WHEN I ASKED ACTIVISTS involved in the pro-Palestinian movement about whether there had been a change in protest culture, they pushed back against the suggestion that their coalition wasn’t responding to the Iran war with a similar level of organized activism compared to two years ago.
“These protests are happening. And so when we get questions like this, I’m always very confused,” said Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, who was a
prominent supporter of the
Uncommitted movement in 2024. “Every time there has been an international summit or [when] people knew where [Trump’s] motorcade was gonna be—people were there protesting.”
Other activists noted to me that around eight million people turned out around the country two weeks ago for the “No Kings” protests, which had embraced an anti-war message. They said that activists were still protesting the president, but that it was harder to do so outside of the context of a presidential campaign cycle when there are fewer public events being held. They lamented that the media simply wasn’t as interested in covering their protests in the same way now that it’s not a presidential election year.
But Romman and other organizers also acknowledged that organizing in Trump’s second term is extremely difficult. Since returning to office, Trump has threatened to use the full force of the federal government to crack down on organizations and protesters that he views as promoting antisemitism or violence. The result, organizers say, has been a chilling effect among students. Trump has also threatened to withhold federal funding for schools that allow what he calls, without explanation, “illegal protests,” and he went after pro-Palestinian protesters involved in the occupation of Columbia University’s campus last year. Then, after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on a college campus last September, Trump cracked down on free speech on campuses. He blamed liberal protesters and donors and signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization (although such a designation doesn’t actually exist under federal law).
But it’s not just Trump who is making it harder for students to participate in campus protests.
In an effort to get control of campuses that had spun out of control in the weeks following the October 7th attacks, some colleges and universities implemented new restrictions on campus protests at the start of the 2024 school year—such as banning encampments and megaphones. Such changes seemed to have had an immediate impact. The
New York Times reported in November 2024 that there had been just 950 protest events and 50 arrests at that point in the fall semester compared to 3,000 events and
arrests during the previous spring semester.
“
There’s a very real fear about the repression that was happening on college campuses, both from university administration and from the Trump administration,” said Denae Ávila-dikkson, an organizer with the Sunrise Movement. “Students were trying to get a sense of, ‘What does this mean for my life? What does this mean for my academic career?’”
WHILE SOME CAMPUS PROTESTS are still occurring, organizers said that anti-war movements often take time to build. Although pro-Palestinian protests were spreading around U.S. campuses just days after the October 7th attack, they didn’t peak until later, in the spring of 2024.
Trump’s penchant for changing his mind can also make it difficult to figure out whether a conflict like Iran is going to drag on or—as was the case with his attack on Venezuela—abruptly end after a few days. Not to mention that there’s a long list of other issues fueling the public’s outrage, especially ICE’s brutal tactics and the other acts of cruelty arising from the Trump administration’s mass-deportation agenda.
Organizers insist that the outrage is there, it just looks different. Instead of pitching tents on the campus quad, some students are organizing food drives and other community-focused efforts. Joel Payne, chief communications officer of the liberal activist organization MoveOn, said that a lot of activism is taking place online. Some of the group’s most popular online petitions of the second Trump administration have been in response to the war in Iran and thousands of people have tuned in to digital events in response to the conflict.
“
You have an administration that spent the last fifteen months targeting students on campuses because of their activism. So it would not surprise me if there was some kind of backdown in campus activism going on because of that,” said Payne. “A lot of that activism has been rolled up into mass-movement mobilizations, like No Kings. And as Trump continues to wade us deeper into this, it’s only going to ramp up further. That energy is not gone.”
