What Happened to the Anti-Trump Protests? Honey Badger Don't Care.
Corporate leaders seem eager to work with Trump, and there's no push back from employees. Some CEOs wrote big checks for the inaugural this time. That's a HUGE change from 2017.
When Donald Trump surprised almost everyone - including himself - by defeating Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016, the reactions were primarily adverse. It got worse as he was sworn in, with the outbreak of violence on Inauguration Day to the subsequent “Women’s March,” complete with pink “pussy hats.”
You may not know that it has become an annual event, although, like most such protests, it has all the hallmarks of a grift with ties to Marxist and anti-Israel marches in other cities.
Not to be left out, a mob operating under the label “Disrupt J20” launched a riot in downtown Washington around 12th and K Streets, NW, near where I used to work. Over 200 rioters were arrested, and six police officers were injured in the attacks. Two police officers were hospitalized. All but 21 of the charges were dropped against the rioters. Over $100,000 in damage was reported, mostly smashed windows, damaged cars, and fires. They had plans to shut down bridges and crash one of the inaugural balls that were scuttled or, more likely, foiled.
And that was just in Washington. There was enormous angst among young wokesters in corporate offices across the land. I saw it firsthand when I worked in New Jersey and felt the brunt of a marauding mob of college-indoctrinated Millennial activist employees raising a stink with an overwhelmed human resource department that helped create the monster in the first place.
In my case, it began with trying to explain Trump’s election to officials and opinion leaders in Canada. They didn’t get Trump or understand how he was elected in 2016. Days after that election, the Canadian-American Business Council (CABC), which I used to chair, was scheduled to hold an annual event in Ottawa, steps away from Parliament Hill, at the posh Chateau Laurier Hotel. We arranged two former presidential candidates, former US Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who had challenged Trump for the GOP nomination, and former Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT), who had run for the 2004 Democratic nomination. Both were friends, came from the populist wings of their respective parties, and had appeared together several times to promote civility in political communications.
The event was a huge success, even as Trump was then and remains unpopular in left-leaning Canada. Both veteran US politicians outlined the frustrations of America’s working classes and a lack of upward income mobility, a problem Canada was not facing and did not understand at the time (they sure do now).
It was so successful that I invited Santorum, a personal friend, to visit my employer’s headquarters for an employee town hall to “explain Trump” to our increasingly young workforce. Upon returning to my office, I notified my superiors, who expressed no objection since I’d successfully held dozens of town halls with bipartisan local, state, and federal officials over several years. Santorum was well known within our company, and while in the US Senate, he was the first recipient of contributions from our company’s political action committee for his strong support of our public policy agenda (the company PAC was eliminated after I retired).
I sent a notice across the company transom. That’s when the fun began.
Woke employees approached an LGBTQ activist on the company’s senior leadership team. She asked for a meeting with me to allow a small handful of employees to air their objections to allowing a former GOP US Senator and two-time presidential candidate a forum at our company. They trotted out a bunch of old and tired quotes taken out of context to make Santorum out to be hostile to LGBT people.
I corrected and challenged them, reminded them of Santorum’s strong relationship with the company, and invited them to attend to address their concerns directly with him. They wouldn’t have asked or said anything to him he hadn’t dealt with before and could not handle with aplomb.
Unhappy with my failure to acquiesce to their unreasonable demands, they organized a campaign to badger the head of Human Resources and eventually the CEO. I was told it was the biggest HR crisis in the company’s recent history. I was directed to cancel the event. Nearly all the executives I dealt with on this have left the company. I happily retired a year after this debacle. Cancel culture was in full bloom. Hopefully, things have improved at my former employer.
It wasn’t fun telling Santorum what had happened. While surprised, he took it in stride, being no stranger to hostile attacks and the cancel culture mob. The woke employees were emboldened and continued their cultural revolution within the company’s DEI-inspired “affinity” groups, on internal company websites, and elsewhere.
Several employees—more than those who complained initially about the event—were upset that it was canceled. I chose to keep our date with Santorum and personally paid for a private lunch with more than a dozen employees who wanted to hear from him. It was terrific.
Meanwhile, Trump would still be President, and his people would populate regulatory agencies. Trump’s White House created a Manufacturing Council and invited my CEO to participate. She accepted and came to the East Room at the White House, where Trump extolled how much he loved our products. He invited us to a first-ever Manufacturing Summit, where I set up a table of American-made company products. He, Vice President Mike Pence, and others stopped by for conversations.
