PROTESTS UNDER TRUMP, 2017–2021*
The Trump presidency featured a high volume of contentious mobilization. We describe the collection and aggregation of protest mobilization data from 2017 to 2021 and offer five observations. First, the protests were sustained at a high level throughout the Trump presidency, with the largest subset of protests positioned against Trump and the administration’s policies. Second, the grievances that drove the protests varied. Third, the National Student Walkout and the antiracism protests in 2020 had the broadest geographic spread of any reported protests in U.S. history. Fourth, the vast majority of protests did not have arrests or injuries; they were nonviolent protests. When there were arrests, most people who were arrested were committing nonviolent civil disobedience, not aggression or interpersonal violence. Fifth, in 2020, a sustained period of right-wing countermobilization began around the issues of COVID-19 lock-downs, policing and race, and Trump’s false claim about the presidential election.
Contributor Notes
* We would like to thank the many research assistants and volunteers who contributed to the Crowd Counting Consortium. We are grateful for the comments from Mobilization’s editor and anonymous reviewers. For CCC funding, we thank the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; the Carnegie Corporation of New York through the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver; the Humility & Conviction in Public Life initiative, a project of the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute; and the Alan Bennett honors professorship at UConn.