Donald Trump’s 2024 victory didn’t just usher in political change, but a cultural one. The fact that Trump won both the popular vote and every battleground state meant, for many (Trump himself foremost among them), that the country had eagerly accepted his worldview as their own, was fully on board with his political program, and that any resistance was futile. Media outlets, businesses, and other institutions quickly folded or bent the knee to the incoming administration, which, upon taking office, didn’t meet anything approaching the kind of widespread pushback and energized, large-scale protest that had hounded Trump in his first term.

This was all based on perception. In reality, Trump’s win, though more emphatic than 2016’s, was anemic in the scope of history. He had failed to cross the 50 percent threshold, his battleground state victories were all secured by wafer-thin margins, and Republicans had actually won a bigger share of the popular vote in the 2022 midterms — an election widely viewed as a historic flop for the GOP.

But even though Trump had nothing close to the kind of mandate to embark on the radical, deeply unpopular program that followed, the widespread liberal demoralization his win produced did a lot of his work for him, by preemptively neutering much left-leaning opposition to his actions.

The “No Kings” protests that took place over the weekend, motivated by broad unhappiness with Trump’s term so far, are a signal that this state of affairs has, nearly half a year in, firmly changed.

It wasn’t just the sheer size of the protests, though that was significant: at between two to six million people across more than two thousand cities, Saturday’s demonstrations were not just on par with the largest protests of Trump’s chaotic first term but may have been one of the biggest mass protests in American history.

Some of the numbers in major US cities were staggering: 80,000 in Philadelphia; as many as 75,000 in Chicago; 50,000 in New York, San Francisco, and in the much smaller Portland, where the march stretched for twelve city blocks; at least 70,000 in Seattle, one of the biggest protests in the city’s history; ten thousand or more in cities like Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Spokane. In contrast to recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, many of the protesters trended toward the older, more middle-of-the-road Democratic voter, with many saying it was their first protest in decades or in their whole lives, and the rallies overwhelmingly saw no property damage or police violence.

But the protests were arguably more significant for their depth. Thousands turned out in larger, more liberal cities in otherwise red states, like the at least four thousand who protested in Nashville; the ten thousand or more who attended protests in Austin, Dallas, and Houston; the three thousand in Fargo, North Dakota; the thousands more in Topeka, Boise, and Little Rock, or the nearly one thousand who turned out in Charleston, South Carolina.

The protests reached deep into Trump-voting country, and not just in massive, populous cities. Thousands turned out across thirty-five different Iowa municipalities, including several thousand in Cedar Rapids and seven thousand at the state capitol in Des Moines. In Nebraska, ten thousand came together in Omaha, which had seen 1,000 people gather a day earlier to protest recent ICE raids, while two thousand people filled up the main strip of Lincoln and hundreds more protested in rural cities like Hastings and North Platte. Both states had in February seen some of the earliest mass gatherings against Trump, when overflow crowds turned out in Omaha and Iowa City for Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in red states.

These scenes were replicated by many thousands more demonstrators in numerous Trump-voting states: across thirty cities in Missouri, dozens more cities in Texas, at least twenty-four communities across Alaska, more than a dozen in Kentucky and Indiana a piece, and more than seventy cities in Florida, an ever-reddening state that last year saw even traditionally more liberal metropoles like Miami-Dade County move markedly toward Trump. For some of these locations, Trump’s recent controversial actions, including siccing the military on US protesters, had clearly spurred more grassroots opposition: in Mobile, Alabama, for instance, the two thousand protesters who turned out were a major step up from the hundreds who taken to the city’s streets two months ago, during the first series of nationwide “No Kings” protests.

It wasn’t just solidly red states, but also purple states that have wavered between Trump and Democratic candidates the past decade. These states’ uniform Trumpward shift last year was widely viewed as a bellwether for the country’s overall political mood, yet this Saturday they also saw thousands of people attend widespread demonstrations: in seventy towns and cities throughout Michigan, more than fifty across Wisconsin, and around forty in Arizona, where a thousand people were on the streets of GOP-voting Scottsdale in temperatures that reached a hundred degrees.

