If you squinted at various points through this election season, it almost felt like old times—specifically, 2017, when a loose coalition of voters, elected officials, and former TV game show contestants joined together with the singular goal of resisting a newly inaugurated president, Donald Trump, whom they viewed as an existential threat to democracy and the republic itself.

#TheResistance, as it was known on the website then called Twitter, didn’t materialize in time to stop Trump’s first election, but it had solidified its place in the culture by the time he took office, urging that we all had a pressing imperative to resist his xenophobic, racist, and homophobic policies in ways big and small—sometimes while wearing matching pink headgear—and assuring us that we shouldn’t be too concerned about the dubious new friends we seemed to be picking up along the way.

In retrospect, to see this energy bubbling up around President Joe Biden’s reelection might have been cause for some reflection, or at least taken as a sign that the president was not coming up with anything new in his bid for another four years, beyond still not being Trump.

But when Biden’s disastrous debate happened, the Resistance was cast into turmoil. Would it be better for the president to #Resist those calling for him to step down out of the belief that he’s the only one who can beat Trump or should he bow out and make way for Vice President Kamala Harris?

When Biden officially dropped out of the race, the relief was palpable: Finally, we could go back to focusing on beating Trump, with everyone tucked into line and newly united around Harris. And with Harris’ ascendance to the party’s nominee, the #Resistance vibes have once again reached a fever pitch.

All of our favorite characters are back out to play, and we’re welcoming cops and war criminals like former vice president Dick Cheney under the big tent and wish-casting about a reanimated Ronald Reagan pulling the lever for the first woman president. Most punishingly, Democratic voters are being asked to set aside core tenets of progressivism to electorally defeat Trump—the same ultimately failed moral bargain they were asked to make the first time around.

Current Issue

October 2024 Issue

Think back, if you can, to January 2017, when the original bad thing happened and Donald Trump was inaugurated as our 45th president. It was, of course, an affront to millions of people’s core beliefs in progress, racial equality, protections for LGBTQ people, and women’s reproductive freedom. 

But it also struck a real psychic blow to Democratic voters that the party still hasn’t fully gotten past. Chuck Schumer’s now-infamous gambit that, for every blue-collar Democrat the party lost to Trump, it would double its gains among moderate Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Illinois didn’t pay off; of those three states, Hillary Clinton carried just Illinois.

Yet, instead of making noise about gerrymandering, reforming the Electoral College, or acting on the idea that the party’s strategy had perhaps purposely alienated many working-class voters for a generation, a certain sector of too-online liberals took a different tack. There was still work to be done; it was more important than ever, and plenty of the work took the form of posting.

This loose assemblage joined together under a hashtag-ready mantra to #Resist, which gave away the game from the beginning: This was about pushing against a set of policies rather than articulating a vision for a better world, or the on-the-ground organizing work that could help us get there.

The broad coalition contained legitimate movements, like Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March. But it also attracted all manner of hucksters and frauds. Within a year, the #Resistance had become big business, with the savviest factions brought under the umbrella of the Democratic Party’s machinery.

With that in mind, it wasn’t a huge surprise to see our old, cringe-inducing friends rev back into full-force posting before the June 27 presidential debate that upended the 2024 race. Back were the hallmarks of the #Resistance, including Biden partisans thanking prosecutors for going after Trump, and former tweeting superstars like Jeff “I voted for the email lady” filling the collective timeline again. (A sample of Tiedrich’s unique stylings: “listen up, you caterwauling cum-socks: when Donny shits his diaper on live television, it’s not going to be CNN’s fault, and it’s not going to be Joe Biden’s fault.”)

But in the wake of the debate, the #Resistance was torn: Should Biden step aside for Harris? Or, more mystifyingly, did Biden even do that badly?

Conceding that he “wasn’t expecting much” out of the former Delaware senator’s first term and comparing the way the candidate moves to “FDR from his wheelchair,” Majid M. Padellan, a Resistance ringleader better known as BrooklynDad_Defiant! who has “#BlueWave2024” in his bio, wrote that Trump “wants to be a dictator. He wants to stay out of prison.”

“If you’re looking for someone who’s young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie,” BrooklynDad continued in the July 11 post. “I’ll take the old guy who needs a nap while saving democracy over the old guy trying to overthrow democracy who needs a legal team.”

The reinvigorated Resistance got more fanciful from there. “If Biden withdraws, how about a ticket of Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney to show this election is about our democracy? Country over party,” an MSNBC podcast host tweeted on the Fourth of July, apparently without irony. Darker conspiracy theories about CNN rigging the debate through bad lighting also went viral.

