What should—what will—protests against Donald Trump be like? I asked myself this question early yesterday morning while riding a bus down to Washington from New York. My bus left from Trinity Church, near Wall Street. On the bus were teen-agers, twentysomethings, parents, children, the late-middle-aged, and a few Episcopal priests. In the front seats, two young women were knitting pink pussy hats; across from them, two more made posters about racial justice. Would the march be cozy or confrontational? Affable or angry?
On the Mall and on the streets, every possibility co-existed. Eras, sensibilities, and aesthetics jostled for attention. A large family clustered around a little girl, perhaps four or five years old; when they said “Smash the—” she shouted “patriarchy!” to general applause. Many people carried signs expressing exasperation and bewilderment: “WTF,” “Shit Is Fucked Up,” “What Have You Idiots Done?” Others, such as the marchers from the International Communist Party, seemed unfazed by Trumpism—like the old pros they were, they led a polished, megaphone-powered march-within-a-march, with its own refrain (“Stand up, fight back!”). A young woman with a Russian accent held a sign with Cyrillic lettering: in Russian, she explained, it read, “Trump, Putin, Fuck Off.” Another sign quoted Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
And yet there was also a sweet, disarming, nerdy irony on display—the Internet-age equivalent, possibly, of nineteen-sixties flower power. One marcher carried an unhappy-face emoji. Signs referenced the resistance movements in “Star Wars” and “The Hunger Games.” The march harnessed the power of the cat meme, and a couple in front of me carried a sign reading “Three Doors Down: LOL.” The two-woman knitting circle posed for a photograph. “Look angry,” the photographer said. “I can’t,” one of them replied. After the flash, she said, “I kind of smiled. I went for cute-angry.” So, it seemed, had many other marchers.
Standing under a tree not far from the Capitol, Chris Ballard, a youthful fifty-two-year-old priest from New York, said that he’d been preaching about Trump. He grew up in the Midwest, and had told his congregation that he understood the frustration of rural whites who felt economically and culturally marginalized; still, he’d said, racism and xenophobia couldn’t be tolerated, and had to be called out for what they were. At that, a parishioner who’d supported Trump stood up and walked out. A colleague told Chris, “If she walked out, you did your job.” This didn’t seem to sit well with him, exactly. “You can’t just walk out,” he said. “It’s like if you’re in a relationship—you can’t just storm off. You have to stay and work things out. You’re in a community.”
He’d watched all of Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearings. “I wanted to see him as a human being,” he said. “I still don’t trust him, but now I can respect him. The same thing happened with Marco Rubio, when I watched him question Rex Tillerson. I’d never seen him like that before. I actually wept. I think American politics needs chemotherapy, and that chemotherapy might be Donald Trump. He’ll make us so sick that we’ll want to work together again.” A roar rose in the distance and then passed, wave-like, through our part of the crowd—an emanation from the speeches taking place out of earshot—and a few like-minded folks from the Trinity bus nodded in agreement; in that instant, they were ready for the healing to begin. Meanwhile, a group of women nearby saw the priests and grinned. They called out, “Nasty clergy!” Chris laughed and said, “That’s right.”
The march didn’t, to my eyes, feature the kinds of gestures that might sway voters moved by Trump. Almost none of the signs focussed on the economy, or on economic issues, such as student debt, that interest both liberals and conservatives. The words “freedom,” “equality,” and “democracy” were everywhere, but when I saw a sign reading, simply, “We Are Patriots” I realized that patriotism, as such, was broadly absent. At times, the colors of the rainbow appeared to be more widespread than red, white, and blue. Later, on the bus ride home, Madonna’s speech to the assembled crowds—“To our detractors that insist that this march will never add up to anything, fuck you”—was read aloud, to the delight of everyone on board. Curious, I took out my phone to see how the speech had been received on the right: sure enough, the presence of Madonna had been portrayed as a typical example of the left’s celebrity-centric self-gratification. Elsewhere on Twitter, images and videos suggesting that the march was an act of lefty narcissism were already circulating.
But this march wasn’t a coördinated act of political speech or an attempt to rethink how the left makes its case. It was, as Jia Tolentino wrote recently, a more or less spontaneous act of reaffirmation, a chance for people who feel repudiated by their fellow-citizens to get together and remind themselves that they aren’t alone—in fact, they are the majority. “You woke the giant,” one sign read.
Afterward, standing in a crowded bar in Union Station, the Trinity crew contemplated, on television, aerial footage of vast crowds filmed at protests around the world. Such crowds force you to think. The large number of people who voted for Trump has caused some liberals to ask whether they might have too readily dismissed his supporters as simply, or only, racists and xenophobes; surely that many people couldn’t have been motivated by impulses so base. Taking in the televised images of the protest crowds—scenes that couldn’t be brushed aside with a tweet about media bias—it was easy to hope that they’d push some Trump supporters to reconsider his “élite” critics. If the millions who came out to criticize him are élites, then the word “élite” has no meaning.
While the priests stood drinking their beers and watching the news, a woman approached them. She was soberly dressed, in clothes suitable for an office; around her neck she wore a lanyard from which hung a badge that said “Women’s March on Washington.” “Are you priests?” she asked. When they said that they were, she asked for a prayer. One of them took her hands in his, and, after a brief and private conference, they prayed quietly together. She walked away, and there was a moment of silence. Then they turned back to watching the multitudes.
