Saturday’s march in Washington bore all the resemblances to the Women’s March that happened eight years ago. There were quippy signs, strident chants and a sea — albeit a much smaller one — of people from all over, impassioned in their resistance to Donald Trump. Even the pussyhats made a return.
But behind the scenes, there’s widespread acknowledgment that the original movement has transfigured.
“I think the reality of eight years ago is that the Women’s March as an organization did not exist prior to the march. We’ve spent the last eight years navigating the growing pains of being an infant organization but with a big spotlight on it,” Tamika Middleton, managing director of Women’s March, told NOTUS ahead of the event.
Middleton says the organization is preparing to take on the next four years with a sharper, clearer vision of who they are and what it is they seek to contribute. They’re contending with a completely different political climate; polling shows that Americans’ distaste for Trump has softened since 2016 and 2020. Grassroots resistance to Trump faltered in the greatest way possible with his reelection. And elected Democrats are divided on how to rebuild their operations.
This year, the march drew a crowd of at least 50,000, according to organizers and the National Park Service. That’s only a fraction of the attendance in 2017, when roughly 470,000 people marched in Washington, D.C., with millions more in other cities.
After internal turmoil, the organization behind the Women’s March reimagined itself as a broader social justice movement. The protest itself has been renamed: It’s the People’s March. The focus Saturday was not just on women’s rights but also on immigration reform, D.C. statehood, rights for Indigenous people and the Israel-Hamas war.
“There has been a greater effort to make sure that we’re dealing with [issues] in a way that is across different types of movements, in ways that definitely didn’t happen in 2017,” Nana Gyamfi, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, told NOTUS.
Organizers are aware of the challenges of a resistance movement in 2025. In 2017, Trump was an unknown quantity as a politician, freshly linked to misogynistic rhetoric and allegations of mistreatment of women. Hillary Clinton’s loss had come as a surprise to the American public after months of polling that showed her with an advantage.
“It was just a shock to the system that brought up all of these questions around the kind of country that we were living in, in a way that had not been seen,” Middleton said. “Eight years later, a second Trump win, the shock feels different. There’s less shock because there has been, over the last eight years, a bit of a normalization of rhetoric, a bit of an entrenching in different ways of the kinds of policies that Trump had been advancing.”
Immediately after the election, liberal organizers told NOTUS that they were not trying to build a repeat of last time and that this moment will require “new analysis and fresh tactics and different ways of engaging.” It’s not entirely clear yet what all those fresh tactics will be or how much of an appetite there is to join a protest movement.
Rukia Lumumba, the director of the electoral justice project for Movement for Black Lives, said after Trump’s inauguration, the focus will be on organizing groups at the local level to identify challenges and solutions to community issues — a different approach than the Trump-focused rhetoric from 2017.
“How are we responding? What are we building? What are our hopes as we move towards 2026 and 2028 and how are we going to achieve those, to see real wins? And how are we going to mitigate harm that is possible during these next four years? And so those assemblies are really important, and so we’re going to continue to do those throughout the year,” she told NOTUS.
Gyamfi emphasized coalition building across demographics and issue areas.
“It’s necessary because all of our challenges and solutions are interconnected, and the more that we operate in silos, the less opportunities we have to address those challenges and to push forward those solutions,” she said. “That de-siloing is what’s going to enable us to have power, and if we can continue — this is not a beginning. It’s like another stepping stone in the process that people have been engaged in, and an important one.”
Beyond Saturday’s action, Women’s March initiatives this year include combating misogynistic rhetoric online, training the grassroots to organize women’s protection teams in their communities, women’s self-defense training and continuing their Digital Defenders program to combat misinformation and disinformation online.
“What’s fueling the movement now is a sober assessment of what’s at stake. … They have explicitly told us that they are coming for everything,” Middleton said. “So I think that’s what’s really fueling the movement right now — an understanding that we have to use every tactic at our disposal in order to fight what is coming.”
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Violet Jira is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.