Just as day follows night, twin brothers Ed and Brian Krassenstein followed the Blue MAGA siren. The brothers Krassenstein, if you’ve forgotten, were #Resistance kingpins who were kicked off Twitter in 2019 and earlier faced allegations of running a Ponzi scheme that resulted in federal agents seizing half a million dollars from their homes. (They were never charged with any crimes.) They were eventually restored to Twitter, which they credited to Elon Musk’s benevolence, and happily re-embedded themselves in the posting community. “Uh oh…. You better watch out. Dark Brandon is coming back,” tweeted Ed Krassenstein on July 7. As a related aside, both now have “AI” and “crypto” in their bios as part of their rebranded reemergence.

But the debate was so bad for Biden that not even crudely sexual posts, harkening back to a hyper-specific, Obama-era subgenre, could save him. When he dropped out of the race on July 21, paving the way for Harris, the consensus shifted overnight. Biden became a “farewell sleepy prince” meme, a nod to his fondness for nodding off in public, in a fan cam-type video set to a cover of The Cranberries’ “Linger.” Writing in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, who tweets under the username RadioFreeTom, characterized Biden’s deeply belated, arguably forced decision to leave the race as his joining an “honorable fraternity” of men who chose not to seek reelection, a club, he notes, that was founded by George Washington.

In its swan song post the day Biden stepped aside, The Oval Pawffice, which tweets in the pretend voice of White House pets, posted a photo of the president with who appears to be his now-banished, bitey German Shepard, Commander, along with a message that read in part: “Furiends, please don’t be sad…we suppawrt his decision. Plus, we’ll continue to meowoof here until we pass the baton – in our case a bone – to the next first pet(s). And then they’ll meowoof here.” 

After Biden dropped out of the race, the consensus around Harris shifted almost overnight in a moment that felt eerily similar to the messaging around the last candidate who lost to Trump.

Many Biden dead-enders enjoyed a frictionless transition to becoming Harris die-hards. BrooklynDad_Defiant!, for instance, praised her “joyfulness” and declared, “trump is COOKED,” a contention not supported by polling, which still shows a close race. The “Biden’s Wins” account, which had been one of the final holdouts still supporting the current president, instantly switched to “Kamala’s Wins.” Even the Oval Pawffice got the memo.

Other events were even more explicitly #Resistance-coded. In September, the cast of Hamilton released a video urging viewers to check their voter registration status. While they didn’t explicitly endorse Harris, the stakes were clear: “I am not throwing away my vote, folks!” one cast member sang. The video could not help but recall one of the more harrowing moments from the 2016 campaign, where Lin-Manuel Miranda was filmed performing a pro–Hillary Clinton song which included, among other things, the line “Tim Kaine in the membrane!”

But alongside this relatively inconsequential froth came the more ominous features of the Trump-era #Resistance—particularly its focus on disciplining Democratic voters who would dare make a fuss in demanding more from their candidate, rather than a former “top cop” who prosecuted the parents of truant students and has been a heartbeat from the presidency as the administration aids and abets a genocide in Gaza.

Instead, Democrats have been told to quiet any doubts they had about a parade of cops and sheriffs at the DNC, Harris vowing to maintain the most “lethal” military in the world, or her campaign’s enthusiastic courting of Republicans. Any #resistance to that, the warning goes, would bring Trump back.

That’s the message the Harris camp made particularly clear to moral critics like the Uncommitted movement, who all but begged for a Palestinian speaker to represent their cause at the Democratic National Convention. When pro-Palestinian protests interrupted the vice president during a campaign stop in early August, Harris was roundly praised for shutting them down by saying, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

The last time we had a candidate telling us to shut up and vote, we ended up with the first Trump administration. But that’s either all in the past or isn’t considered worthy of reflection, let alone doing anything differently this time around.

Some former #Resistance stars, to their credit, have held off from diving back in too deeply. Even comedian Sarah Cooper, who amassed hundreds of thousands of followers with her videos lip-syncing some of Trump’s most bizarre remarks about sharks and Covid and leveraged her celebrity into a role in Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted movie, appears ready to move on. While she briefly jumped back into the game for a video recap of the Trump vs. Harris debate, she tellingly didn’t repost the video on social media but wrote in a pinned comment on the YouTube video, “This is the final one folks. Kamala will win if we all vote. Then we can finally put this menace out of our collective mind!”

In the end, that’s the promise the #Resistance is pitching: that we may banish Trump and, in doing so, allow American politics to recede out of sight and out of mind, knowing that the adults are in the room, in control, and nominally better than the Republicans.

But, as if in an intentional bid to engineer its own obsolescence under a Harris administration, the #Resistance has gotten awfully sloppy with who it’s allowing in. More than 100 Republicans who were members of the national security state or Congress under Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush signed a letter to back Harris? Welcome to the Resistance! Cheney, the architect of the plan to lie American into forever war in the Middle East, backs the vice president, as does W.’s torture-backing former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Crucially, these bandwagoners either full-throatedly support Harris’s plans to keep aiding and abetting the war on Gaza or have no plans to raise a fuss. All told, it’s an ignoble end to a social movement that was all bluster, no teeth.

After all, with friends like these, what’s left to resist?