Politics
The Trump Resistance Won’t Be Putting on ‘Pussy Hats’ This Time
The week after Election Day in 2016, Shirley Morganelli, a women’s health nurse and lifelong Democrat, invited a dozen friends over to the living room of her rowhouse in Bethlehem, Pa., for a glass of wine. Actually, many glasses.
“Misery loves company,” she said.
Ms. Morganelli’s friends, mostly women then in their 50s and 60s, were teachers, nurses, artists and ardent supporters of Hillary Clinton. Some of them had dressed in suffragist white to cast their votes that day, expecting to celebrate the election of America’s first female president. Instead, they had ended the night consoling their college-aged daughters.
“When she called me at three o’clock in the morning — I get all choked up now, because it was the first time I couldn’t say, ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’” said Angela Sinkler, a nurse and former school board member in Bethlehem.
The get-together — Ms. Morganelli called it “unhappy hour” — became a regular event. By the end of the month, commiserating had turned into organizing. They started with writing postcards to elected officials calling on them to oppose Donald J. Trump’s agenda, then moved on to raising money for a local Planned Parenthood chapter and joining in community protests.
Local political candidates began showing up to their gatherings, too, and the group, now called Lehigh Valley ROAR, turned to campaigning. In 2018, several members were elected to City Council in Bethlehem, and Susan Wild, the city solicitor in nearby Allentown and old friend of Ms. Morganelli’s, was elected to Congress with the group’s support.
Lehigh Valley ROAR was one of more than 2,000 similar grass-roots groups formed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s first election — a moment of mass organization larger than even the Tea Party movement at its peak during President Barack Obama’s first term, said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University professor of government and sociology who has studied both movements.
A vast majority of the groups were led by women, and many traced a similar arc to Ms. Morganelli’s, their shock at Mr. Trump’s election sparking political activism and then, often, electoral victories.
But then there was the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
As Mr. Trump returns to the White House on Monday with a popular vote majority and a governing trifecta in Washington, there are few signs of the sort of mass public protest that birthed “the resistance” the last time he took office.
Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017 was met with the largest single-day public demonstration in American history. Although thousands marched in Washington Saturday and smaller protests were held in other cities, their numbers fell far short of the hundreds of thousands that rallied eight years ago.
Organizers of the 2017 efforts say this shift reflects the lessons learned from the street protests that took place early in the first Trump presidency, tactics that were quickly abandoned in favor of more strategic organizing — and that opposition to a second Trump term is unlikely to take the same forms.
But some concede that the opposition is more uncertain than it once was. Congressional Democrats and governors now openly debate the wisdom of locking arms against Mr. Trump’s agenda, as they eventually did during his first presidency. And Democrats still now bear scars from last year’s conflicts over Israel’s invasions of Gaza and Lebanon, their embrace of identity politics and President Biden’s aborted candidacy.
In 2017, “everything felt bigger, more important,” said Krista Suh, a screenwriter in Los Angeles. When the Women’s March was announced for the day after Mr. Trump’s swearing-in, Ms. Suh, a novice knitter, came up with a pattern for a cat-eared pink cap to wear to the protest and posted it online.
Within days, “pussy hats” became a ubiquitous emblem of anti-Trump dissent.
Ms. Suh has stayed somewhat politically involved; she canvassed for Ms. Harris in Arizona. But she had no plans to protest this weekend.
“I feel like I’m just so much more jaded now,” she said.
‘He Won the Popular Vote’
When members of Lehigh Valley ROAR assembled once again in Ms. Morganelli’s living room this month, days before Mr. Trump would return to the White House, few were certain about what they should do next. They had canvassed and phone-banked for Ms. Harris. “You name it, we did it,” Ms. Morganelli said.
Ms. Wild had lost her seat, too.
In the corner of Ms. Morganelli’s living room, a cardboard cutout of Mr. Obama still wore a pink hat from the 2017 Women’s March, which most of the group members had attended. But none of them were going to Washington to protest Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Some members had come to question the effectiveness of the Women’s March. Others were now more concerned about the safety of demonstrating. Last fall, one member’s car was broken into by someone who also tore up the Harris yard signs she had in the back seat.
Four years after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, Ms. Morganelli was ambivalent about the optics of protesting the outcome of a fair election.
“This time, he won the popular vote,” she said, referring to the president-elect. “As good Americans and good Democrats, you have to accept that, right?”
Instead of protest, the group planned to get together to drink wine and write thank-you notes to Mr. Biden. “Moving forward, all we can do is try to be our best selves as good citizens,” Ms. Morganelli wrote on the group’s Facebook page.
