What it said
Most of what both movements said fit on a hat or a sign. The red cap carried Make America Great Again
, a line that Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign had already put on buttons as Let's Make America Great Again
. Stanford's Symbolic Systems program named the Trump hat its symbol of the year for 2016. Against it came the pink knitted hat of the Women's March, designed by the Pussyhat Project in November 2016 to make a unique collective visual statement
, and signs such as Love Trumps Hate
at marches in New York days after the election. Online, the matching shorthand was #Resist and #NotMyPresident.
Slogans of this kind are virtue words. Great
and love
are hard to vote against and hard to measure. That makes them banners, not claims, and a banner is ordinary political speech.
The heavier load rode on two other phrases. One was Stop the Steal
. The other was the forecast, repeated on anti-Trump accounts from 2017 to 2019, that the president had conspired with Russia and was about to be charged.
Who made it and why
The pro-Trump side was rally crowds, volunteers and meme-makers, plus a few organizers who gave the anger a name. Roger Stone's political action committee ran a Stop the Steal
site and a volunteer vote protectors
project in 2016, aimed first at the Republican nomination and then at the general election, before either result was in. Reddit's r/The_Donald worked as a workshop for images that spread across platforms. In 2020 volunteers ran Trump Train
car convoys and boat parades; a Facebook page for one on Lake Travis, Texas, on 5 September said more than 2,600 people planned to come.
The anti-Trump side was marchers, town-hall regulars and new local groups. Former congressional staffers published the Indivisible guide in December 2016. The Women's March on 21 January 2017 put more than 3 million people in U.S. streets by political scientists' counts. Through 2017, local groups formed in towns of every size, largely through friendships and social media; Gose and Skocpol found most members and leaders were middle-class, college-educated white women. In February 2017 about 1,000 constituents filled Rep. Jason Chaffetz's town hall in Utah to oppose repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Both sides also had imitators they did not hire. Russia's Internet Research Agency, working through fake American accounts, promoted Miners for Trump
rallies and also a Trump is NOT my President
rally in New York on 12 November 2016. The record does not tie the real marchers of that day to the agency's event. The same agency posed as both sides of the police debate as well; see the page on the two police slogans.
What it got right or wrong
The 2020 fraud claim was false on the record. Courts dismissed or ruled against Trump and his allies in more than 60 election cases. Federal election-security officials stated:
There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
Attorney General William Barr said he had not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election
. Facebook took down a Women for America First Stop the Steal
group on 5 November 2020 after it gained hundreds of thousands of members in two days; Ali Alexander incorporated a new Stop the Steal entity on 10 November and kept holding rallies. The label kept its verdict while the cases were being lost.
The collusion forecast was also not borne out. On 13 May 2017 Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor wrote that sources with links to the intelligence and justice communities
said a sealed indictment of Trump had been granted. No such indictment appeared. The Steele dossier, published by BuzzFeed News on 10 January 2017 was described by BuzzFeed itself as unverified
. The Special Counsel's report of April 2019 documented Russian interference and many campaign contacts, and then said this:
the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities
Some #Resistance accounts kept building on collusion theories after that sentence was published.
Both sides used the same insult for the other's crowds. In 2009 Nancy Pelosi said of anti-health-reform town hall protesters, I think they're Astroturf
. In 2017 Trump posted that The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. Sad!
Reporters found no evidence that the 2017 protesters were paid. Organized is not fake. Indivisible published its playbook under its own name, as the Tea Party groups had.
Both sides objected to the count. On 6 January 2017 House Democrats objected to electors from several states; no senator joined and Vice President Biden ruled the objections out of order. On 6 January 2021, after the Capitol was cleared, 6 senators and 121 representatives voted to sustain the objection to Arizona's electors, and 7 senators and 138 representatives to Pennsylvania's, all Republicans. Both objections failed. The procedure is lawful. The difference is in the numbers and in what happened earlier that day.
The outcomes were not the same size, and saying so is not taking a side. On 6 January 2021 Women for America First held the permitted rally at the Ellipse, the president spoke, and crowds then attacked and breached the Capitol. More than 140 police officers were assaulted, and the Justice Department has charged more than 1,500 people. The violence the record shows on the anti-Trump side in this period was in city streets and smaller: Portland police declared a riot after property damage on 10 November 2016, and inauguration-day protests in Washington ended in 230 arrests after windows were broken and a limousine burned. The Women's March the next day had no arrests, D.C. police reported. In Texas, a Trump Train
convoy surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 on 30 October 2020; in 2024 a federal civil jury found one of six defendants liable under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and cleared the other five.
