Officials in New York and Washington tightened security in response to Donald Trump’s demands for his followers to protest the possibility of his being charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Ferrer, which stoked concerns about potential violence. But both notable supporters and the far-right online acolytes who responded to Trump’s rallying cry on January 6, 2021, mostly rejected his exhortations.
Just 50 people attended a protest on Monday that the New York Young Republican Club organized outside the Manhattan court where Trump would be arraigned if charged. Local news sources claim that very few of his followers turned up outside of his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Without a clear date or event to unite around and suspicious that protests might be “traps” set by federal law enforcement. The overwhelming majority of pro-Trump internet communities appeared to vacillate between apathy and perplexity, with little desire for concerted action. In a well-liked MAGA Telegram channel, someone commented, “He’s not infallible and protest is extremely imprecise.” Another individual in another group said, “And what exactly does “Protest, Protest!!!” mean?”
I’m not trying to be a jerk, but if he really wanted the tens of millions of supporters to act in a useful way, you’d think he could give a little bit more specific directions. While there were the typical references to “civil war” and doomsday rhetoric about using violence to “take the country back,” polls in these groups asking whether supporters would demonstrate for Trump indicated that the majority would.
None of the prominent Trump supporters who played key roles in organizing rallies and protests in the past stepped up either, with many of them publicly declaring they were staying out of it. “I’m retired,” Ali Alexander, a right-wing activist and key organizer of the 2020 “Stop the Steal” rallies that led to Jan. 6, wrote in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Alexander said he had spoken to Alex Jones, a prominent conspiracy theorist involved in the Jan. 6 rallies. “He’s not protesting either. We’ve both got enough going on fighting the government,” he wrote. “No billionaire is covering our bills.”
