The Missing Outcry: Why America’s Streets Stay Too Empty Against Trump – and the Collapse of Trump’s Numbers

The images from Labor Day 2025 tell two stories at once. There are the raised fists in front of Trump Tower in New York, the blue-striped Chicago flags waving through the canyons of skyscrapers, the “No Kings” signs in Boston. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, rose up on this symbolically charged Monday in September against the rule of billionaires and Trump’s authoritarian overreach. Yet in the arithmetic of resistance, a painful truth is revealed: measured against the dimension of the threat – National Guard in Washington, D.C., federal takeovers of city administrations, the creeping erosion of democratic norms – the protest remains shockingly small.

The numbers speak a clear language. Even if one takes the organizers’ most optimistic estimates and assumes roughly five million participants nationwide, the movement does not even come close to the critical mass historically required for systemic change. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth has established the 3.5 percent rule in her groundbreaking research: Nonviolent movements that can mobilize at least 3.5 percent of the population at their peak almost never fail. For the United States, with its 342 million inhabitants, this means that twelve million people would have to take to the streets simultaneously. The reality of Labor Day fell short of that by several orders of magnitude.

The Anatomy of Fear

What America is experiencing in 2025 is not classic political apathy but a complex web of calculated intimidation and learned helplessness. The deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., since August 11 was more than a show of force – it was a precisely orchestrated act of deterrence. When Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago issues preemptive orders that city officials are not to cooperate with federal agents, when Chicago immigrant rights groups feverishly hire lawyers and set up emergency hotlines, this shows the perverse effect of authoritarian threat scenarios: they force civil society into a defensive posture even before the first baton is swung.

The deterrence works with surgical precision. In conversations with demonstrators, a pattern emerges: there is Filiberto Ramirez, 72, who openly admits in Chicago that he fears violence should additional ICE agents come to the city. There are the parents carrying their children on their shoulders but secretly calculating whether the next demonstration might be too risky. There are the restaurant workers in front of Trump Tower symbolically handing out tacos – a reference to “Trump Always Chickens Out” – but whose unionization rate of a meager 9.9 percent prevents them from exerting real economic pressure. This individual risk calculation multiplies millions of times and creates what social psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance”: everyone waits for the others to act first, while at the same time everyone believes they are alone with their outrage. The result is a protest landscape that is geographically broad – from Guam to Maine – but numerically thin.

We are also embedded in a transregional network supported by journalists, activists and civil rights advocates. It ensures that information flows faster, whistleblowers can report confidentially, and reports of human rights violations now reach us as reliably from South America as from Africa or Europe. This work is deliberately carried out in secret – only in this way do we receive sources that would otherwise never see the light of day. The Epstein case could also become highly significant; our investigations are ongoing, but apart from the factor of time, financing is a constant challenge. Such investigations consume thousands of dollars, while major media outlets are increasingly holding back – not least after the still inexplicable error of the Wall Street Journal, which reported on the leather-bound book of birthday wishes to Epstein in which Trump is said to have left a compromising entry. Experienced reporters had already warned against publishing such hearsay, because the book is safely in the possession of Epstein’s lawyers and will certainly not be released. This journalistic misstep has done considerable damage: it has made it more difficult to mobilize people against Trump because many now fear that other revelations could also be vulnerable. While Trump’s deportation policy is heavily criticized in many states, it remains largely unchallenged in Republican strongholds – and every journalistic mistake costs not only trust but strengthens the political right.

The Paradox of a Thousand Demands

“Workers Over Billionaires” – the slogan sounds like revolutionary clarity, but behind it lies a strategic dilemma that has plagued movements throughout history. The Labor Day protests brought together union members fighting for higher wages, civil rights activists opposing federal takeovers, immigrant activists fearing ICE raids, teachers defending their education budgets, and Democrats concerned about the constitutional order. This breadth is both a strength and a weakness.

Successful mass movements in history – from the civil rights movement to the anti-apartheid campaign to the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 – were characterized by crystal-clear, catchy demands. “Equal rights now.” “One person, one vote.” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The current anti-Trump movement, by contrast, resembles a kaleidoscope of legitimate concerns whose complexity dilutes its mobilizing power.

When May Day Strong speaks of the “billionaire takeover” and simultaneously protests against federal interventions, for workers’ rights, against immigrant persecution and for the preservation of Medicaid, no focused energy emerges but rather diffuse outrage. The average American who might sympathize with one or two of these concerns finds no clear entry point. Where exactly do you sign? What exactly do you risk your job for? When exactly would the fight be won?