A Resistance With Some Regrets
In its early days, the opposition to Mr. Trump seemed to practically organize itself. Grieving liberals poured their energy into any vessel available. People who had never organized a protest in their lives were transformed into leaders of demonstrations of historic scale, sometimes overnight, as was the case for Naomi Lindquester.
Jolted by Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Lindquester, then a 42-year-old elementary schoolteacher in Denver, created a Facebook event called Women’s March on Denver. She thought she would have to beg her friends to attend.
Instead, the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 people arrived at the State Capitol to denounce the new president. It was likely the largest demonstration in the history of Colorado.
The Women’s March protests drew some 500,000 attendees to Washington and hundreds of thousands more rallied across the country. But the groups that materialized to organize them, often led by media-savvy young urban professionals, soon found themselves struggling to maintain momentum and, at times, infighting.
The national Women’s March organization splintered after one organizer accused others of antisemitism. Other groups disintegrated amid more prosaic conflicts over priorities and egos.
“It got really ugly, really fast,” said Ms. Lindquester, who has not spoken with her fellow organizers of the Denver march since they fell out in late 2018.
Many such groups, she believes, were victims of their sudden celebrity. “I’ll be really honest with you,” she said, “I very much enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame.”
Since November, Ms. Lindquester has found herself questioning the impact of the march she organized. “The fact that we did that ginormous march and he still got re-elected a second time?” she said.
She has mostly stepped back from public politics — a shift that was in part a result of her move from Denver to a small, conservative town elsewhere in the state, and the heightened scrutiny on teachers’ politics in recent years.
While she was proud of her role in the 2017 protest, “I don’t talk to anyone about that, because I will hear about it if I do,” she said.
In a Facebook post this month she suggested a list of actions that she argued would make a bigger difference now than marching: Plant trees. Volunteer in the community. “Engage with people who think differently than you and find your common ground.”
A New Message: ‘This Is Hard.’
Some argue that the energy is still out there, but the goals are different. Ezra Levin, the executive director of Indivisible, an organization he co-founded in 2017 to channel grass-roots opposition to Mr. Trump, said the group had registered more new local chapters since November than it had at any other point since 2017.
In a new blueprint for action released shortly after the election, Indivisible urged its members to focus not just on Mr. Trump and Congress but also on local elected officials — particularly Democrats in blue states that could serve as a bulwark for resisting Mr. Trump’s policies.
It conceded that “too often in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests instead of using them as part of a strategy.”
“You shouldn’t start with a tactic,” Mr. Levin said. “You should start with a goal.”
In Ms. Morganelli’s living room, the Lehigh Valley ROAR members spoke of leaning on one another even more as some family members drifted away from their politics in recent years: children who had grown enamored with right-wing survivalism or opposition to vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic, or turned on Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris over their support for Israel.
“I lost my liberal, progressive son to Joe Rogan,” one said, as others nodded in sympathy.
They felt alienated from younger Democratic activists who seemed to see fighting Mr. Trump as a lesser priority than matters of ideological purity.
“If you’re not lefty-left enough, they are willing to sacrifice their vote and throw it away,” either by not voting or voting for a third-party candidate, said Lori McFarland, a member of the group who is now the chairwoman of the Lehigh County Democratic Committee. “And they’ve just set us back.”
Ms. Suh, the “pussy hat” creator, has not sought to reprise her role in the protest movement. She thought that a unifying phenomenon like her hat would still be possible — but the message should now be something different than the defiance of early 2017.
“I think,” she said, “it has to be something like: ‘I hear you. This is hard.’”
Politics
Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., refused to address her revised financial disclosures that could imply she has a negative net worth after the progressive lawmaker dramatically reducing the reported value of assets tied to her husband’s business ventures.
“Can you tell us if your husband still has the consulting business and the wine business?” Fox News Digital asked Omar.
The congresswoman stayed silent as she was repeatedly questioned, after previously telling Fox News Digital that the original filing — showing Omar’s reported assets reducing by as much as $29.9 million — was inaccurate and “incomplete” information.
ILHAN OMAR’S OFFICE SAYS SHE’S ‘NOT A MILLIONAIRE’ AFTER $30M FILING REVISED DOWN TO UNDER $100K: REPORT
US Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, speaks during a press conference with family members of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as members of Congress call for US investigations into Israel’s actions and reintroduce the Justice for Shireen Act, outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, May 18, 2023. The Al Jazeera journalist, who was a dual US citizen, was killed on May 11, 2022. The Israeli army later admitted one of its soldiers likely shot the reporter. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The controversy surrounding Omar’s finances began when a 2024 financial report estimated that Omar and her husband possessed between $6 million and $30 million in assets, all while the Minnesota fraud scandal within the Somali community was beginning to come to fruition.
