One Year Into Trump’s Second Term, Protest Became Ambient

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — January 20, 2026

What Happened

By late 2025, public protests against Donald J. Trump continued to surface in Washington, D.C., despite the absence of a unified or durable opposition movement.

One such event was a rally branded “Remove the Regime,” held at the National Mall in November 2025. The gathering drew thousands of participants and circulated widely on social media. The protest called for the removal of the sitting U.S. president but did not produce a lasting organization, formal leadership structure, or sustained campaign.

Similar demonstrations appeared intermittently throughout the second half of 2025. These events varied in name and scale but shared a common pattern: rapid mobilization, brief visibility, and quiet dissolution.

What Is Known — and What Is Not

There is no public evidence that Remove the Regime functioned as a long-term national movement with chapters, funding infrastructure, or an enduring strategy. Available reporting and organizer communications indicate the rally was intended as a single-day mobilization rather than a permanent political organization.

Attendance figures are based on organizer statements, media photographs, and publicly available social media documentation. Independent crowd estimates vary, and precise participation numbers cannot be independently confirmed.

What can be established is frequency. Protest activity calling for impeachment, removal, or resistance continued to occur without centralized coordination, even one year into the president’s second term.

Analysis

By the end of 2025, protest in the United States had become ambient rather than exceptional. Demonstrations no longer depended on a unified movement or formal leadership to occur. They emerged because the political conditions motivating them remained unchanged.

In this context, rallies such as Remove the Regime functioned less as engines of political change and more as pressure indicators. Their lack of permanence was not a failure of organization, but a defining feature of the period. Dissent had normalized.

Archival Context

For historical and journalistic purposes, events like Remove the Regime are best documented as markers of the late-2025 political climate rather than as movements in their own right. They reflect a presidency characterized by sustained unpopularity and weakened institutional legitimacy, rather than episodic opposition tied to isolated policy disputes.

As the Trump administration entered its second year, protest activity had become recurring, decentralized, and expected.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

This essay is archived as part of the ongoing WPS News Monthly Brief Series, available through Amazon.

References

Refuse Fascism. (2025). Remove the Regime march in Washington, D.C. https://refusefascism.org

Social media posts and photographic documentation from November 2025 demonstrations at the National Mall, Washington, D.C.