The Structural Powerlessness of the Working Class

America in 2025 is a country that has forgotten the grammar of resistance. With a unionization rate of less than ten percent, the movement lacks its historically most important muscle: the ability to bring the economic machinery to a standstill through coordinated work stoppages. The great social upheavals of America – from the New Deal to civil rights legislation to the environmental laws of the 1970s – were always fought for by or with strong unions that could not only demonstrate but also shut down production.

Today’s reality looks different. SEIU Healthcare Michigan may proudly mobilize its 17,000 members and announce strikes, but these are pinpricks in an economic system that has long since learned to live with fragmented labor disputes. The Chicago Teachers Union can bring thousands to the streets, but without the dockworkers, without the truck drivers, without the Amazon warehouse workers, it remains symbolic gestures.

The irony is that precisely at a time of historically low unemployment, workers would theoretically have maximum bargaining power. But decades of neoliberal policy have atomized that power. Gig economy, temporary contracts, fear of automation – all this has turned the working class into a collection of isolated individuals fighting for personal survival rather than collective rights.

From the Women’s March to Protest Fatigue

There is a grim precedent that hangs like a shadow over the current movement: the Women’s March of 2017. Back then, immediately after Trump’s first inauguration, 3.3 to 4.6 million people poured onto America’s streets – one of the largest single-day mobilizations in the country’s history. The pink pussy hats became a global symbol of resistance. And then? Trump governed for four more years, the movement splintered, the energy dissipated.

This experience has etched itself deeply into the collective consciousness. Why march again if even millions achieve nothing? The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 may have been the largest protest wave in American history with 15 to 26 million participants over several weeks, but they too led to no fundamental systemic change. Police budgets were cut marginally and then increased again. Structural violence remained intact.

This protest fatigue is not only psychological but also material. Demonstrating costs: travel, lost work time, potential arrests, legal fees. After years of pandemic, inflation and economic uncertainty, the resources of many Americans are depleted. The middle class, traditionally the backbone of mass movements, is fighting for survival itself. Anyone juggling three jobs to pay rent has no time for revolution.

The Long March to Critical Mass

And yet it would be fatal to dismiss the current protests as meaningless. History is not written linearly. The civil rights movement took years to build before it reached its zenith. The Eastern European revolutions smoldered for decades before they exploded in 1989. What happened on America’s streets on Labor Day 2025 may be numerically insufficient, but it is infrastructure in the making.

In Chicago, immigrant rights groups are currently building networks that go far beyond demonstrations: legal aid hotlines, know-your-rights trainings, safe houses. In Detroit, health workers are networking across sectors. In New York, restaurant workers are experimenting with new forms of protest. These molecular organizing processes are invisible in the statistics of demonstration participants, but they are the mycelium from which mass movements grow.

What is missing is the spark. In the history of resistance, it is often a single event that turns smoldering discontent into widespread rebellion. Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia. The murder of George Floyd. No one can predict what that spark will be, but the probability increases with each authoritarian overreach by the Trump administration. The threat to send federal troops to Chicago could prove to be a strategic mistake. Americans may be divided on many things, but the rejection of military force at home is deeply rooted. If tanks roll through the streets of Chicago, it could mobilize the twelve million who are still staying home today.

Until then, America remains trapped in an in-between state: too outraged to stay silent, too fragmented to win. The 865 Labor Day events were not nothing – they were proof that the democratic pulse still beats. But they were also not enough. Not nearly enough. In the arithmetic of resistance, the difference between one million and twelve million is not gradual but categorical. It is the difference between protest and revolution, between symbolism and systemic change.

What remains: the new Yahoo/YouGov poll shows that a clear majority of Americans reject Trump’s plan to send the National Guard to Chicago and Baltimore: only 37 percent support such a move, 53 percent are against it. Even Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., is largely seen critically – Democrats and independents clearly oppose it, only Republicans mostly support it. The legal basis is also shaky: a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the use of the military in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act, making further deployments vulnerable. Notably, only one third of respondents would approve of soldiers being deployed in their own city, and among Black Americans it is just 15 percent. Trump’s provocative claim that he is “not a dictator” but is praised for “stopping crime” is also rejected by most – 69 percent oppose the idea of a “dictator against crime.” At the same time, concerns about crime are declining overall: the number of those who see violent crime as a “very big problem” has fallen significantly since 2023, while official statistics show sharply declining crime rates in both D.C. and Chicago.

History teaches us that authoritarian systems are not overthrown by moral superiority but by organized power. The question is not whether America can muster this power – the numbers from 2017 and 2020 prove the potential. The question is whether it will muster it before the windows of democratic resistance finally close. The countdown is running, and the streets remain too empty.