After Donald Trump’s win in 2024, commentators declared the so-called Resistance “dead” and “futile.” The opposition movement against Trump had been embarrassing, ineffective, a performative failure that did nothing “besides making the #Resisters feel good about themselves.” With the country now nine months into Trump’s second term, though, reports of the death of the Resistance turn out to have been exaggerated. The movement looks different than it did the last time around. It’s more hard-bitten. But it retains the same underlying idealism about the American project that led first to the explosive growth of the coalition, and then to its dismissal by cynics.

Today, in a reprisal of the first “No Kings” rallies that took place in June, millions of protesters will gather around the country to express their opposition to Trump. Over the summer, protesters waved American flags, dressed as the Founding Fathers and the Statue of Liberty, and held signs with quotes from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Those rallies drew an estimated 2 million to 5 million people around the country—on the scale of the 2017 Women’s March that convened the day after Trump’s first inauguration, then a competitor for the largest single day of protest the United States had ever seen.

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Organizers are now expecting an even bigger turnout. “We have a goal for No Kings to be the largest peaceful protest in modern American history,” says Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the progressive organization Indivisible, one of the many groups coordinating the demonstrations. MAGA, at least, is doing its part to deride the gatherings as uncool: “Anyone who participates in a No Kings rally is a dork,” one right-wing influencer wrote on X. Earlier reflections on the Resistance brushed it off as embarrassing pap. But such dismissals now risk ignoring the possibility that earnest outrage, at the right place and the right time, is itself a powerful tonic agai