At first glance, the “No Kings on Presidents’ Day” protest in Harrisburg, Pa., might have been mistaken for a surprisingly progressive Trump rally. MAGA caps and pussy hats alike were missing from the heads of the 500 or so Pennsylvanians who gathered on the state capitol steps on Monday. I spotted nearly as many Stars and Stripes and Gadsden flags—coiled rattlesnakes over the phrase DON’T TREAD ON ME—as I did emblems of Pride and Palestine.
The sloganeering likewise wasn’t so easily coded as strictly red or blue. For every familiar exclamation of “Dump Donald Trump!” or “This is what democracy looks like!” from someone dressed in rainbows, I overheard chants that called for limits on executive authority (“No Kings, No Tyrants!”) by people clad, Tea Party-style, in American Revolution costumes. And I heard calls for the deportation of at least one immigrant (Elon Musk).
Monday’s protests—held in roughly 80 cities across the country—were the byproduct of the new 50501 Movement, which stands for “50 protests. 50 states. 1 movement.” It originated in January on Reddit, reportedly thanks to a user named Evolved_Fungi; the 50501 subreddit now boasts more than 119,000 members. The movement’s first nationwide protest was held on Feb. 5, and Presidents’ Day marked the second.
“In other words, the problem is billionaires, not white supremacy or the patriarchy.”
Both rounds of demonstrations have been a tiny fraction of the size of the anti-Trump crowds seen during the president’s first term, but there are hints that 50501 may be a smarter kind of decentralized, many-tentacled beast than its predecessors. Some of the movement’s loudest voices say: Don’t be too woke, too un-American, or too cozy with the Democrats. They’re also de-emphasizing the identity-first calls to action that galvanized and then eventually splintered the Women’s March, the Science March, and the dozens of other boutique protest movements that rose up in the late 2010s. Instead, they are framing their arguments in terms of protecting the working class and the levers of democracy from unelected oligarchs. “[We’re] showing the world that the American working class will not sit idly by as plutocrats rip apart their democratic institutions and civil liberties while undermining the rule of law,” reads a line on 50501’s website.
In other words, the problem is billionaires, not white supremacy or the patriarchy.
“This isn’t about Trump. It isn’t about Biden. It isn’t about left vs. right,” declared a 50501 moderator. “This is about the ruling class stripping away the rights of everyday people—one step at a time, one law at a time, one crisis at a time.”
If this sounds like a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the rotting flesh of the old #Resistance as well as the left populism of Occupy Wall Street and the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign—well, there’s something to that. Indeed, 50501’s biggest partner is Political Revolution, Sanders’s old organizing PAC.
Squint hard enough, and you can also spot some strains of the DNA of their distantly related cousins on the right: the Tea Party, the Ron Paul campaign, and—ironically enough—the first Trump campaign. Hence, all the waving of Old Glory and talk of the hijacking of the government by one South African-born tech mogul.
The Trump administration and DOGE, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, have certainly provided opponents with plenty of rage bait recently. Musk’s team of cybernerds has been hacking away at the federal government like it’s a demon in Musk’s favorite video game. For his part, Trump cribbed a line attributed to Napoleon on X this weekend, declaring: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
What’s far from certain is whether 50501—or any street protest-first movement in 2025—can do much more than mildly annoy Trump 2.0. All the aforementioned populist movements ran out of gas, got co-opted by the major political parties, or ate their own tails.
The new movement’s horizontally organized form and eat-the-rich messaging give it the air of an Occupy Wall Street revival, which means it may also be destined to make its biggest mark as an awareness campaign rather than a genuine political movement. Occupy’s biggest legacy was a revival of class consciousness among young millennials and a narrative triumph—a 1 percent vs 99 percent framing through which millions of Americans (myself included) could understand their economic difficulties. However, without leaders, institutional backing, or a clear agenda, it eventually died on the vine in Zuccotti Park in 2012—though it did help set the table for the initial Sanders insurgency a few years later.
One advantage 50501 has over Occupy is that Trump and Musk can easily be cast as billionaire villains, unlike President Barack Obama, who not only had a lower net worth but also talked a good game against corporate greed—despite avoiding serious economic reform as president and eventually twisting his knife in the back of the Sanders campaign.
Nonetheless, the movement faces serious headwinds. We aren’t in an auspicious moment for social-media driven mass protests of the sort that surged a decade ago. Most of America is still exhausted from the peak hyperpolitical period of 2016 to 2022. It has begun to hibernate from news coverage and the nonstop social-media anger machine and turned back to Netflix and chill. Most Democrats seem to be putting their hands in their pockets and trudging back to brunch.
Organizers will also have to contend with a less favorable media climate. As we saw when The Washington Post declined to endorse Kamala Harris, the mainstream media is attempting to be more politically neutral this time around—no doubt in part to avoid being targeted in the president’s litigious campaign against unfriendly outlets. Social-media algorithms are also being nudged away from resistance, most notably on X, which is under the thumb of Mr. DOGE himself.
A further problem is that, while Trump’s open coziness with oligarchs may be a liability, he also enjoys more popular support in 2025 than in 2017, and his base is more working-class, not less. One test will be how many voters who took a chance on him in 2024 will end up disillusioned enough with his administration to rebel—especially if inflation persists even as the GOP seeks to cut programs like Medicaid while extending tax cuts for the wealthy. Under these circumstances, it’s conceivable that the discontent that propelled Trump into office twice could turn against him.
For the moment, though, Trump may be quoting figures from the French Revolution, but there’s little appetite for reaching for a guillotine.