 4.6 million people marched nationwide.
"There were 10, 20 times as many people the first time," Karen Elkin of northern Virginia estimated as she stood near the Lincoln Memorial and looked across the reflecting pool.
"I had like ten people staying at my house from all over the country," she added. "And I have zero people staying at my house this time."
The People's March was meant to be different
"We never set out to try to meet or exceed that first march," People's March organizer Tamika Middleton told NPR in an interview before the protest. "We're in a different place, and we're in a different moment."
Middleton serves as the managing director for Women's March, which led logistics for the demonstration on Saturday.
While previous Women's Marches have often centered on gender equality and protecting abortion access, Middleton said that the People's March was geared at a broader range of issues affecting voters.
"We have to – at this time – not just mobilize people to show up and say, hey, on this day, I'm registering my dissent or my resistance to a Trump presidency," she said. "We have to get people to show up and then continue to show up because every single day we're preparing for attacks on immigrant folks, on LGBTQ folks, on poor folks, on women."
Marching, Middleton argued, is the best way to grow the movement, even as some feel politically drained.
Robert Cohen is a professor of history at New York University and studies U.S. protest movements. He argued that opposition levels could still change as Trump implements his agenda.
"Being tactical about it and trying to come up with new approaches is not necessarily a sign of weakness or that you are totally demoralized and not going do something when something horrible is done by this administration," he said. "It just means that 2025 is not 2017."
Protest movements have fluctuated in size throughout recent history, Cohen added, pointing to a drop in protests after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, only to be followed by a resurgence and renewed massive movement in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.
"That's a really good example where a movement that seems pretty ineffective comes roaring back more powerfully than ever before," he explained.
Anti-Trump activism in 2025
Trump's win in 2016 left Leshea Long of North Carolina feeling very alone. Now, this time around, she said she knows what's coming.
"I've spent the last three months filling myself up with joy and all of the things because I know … what daily life in that fight is going to be about," she said
Long told NPR she plans to stay politically active, working with abortion rights groups and hounding her elected officials with calls and petitions.
Looking around, she said she wasn't worried about the size of the People's March compared to eight years ago.
"We're going to take this back to our states or our cities, our towns, and we're going to talk about this," she vowed. "It's going to open up the conversation."
Larry Stopper disagrees. The full-time activist led Democratic organizing efforts and anti-Trump actions after retiring in 2016. Watching Trump win last fall, he said, was gut-wrenching.
"I've been defeated," he told NPR ahead of the People's March.
Over the past few years, his focus has turned to local organizing in Virginia. He didn't go into the district for Saturday's protest.
"I have learned through marching and marching and marching and watching what happens after we march that it doesn't change a thing," he said. "If I want to change things, I have to do something that can affect change, and marching is not it."
Back at the march, DC-based Methodist pastor Scott Bostic has heard similar sentiments. He said that part of the reason he attended the march was to send a message to those who skipped it.
"This is an incredibly important time to continue to encourage one another, to continue to try and build hope for other people," he said. "I talked to several people who are kind of feeling resigned just because we're in this place again. And so I thought it was really important to be here to stand up and to encourage others."
In his hands, he holds a poster of a Black woman that he found while walking around. It reads: "Our future, our democracy."
"I wanted to have one," he said. "And I wanted for my daughter to have one, too."
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