“The Resistance” is a label for the loose network of groups, campaigns and protests that formed in opposition to the first Trump administration after the November 2016 election. It was never a single organization, and the name was applied from outside as much as claimed from within.
Indivisible
The clearest documented strand is Indivisible. It began in 2016 as a Google Doc written by former congressional staffers, setting out how constituents could pressure members of Congress, and it spread from there into a network of local groups. Roth’s study reads it as a countermovement that took its tactics deliberately from the Tea Party — the same focus on town halls, district offices and primary pressure, aimed in the other direction.
Indivisible currently states that 2,500 local groups are organizing and that 99% of congressional districts contain one. That figure is self-reported, has no independent verification, and is recorded here with that limitation.
The Women’s March
The largest single mobilization associated with the period was the Women’s March on January 21, 2017. The Crowd Counting Consortium’s estimate is 3.2 to 5.3 million participants across more than 650 locations — a range, not a count, and the range is wide.
What was removed
The previous version of this page carried several precise figures with no source behind any of
them: that #Resist appeared in over 2.5 million tweets in three days after the January 2017 entry
restrictions, that the Indivisible Guide “spawned nearly 6,000 local chapters by 2017”, and that
over 1,000 #resist Meetup groups scheduled 625 events globally. The chapter figure is more than
double what the organization itself claims today. None of the three could be traced to a source
and all have been removed.
It also claimed the movement contributed to Democratic gains in the 2018 midterms, helped defeat the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and “normalized small-dollar fundraising”. Those are contested causal claims about elections and legislation, and nothing cited here establishes them.
Status
Recorded as transformed. The organizations formed in this period continued past it; the
mobilization that gave the label its meaning did not persist in the same form.
Sources
- 01.
Indivisible. About Indivisible. The organization's own account. Source for the origin of the Indivisible Guide as a Google Doc written by former congressional staffers in 2016, and for the organization's current claim of 2,500 local groups covering 99% of congressional districts. A self-reported figure with no independent verification, and used here as such.
- 02.
Roth, B. (2018). Learning from the Tea Party: The US Indivisible Movement as Countermovement in the Era of Trump. Sociological Research Online, 23(2), 539-546. Peer-reviewed account of Indivisible as a countermovement modelled explicitly on Tea Party tactics. Publisher site (journals.sagepub.com) returns HTTP 403 to automated clients; metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 03.
Chenoweth, E., Hammam, S., Pressman, J., & Shay, C. W. (2025). New data shows No Kings was one of the largest days of protest in US history. Waging Nonviolence. Cited only for the Crowd Counting Consortium's figures for the January 21, 2017 Women's March — 3.2 to 5.3 million participants across more than 650 locations — which the article gives as a comparison case.