It MATTERS that the crowd for the Women’s March on Washington was far bigger than that for President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The new president often boasts of having started a great movement. Let it be the one that was born with Saturday’s massive protests.
If size is important, and apparently to Trump it is, there was no contest. The Metro transit system recorded 1 001 613 trips on the day of the protest, the second-heaviest in history – surpassed only by that for Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. By contrast, just 570 557 trips were taken on Friday, when Trump took the oath of office.
Those are the facts, not the “alternative” ones the administration wants you to believe.
A president obsessed with winning began his term by losing.
Among all the news of the past few days, I begin with crowd size because Saturday’s rallies and marches, in cities across the nation, were unprecedented. Perhaps half a million demonstrators, many wearing pink hats, filled the streets of Washington. Protests in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles also drew crowds measured in the hundreds of thousands, and there were big anti-Trump gatherings in Denver, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, San Antonio and other cities in the US and around the world.
The White House predictably tried to blame the messenger. “There is an obsession by the media to delegitimise this president, and we’re not going to sit around and let it happen,” chief of staff Reince Priebus complained to a sceptical Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.
If Trump believes journalists can be so easily cowed, he’s in for a long four years.
The president is skilled at diversionary tactics.
He has been known to pitch a fit in order to draw attention away from news he finds inconvenient or embarrassing.
While his spokespeople have been spewing nonsense about television ratings and such, the administration has taken significant steps. Trump signed an executive order beginning the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, imposed a hiring freeze for federal workers, and reimposed a ban (lifted by the Obama administration) on US aid to family planning groups that provide or promote abortions overseas.
But whether Trump’s ostentatious pique about the not-so-historic size of his inauguration crowd is real or feigned, the fact that so many more people came to town to protest against Trump’s presidency than to celebrate it is important.
The new administration ignores the passion we saw on Saturday at its own peril.
Remember that the tea party movement looked at first like nothing more than a rowdy, incoherent bunch of sore losers – until it swept Democrats out of power in the House in the 2010 midterm elections.
I covered some of those early tea party rallies, and I saw similar levels of energy and engagement –and, yes, anger – at the Women’s March. The millions who participated nationwide constitute the kind of broad-based network that can be harnessed into effective political action.
The Trump administration can haughtily dismiss the dissenters by saying, as the Obama administration once did, that elections have consequences.
But the next election is right around the corner.
If progressives are going to recreate the tea party’s success, Saturday’s multitudes will have to begin organising at local level. They will have to field candidates not just for Congress but for governorships and state legislatures, too. They will have to develop policy positions that go beyond “stop Trump” – and that also go beyond traditional Democratic Party dogma.
The movement will look to lions such as senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and representative John Lewis for guidance, but ultimately must find younger leadership with fresh ideas.
The Democratic establishment faces the same existential dilemma that the Republican establishment had to confront: adapt or step aside.
The administration will argue that, after a bitterly divisive campaign, it is time for the nation to come together behind the new president. No, it is not.
We are in the middle of a political realignment that is nowhere near complete, and it is more important than ever that progressive voices make themselves heard. We need universal health care. We need to reduce inequality. We need to eliminate poverty. We need to move toward a clean-energy economy.
We need immigration reform and criminal justice reform.
And always remember: If Trump can become president, nothing is impossible.
l Robinson is an opinion writer for The Washington Post