A more recent 2025 financial disclosure report shows Omar’s revised value of shared assets between her and husband to sit at a maximum of $125,000 — a multi-million-dollar drop from the year prior. The lower estimate of their assets, $20,000, compared to the low and high debt estimates, $30,000 and $100,000, would imply the Minnesota Democrat could have a negative net worth.
Both her and her husband have separate debts, each ranging somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 — from her own student loans and her husband’s credit card debt, according to the disclosures.
WATCH: OMAR SILENT WHEN CONFRONTED ON ALLEGED TIES TO MASSIVE MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
RICHFIELD, MN – AUGUST 08: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (C) campaigns with her husband Tim Mynett (R) at the Richfield Farmers Market on August 8, 2020 in Richfield, Minnesota. Omar is hoping to retain her seat as the representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in next week’s primary election. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
The biggest change in the documents involved Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. His reported ownership interests in both his winery and venture capital advisory firm, which were previously valued in the millions of dollars, are listed with no value now.
In Omar’s 2024 financial disclosure records, Mynett’s share in his winery was valued between $1 million and $5 million, and his share at the venture capital advisory firm was valued between $5 million and $25 million. Now, his equity interests are both listed at $0.
Omar’s office previously told Fox News Digital that Mynett has partners in both businesses and said the earlier disclosure mistakenly reflected the businesses’ total equity rather than his ownership interest. The office also said the original filing listed assets without accounting for liabilities.
VANCE REFERS TIM WALZ, MINNESOTA ATTORNEY GENERAL TO DOJ FOR CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OVER STATE’S ALLEGED FRAUD
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has publicly voiced his interest in the Ethics Committee opening an investigation into Omar’s personal finances after the 2025 financial reports came out showing the possibility of a $29 million drop in her net worth.
Vice President JD Vance also has previously said the U.S. Department of Justice will be opening a probe into her alleged fraud as part of the administration’s anti-fraud taskforce that he spearheads, though no formal investigations have been shared with the public at this time.
Omar has been reluctant to answer Fox News Digital’s questions about her financial fallout and potential probes to be opened against her.
The Minnesota lawmaker similarly dodged answering any of Fox News Digital’s questions just last month about the revised disclosures.
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“There’s also the possibility that it might rain on this sunny day,” Omar replied without responding directly to the content of the question.
Fox News Digital’s Robert Schmad contributed to this report.
As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and role model.
Then came Donald Trump.
Now, in Cohn-inflected McCarthyesque style, President Trump is channeling his tutor yet again, baselessly labeling his political enemies — all Democrats — as communists as he looks ahead to the fall’s midterm elections. Once more Trump shows that his catchphrase “Make America great again” means regressing, this time to Trump’s formative 1950s and the McCarthy era that sadly helped define it.
In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of “communist” or “communism” reached double digits each time. (As that implies, the president didn’t set aside his divisive rhetoric even for the nation’s 250th birthday.)
“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall.
Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.)
Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.
Now that Trump is exploiting a few victories lately by left-wing democratic socialists in Democratic primaries to paint the entire party as communists, it’s time to review the record — his record.
A hallmark of communism is government ownership of companies and control of the economy, at the expense of private property and free markets. In just over a year, Trump has used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to buy shares for the government in a growing list of private companies — U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse and more — citing national security. The companies don’t always welcome their new stakeholder; at a minimum, they rightly fear it for the demands the government could make about prices and production.
“It’s what Putin did,” the estranged Republicans at the Lincoln Project posted online Monday. “Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”
“What began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control,” free-market economist Veronique de Rugy wrote in The Times last October of Trump’s actions. “The power to ‘partner’ with business is the power to control it.”
Comrade Trump’s first big government grab, and a model for those to come, was in June last year, when he wrested a permanent “golden share” in U.S. Steel in return for approving its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel. The company’s charter was revised to give the U.S. president extraordinary veto power over nearly a dozen corporate activities, including closing or relocating plants, supply-chain decisions, even pricing.
“We have a golden share, which I control,” Trump told reporters at the time, in words I never thought I’d hear from a president of the party once associated with free markets.
Just last week, Trump boasted to CNBC how he’d extracted a 10% stake in beleaguered chip giant Intel last August, after first demanding that its chief executive resign. “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company.’ … Somebody said that’s not very American. I said, ‘No, I think it is very American, actually.’ And I’ve done that with other deals.”
And so he has.