Missouri saw one thousand protesters turn out in solidly blue Boone County, but at least a hundred people also protested in Cooper County, which has given Trump 70 percent or more of the vote each of the last three elections. This was part of a nationwide trend, where Trump-supporting communities saw their own, sometimes surprisingly large “No Kings” protests emerge at the county level.

Texas’s deep red Bastrop and Brazos counties, where Trump has won with upward of 55 percent of the vote each time he has run, saw protests of more than seven hundred and nearly a thousand, respectively. In Pennsylvania, around a thousand protesters showed up in Westmoreland County, which has gone for Trump by more than 60 percent the past three elections, while four separate protests were held in Bucks County, a previously blue county that has shifted red — including 1,800 people who demonstrated outside GOP congressman Brian Fitzpatrick’s office in the rain.

In Lee County, Florida, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than two to one and Trump has won three times in a row, more than two thousand protesters turned out in Fort Myers, the county seat. Likewise, thousands were demonstrating in the state’s Volusia and Flagler counties, both solidly pro-Trump areas where Republicans dominate elected office, as well as hundreds more in the Villages, a sprawling retirement community that has been synonymous with Trump.

Local media reported similar phenomena in numerous other heavily Trump-voting, often rural communities, albeit at less elevated numbers, whether in Marion County, Ohio; Pulaski County, Kentucky — which saw its first ever anti-Trump protest this past weekend — Ohio County, West Virginia; or the towns or Lebanon, Oregon, and Lafayette Parish. Indiana’s Tippecanoe County has been a swing county for the past ten years, narrowly breaking for Biden five years ago and voting for Trump the other two times, but saw what organizers estimated was three thousand attendees for its local “No Kings” rally this weekend.

Some areas were notable for the level of protester turnout relative to the size of their populations. In Homer, Alaska, a rural town of six thousand people that features a mix of broadly libertarian voters of both the Left and Right, more than 600 people demonstrated. Axios reported that Pentland, Michigan, saw its local rally attended by a crowd that was half the size of its total population of 800.

Making the turnout particularly impressive were the weather conditions and risks that protesters were defying. Anywhere between three and five thousand Hoosiers rallied outside the statehouse in what was described as “rain-soaked” Indianapolis, for instance.

Meanwhile, around the country, Republican officials threatened demonstrators in advance with legal and even physical consequences. Turnout in Texas did not seem to have been dampened by Gov. Greg Abbott deploying the National Guard in advance, and thousands protested in New Orleans after Louisiana’s pro-Trump attorney general threatened to prosecute protesters who resorted to “anarchy, vandalism, and rioting,” broad terms that have been recently used to crack down on peaceful activists. More than two thousand protested in Cocoa, Florida, after the local sheriff threatened to hospitalize and murder protesters who got out of line. This was on top of defense secretary Pete Hegseth warning that the National Guard might be deployed all around the country as they have been in Los Angeles.

Many commentators have compared the protests to Trump’s underwhelming military parade in DC, where attendance fell way short of the 200,000 people that was expected, partly because of the worry of rain, and without any similar threats of violence. The comparison is meant to be insulting and embarrassing to the president.

But there’s a more important point to be made here. The turnout in liberal cities and even in Trump-voting towns and counties doesn’t necessarily mean that anti-Trump voters outnumber the president’s supporters in these areas or their states — in many cases, they don’t. But it does suggest that voters opposed to Trump’s agenda — who across the country were met with few to no counterprotesters, even in deep red parts of the country — are vastly more energized than his supporters, and that despite his having won the popular vote against a weak candidate running a bad campaign, that Trump’s public support is a lot softer and more passive than his 2024 victory made it seem.

It should also be a wake-up call for institutions that have opportunistically and cynically shifted rightward in the wake of the election to meet what they see as a changed public mood, or out of fear of the White House. The peaceful show of force from the anti-Trump side of the political spectrum on Saturday shows that the country has not necessarily changed as drastically from the years of the highly flawed but well-organized liberal “Resistance” that plagued Trump’s first term as it may seem — just people’s willingness to make their opposition known. And as Trump pushes a deeply unpopular austerity bill, crosses legal lines that few to no presidents have crossed, and plays with another war in the Middle East, that willingness is also changing.