The First Amendment, working as written
Almost all of this was the First Amendment working as written. Wearing a hat, holding a rally, driving in a parade, knitting a protest symbol, flooding a town hall and calling a member of Congress are speech, assembly and petition. Neither movement needed anyone's permission to do any of it, and the page defends both equally. A BuzzFeed News study of six large partisan Facebook pages in 2016 found false or misleading content in 38 percent of posts on three right-wing pages and nearly 20 percent on three left-wing pages. Falsehood ran on both sides, at different rates, and the answer the Constitution gives to it is more speech, not a censor.
The line is violence and the machinery of government. A crowd that assaults officers to stop the counting of electoral votes is not assembling peaceably, and the charges that followed concern the attack, not the caps. The record also notes that the sitting president addressed the rally that came before the attack.
The state's own hand shows up on the other claim too. The Justice Department Inspector General reported in December 2019 that Steele's primary sub-source told the FBI that Steele had misstated or exaggerated
his statements, and that the FBI relied on Steele's reporting in surveillance applications on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, without corroborating its specific allegations about him. The 2023 Durham report said the FBI could not corroborate the dossier's substantive allegations. Secret surveillance of a citizen built on unverified opposition research is a due-process failure regardless of whose campaign he worked for. Where the scale differs, say so: one claim reached a riot at the Capitol; the other reached surveillance applications on one man. Both reached state power.
Facebook's removal of the November 2020 group was a private company's decision about its own platform; the record here does not show a government request behind it. That is different in kind from the government pressure examined on the Disinformation Governance Board page.
Its legacy
Methods travel. MAGA's slogan came from Reagan. The Resistance's town-hall method came from the movement it opposed. Indivisible's authors wrote that they had watched Tea Party activists organize locally and convince their own MoCs to reject President Obama's agenda
, called those activists' ideas wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism
, and set out to replicate the Tea Party's success in getting Congress to listen to a small, vocal, dedicated group of constituents
. The earlier wave is on the Tea Party and Occupy page.
The test that survives this period is the same for both sides. Keep the symbol and the claim apart: a hat is expression, a fraud or conspiracy charge is a fact claim that can be checked. Look for the ruling, the charging document or the report's own words, not a forecast. Notice when a label like steal
or collusion
arrives before the evidence, and whether it changes after.
Sources
- FRAME case study "MAGA and the Resistance: grassroots organising for and against Trump, 2016-2021," for the chronology, counts and quotations. propagandaarchive.org
- Smithsonian, Reagan 1980 button; Stanford Symbolic Systems, 2016 symbol of the year; Pussyhat Project, "Our story."
- CNN, 13 November 2020, on Stop the Steal; NPR, 5 November 2020, on the Facebook removal; House January 6 committee report, chapter 6. govinfo.gov
- Campaign Legal Center, results of 2020 election lawsuits; Christopher Krebs, Senate testimony, 16 December 2020; NPR, 1 December 2020, on Barr.
- U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, "48 months since the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol." justice.gov
- Texas Tribune, 23 September 2024, the Trump Train verdict; CNN, 5 September 2020, the Lake Travis parade.
- Indivisible guide (December 2016) and Indivisible on Offense (2018); Gose and Skocpol, "Resist, Persist, and Transform," Mobilization (2019).
- NPR, November 2016, on the post-election protests and the Portland riot declaration; DCist, 22 January 2017, on arrests; Britannica, Women's March; NBC News, Chaffetz town hall; VOA on the 2017 town halls.
- Roll Call, 6 January 2017; CNN and Forbes, 6 to 7 January 2021, on the electoral-vote objections.
- Snopes, the sealed-indictment claim; CNN on BuzzFeed and the dossier; Daily Beast on #Resistance accounts after the report.
- Special Counsel's Report, Volume I (2019). justice.gov CNN on the Inspector General's report (December 2019) and on the Durham report (May 2023).
- ThinkProgress archive, Pelosi 2009; Trump post, 21 February 2017; BuzzFeed News, partisan Facebook pages, 2016.