The Pentagon is now the largest stockholder in struggling MP Materials, a large rare-earth mine in California, and guarantees a 10-year price floor for its output that stunned competitors. The administration has since taken shares in other rare-earth companies. The Commerce Department took an option for an 8% stake in Westinghouse, to spur construction of nuclear reactors, and has the right to 20% if the government decides the company should go public. The government takes a 15% cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ AI chip sales to China.
As much as anything he does, Trump’s direct intervention in private enterprise invites the question “What if Biden/Harris/Obama did that?” The answer, of course: Trump and Republicans would cry “Communist!”
Trump’s actions are the sort Americans generally have only seen during economic emergencies or major wars, and then rarely. I covered the frenzied and ultimately successful response to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the U.S. auto, insurance and housing industries. Behind the scenes in the Obama White House (and George W. Bush’s at the outset) was constant, angst-filled debate about any actions smacking of government takeovers and a determination that interventions be temporary, unlike Trump’s schemes. (For all the still-lingering unpopularity of the banking bailout, the Treasury — the taxpayers — got all the money back and then some, and exited the business.)
Trump’s economic big-footing isn’t the only way in which he resembles the commies Americans know best, and whom he so admires: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un. There are also the images of himself everywhere, monuments planned, drearily long and self-adulating speeches and interference in the nation’s cultural, educational and legal spheres and — worst of all — in elections.
At Rushmore, Trump closed with a demand that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act to restrict voting. “We do that and we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said, speaking of course about Republicans.
One-party rule through central government election finagling? Now that’s a communist.
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Maine state Rep. Valli Geiger, a Rockland Democrat, former nurse and former mayor, is drawing sudden national attention after saying now-former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner encouraged her to consider taking his place on the ballot in the Maine Senate race.
While Geiger has not been named the replacement nominee, her name entered the Maine Senate scramble after she told local outlet WMTW that Platner called her Monday night, praised her as a “fighter” and asked whether he could put her name forward. Platner’s campaign told the outlet he had not made an endorsement decision but confirmed he encouraged Geiger to consider running if he stepped aside.
After Geiger said Platner called her about potentially putting her name forward, Geiger posted Tuesday she would not “throw Graham under the bus,” while also saying she would not “slander or accuse” Jenny Racicot, the woman who accused Platner of rape, “of anything more than telling the truth as she experienced it.”
By Wednesday, local outlets were reporting that Geiger said Platner had encouraged her to consider running if he withdrew. Platner, who suspended his campaign Wednesday night, has denied the claim.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IF PLATNER DROPS OUT? HERE’S WHO COULD REPLACE HIM ON THE BALLOT AND HOW IT COULD WORK
Graham Platner Maine State Rep. Valli Geiger (Maine State Legislature/Getty Images)
“For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in a video posted to social media.
Geiger is a third-term Democratic state representative from Rockland, according to her legislative biography, representing a coastal House district in Maine that includes Rockland, Criehaven Township, Matinicus Isle Plantation, the Muscle Ridge Islands, North Haven and part of Owls Head. Her biography says she serves on the Labor Committee and the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.
Before entering the state legislature, Geiger served six years on the Rockland City Council, including one year as mayor and four years on the Rockland Comprehensive Planning Commission, three of them as chair.
Her biography says she holds a master’s degree in sustainable design and built her own passive-solar, net-zero-energy house. It also describes her as a former nurse at Pen Bay Medical Center who later worked as a health policy analyst and health administrator, including as director of the Healthreach Hospice program and clinical director for Federally Qualified Health Centers around Maine.
The Maine State Capitol May 18, 2026, in Augusta, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
PLATNER CAMPAIGN PUTTING ‘THUMB ON SCALE’ TO INFLUENCE POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, MAINE DEM ALLEGES
Geiger’s connection to Platner predates the latest replacement speculation. Local reporting has described her as a close Platner supporter, and WMTW reported she previously stood with him and credited him with helping secure funding for rape kit tracking in Maine.
In her Facebook post responding to Racicot’s allegation, Geiger wrote that Racicot’s story “seems credible” but added that “none of us knows the truth nor will we ever.” She also described Platner as “a man becoming a better man” and said she had hoped he would lead the political movement his campaign had built and will not “throw Graham under the bus.”
In the post, Geiger also praised Platner’s “passion for economic populism” and said she had granted him “an enormous amount of grace” for his behavior during what she described as his “dark years” after multiple deployments.
Dr. Nirav D. Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference about COVID-19 at Maine Emergency Management Agency in Augusta. (Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
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The Maine state representative is not the only Democrat whose name has surfaced as Maine Democrats prepare for the possibility that Platner exits the race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Several Democrats have expressed interest or are considering bids, including former gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah.
Under Maine law, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the general election ballot by selecting a new nominee through its party process, with the replacement required to be chosen by July 27.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
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