It didn’t stop there. During his first months, Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, where he said this (be sure to queue up to the 38:50-minute mark if it isn't already reflected here). It was remarkable that the President of the United States singled out my company for praise, a lobbyist’s dream, but the reaction back at headquarters was . . . muted.
Just days before, during the televised Jobs Council meeting at the White House, Trump referenced, he repeated it. And the attacks got worse as Trump took office, and “Charlottesville” happened in August 2017. That changed things.
Looking back, the horrific events in Charlottesville, which included the murder of a young female by a white supremacist Neo-Nazi driving a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, also resulted in the years-long “Charlottesville hoax.” Trump was falsely accused of asserting there were “good people on both sides” of the competing protests between white supremacists and leftists. A total failure of local and state law enforcement to manage the competing protests - they were driven into each other - contributed to what happened.
What Trump was referring to, which was evident on video, was a debate over whether to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville park (it was, as many other monuments of Confederate officers were removed from Richmond and elsewhere, and military bases renamed). It wasn’t until Trump was out of office that some in the media began to acknowledge the hoax.
Joe Biden continued to lie about the event unchallenged and, in fact, primarily supported by the legacy media throughout his presidency. Biden claimed to base his reason for seeking the presidency in 2020 on that lie. As we now know, candidacies based on lies don’t end well.
More fun ensued. The leadership teams of companies on the White House Manufacturing Council were barraged with thousands of clearly orchestrated one- and two-sentence threatening emails with names but no contact information demanding they resign from the Council. Obviously, in retrospect, they were bots. My senior execs were badly advised by a failed former GOP political consultant, Steve Schmidt, to acquiesce to the demands. They chose his advice over mine to keep our powder dry.
It’s still unclear who led or managed these “grassroots” campaigns, but they didn’t end there. They became the basis for a massive cancel culture campaign targeting private sector officials for being on the wrong side of the Kulturkampf. I remained in their sights, but more about that later in a future post.
As CEOs began to resign from the Council, Trump disbanded it. Company execs began to keep their distance from the Trump White House to avoid dealing with the Woke Mobs, sometimes within their companies.
Trump hasn’t said a word about my former employer since.
None of this was unique to my employer, and certainly not me. Perhaps many of you experienced it, too. But fast forward to today, and especially Inauguration Week 2025.
No “DisruptJ20” violent protests. No massive “pussy hat” wearing protests (they claim to have held a march a day or two before, but good luck finding media coverage of it). Some CEOs, especially from the woke-heavy technology sector - Google’s CEO and the founders of Facebook and Amazon - ponied up over $1 million each to help underwrite Trump’s inauguration. It was the first inauguration in recent history that was almost entirely privately funded.
No new Charlottesvilles are on the horizon, thank God, probably because most Confederate monuments have been moved or destroyed and military bases renamed in the never-ending war to erase history and avoid offending certain people. But stay tuned. And no reported employee revolts or organized grassroots campaigns targeting any CEOs or their companies, at least that I’ve seen or has been reported thus far.
Some brutalized fellow Oklahoman Carrie Underwood for agreeing to perform at Trump’s inauguration. Still, she was unapologetic and delivered a beautiful acapella rendition of America the Beautiful when the musical accompaniment failed, even as she reportedly was unhappy with her performance. Successful musicians are often perfectionists. Given the inevitable pushback from her woke industry, I’m sure she wonders if it was worth it.
There are several theories on why “massive resistance” to another Trump term has failed to materialize. It starts with the fact that the last four years under a failed Biden-Harris have been a disaster. Many swing voters began to look fondly back on more prosperous economic times. They were turned off by cultural offenses, especially force-feeding puberty blockers and worse on young children, and often hiding it from parents as disreputable medical outfits saw a financial gravy train.
Americans were aghast at politicizing our federal law enforcement, judicial, and intelligence agencies. Ten to twenty million people poured across our border, including 300,000 unaccounted-for children, many of them human trafficked for slavery and child sex abuse, and the 2021 Afghanistan debacle proved to be a tipping point for millions of voters.
We realized we’d been lied to by so-called “experts,” from COVID-19 origins to the Hunter Biden laptop being a “Russian disinformation campaign.” A president who promised us “unity” delivered anything but. The 90-plus indictments and prosecutions of Trump fell apart, except one New York case will be tossed out on appeal if it even gets that far. The massive coverup of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline that started before he even took office, which the Wall Street Journal has well documented. Then, the brazenly unconstitutional censorship campaigns involving social media outlets, especially Twitter and Facebook, have been well documented in the “Twitter Files.” And don’t get me started on Biden family pardons and corruption.
Then there’s the realization that we’ve gotten used to Trump. He was a shock to the system eight years ago. While many still cringe over occasional social media posts, his rhetorical blandishments, and frequent exaggerations, we know what to expect. The only surprise is how big and fast he’s come out of the box this time. We’ve learned to take him seriously but not literally, as journalist Salena Zito noted about Trump’s supporters from 2016 in her and Brad Todd’s definitive book, “The Great Revolt.”
And Trump, after two assassination attempts and “lessons learned” from his first term, is more strategic this time, if no less controversial. It's funny what winning the popular and Electoral College votes, plus positive job approval numbers can do. This time, Trump was also a different and wiser candidate, aided by a more favorable political climate and the benefit of experience. The 78-year-old Trump proves that you’re never too old to learn unless you’re the diminished if not demented, 81-year-old Joe Biden.
Donald Trump is America’s Honey Badger.
There’s no reelection hovering over him. And “cancel culture” tactics no longer work. People have learned to punch back at the bullies.
You may still be shocked and upset over some of his initial executive orders and actions. Some on the left, or perhaps TDS™-infected Republicans, are making special provisions. They still have what’s left of MSNBC and CNN (what will they do without the preening narcissist Jim Acosta?), along with The Bulwark and The Dispatch for the similarly terminally-infected insignificant universe of allegedly GOP-leaning counterparts to assuage and reinforce their hurt feelings and diminishing mental faculties.
I don’t agree with all of Trump’s actions, either. But guess what? He won 77 million votes, the election wasn’t close, and he’s doing exactly as he promised. He’s accessible, blunt, candid, and authentic, which many Americans missed and find refreshing, even as they disagree on a thing or two or three. We don’t need a college degree or an interpreter to know where Trump stands on things that matter.
The only people upset are the swamp creatures who loved the Biden years when they ran things under a clueless and vastly diminished chief executive. Their days are over.
Too many Americans prefer style over substance in politics. But if that “style” includes a clear vision, candor, accessibility, keeping commitments, and transparency, we can forgive occasional disagreements on substance and even occasional sins of omission and commission. Some of us still live in the real world, after all. Most Americans are tolerant, forgiving, and intelligent.
Southern border crossings are down 95 percent since mid-December, and deportations of criminal illegal aliens have already reached more than 1,000 per day. But we haven’t acquired Greenland, the Panama Canal, or given statehood to Canada yet, so there’s that (if that makes you pearl clutch instead of laugh, seek immediate help).
As for the Trump Resistance™, Freddy Gray, writing for the Spectator World, says it best:
At Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, I witnessed the smashing of windows, rioting and tens of thousands of angry women in “pussy hats” clamoring against his ascent. There was none of that rage for the 2025 sequel. In Farragut Square, two days before the ceremony, I ran into the small “People’s March” — fringey leftists, angry about Palestine, climate change and bodily autonomy. But it was not really an anti-Trump protest, per se. The Resistance, as it was known, proved futile. Now it’s almost dead.
Trump knows he’s “on the clock,” so to speak, since he can’t run for reelection, even as he’s achieved air superiority over the Republican Party. He has a legacy he’s hell-bent to cement. And his ability to get much done after the 2026 midterms, when the party out of power loses an average of two dozen House seats, hangs in the balance. With only a 2-vote majority (which is about to shrink to one when US Rep. Elise Stefanik [R-NY] is confirmed as US Ambassador to the United Nations), that doesn’t bode well for House Republicans, but we’ll see. Trump will never be on a ballot again, despite fundraising gimmicks like this. Three GOP House vacancies, two in Florida, won’t be filled until April.
Political realignment continues, and the 2025 off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, with very competitive open gubernatorial contests, will tell us a lot. Remember that Trump is less than 10 days into his second and final term.
There are about 1,451 days to go. Pace yourself unless you’re in Canada, Panama, or Greenland.
great photo of you at the Campbell booth with the President.