She helped start the Women’s March. This year it’s an afterthought.

As protesters gather in Washington DC on Saturday for this year’s Women’s March, Vanessa Wruble, one of its founders, will be 3,500 miles away on her farm in the California desert.

“I didn’t even know it was still a thing,” she told the BBC from her five-acre animal sanctuary near Joshua Tree, where there are zebras, mini cows and horses, peacocks and chickens.

Eight years ago, on the eve of the first Women’s March, it consumed Wruble. After Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, Wruble, along with a handful of other women’s activists, tried to put together a mass protest against the president-elect.

“We basically didn’t stop, we didn’t sleep,” Wruble said. “It felt like we were doing something important.

The January 2017 march became the largest one-day protest in US history, drawing an estimated 500,000 people to DC and attracting millions to sister marches across the country. And in the months that followed, the Women’s March evolved into the most visible arm of the so-called “resistance” — a loose coalition of grassroots progressive groups, never-Trump Republicans and Democratic leaders who opposed the 45th president and his agenda.

The resistance was angry and it was motivated. The movement was widely credited with helping flip control of the House of Representatives from Republicans to Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections and mobilizing hundreds of women to enter politics across the country.

But in the wake of Trump’s decisive victory against Vice President Kamala Harris in November, much of that energy has been unleashed, fueling questions about the failures of the resistance movement as well as its future. Activists and Democrats are also counting on the reality that the votes of millions of women helped put Trump back in the White House.

The first march came together at an impressive clip, transforming within weeks from a few disconnected Facebook posts from women calling for protest to a blueprint for a national movement.

By January 21, millions had flocked to the nation’s capital, bringing crowds nearly three times larger than Trump’s inauguration the previous day. In Washington and at coordinated events across the United States, women carried anti-Trump signs on railings and wore pink knitted “pussies” — a sharp reference to the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump talked about grabbing female genitalia.

“I’ve never seen anything so crowded, you could barely move,” said Sharon Baseman, a Democratic activist in Michigan who traveled to D.C. for the march in 2017. “It was overwhelming and it was inspiring.”

In the following years, the Women’s March remained the face of the fight against Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda. The movement helped unite the Democratic Party against Trump, a strategy that allowed them to recapture the White House in 2020.

The surge of women activists led by the Women’s March also showed up for other reasons: the #MeToo demonstrations, the protest against gun violence and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018, as well as the nationwide racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 over the police killing of George Floyd.

The first march gave Democrats a sense of solidarity and a sense of wanting to do more, said Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at American University and author of the book American Resistance of the Women’s March to the Blue Wave.

“The 2017 march activated a tone of left-leaning people who had never done anything political before, paying attention, going to town hall meetings and joining different organisations,” Professor Fisher said. “People got a sense that they weren’t alone.”

And experts say the engagement carried over into the 2018 midterms, when a record number of female candidates — most of them Democrats — ran for Congress.

According to Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics, women have made “monumental gains” since 2017.

“A record number of women ran for office at various levels of office,” she said, “leading to a record level of female representation that has largely been sustained.”

This year, the Women’s March was renamed the People’s March, co-organized with a number of other progressive organizations including Planned Parenthood, the National Women’s Law Center and the Sierra Club.

Tamika Middleton, executive director of the Women’s March, said Saturday’s march was about building a coalition, adding that those in the progressive movement must come together like they did in 2017.

“We’re seeing attacks on women, on reproductive rights, on LGBTQ people … and we’re realizing that we really need to build some coordination across the movement to build the kind of mass movement that can fight back,” she said.

So far, there are no signs that Saturday’s event will match the size of 2017. Organizers expect around 50,000 people to turn out, a fraction of the turnout at the initial protest.

“I hadn’t heard about the Women’s March this year, I didn’t know it was happening,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, a nonprofit founded in 2017 that supports first-time progressive candidates running for local and state office.

“There are valuable questions to ask, like what is the purpose of the march this time?” she said. “It’s a tough case right now.

The march itself became something of an afterthought. What was once a watershed moment of defiance early in the first Trump administration has seemingly faded from view.

“I think you’ll find there’s really no appetite to march. I also think it would be ineffective to march,” said Wruble, one of the early founders. “We need to look at what we’re doing and rethink how we’re doing it.”

Wruble was kicked out of the Women’s March soon after her freshman year, later claiming that her Jewish background played a role. Her departure was part of a series of internal conflicts that had plagued the organization since its inception. Original co-chairs Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Bob Bland have since left the group. They did not return the BBC’s request for comment.

But the broader problem, according to activists and democrats, is that the main premise of the resistance movement has remained unfulfilled.

After all, as protesters gather this weekend, Donald Trump will arrive in Washington to begin his inauguration celebrations. And on Monday he will be sworn in as president after a decisive win (he lost the popular vote in 2016 but narrowly won it last November).

The incoming president will also preside over a government firmly under the control of his party, with Republicans holding narrow majorities in both the House and Senate.

Trump’s November victory was helped by continued Republican gains among working-class voters, including black and Latino men. And despite pre-election talk of a potential landslide for Harris among female voters, Trump has also made gains among white women, particularly working-class women.

Dittmar said that while the commonly accepted narrative is that women will continue to distance themselves from Trump, in fact, among non-college-educated white women, “that support for him has only gotten stronger.”

Trump won a majority of white female voters in all three elections in which he ran, a pattern set by every Republican presidential candidate since at least the 1990s.

But it’s striking to many who oppose Trump that he did so this time despite a number of new factors they hoped would scuttle his candidacy: his role in ending the nation’s abortion rights; the jury that found him liable in a civil trial for sexually assaulting columnist E Jean Carroll in the 1990s; and a re-election campaign that saw misogynistic attacks on his opponent.

Rebecca Gau, the 53-year-old executive director of an Arizona education nonprofit, was a staunch Republican until Trump’s ascension and cast her first Democratic vote for Joe Biden in 2020 and again for Harris in November.

Ms. Gau said she thought Democrats focused too much on abortion rights during the election because of kitchen-table issues like the economy, which polls showed were voters’ primary concern.

Some of the fear and uncertainty about what the Trump administration might do was also missing this time, she added, giving voters permission to prioritize other concerns such as food prices and border security.

“We’ve been through all of that and the sky hasn’t fallen,” she said of Trump’s first administration.

Democrats, too, have been muted in their response to Trump’s election, with the party divided over how to confront the president-elect and his allies after months of campaigning that he is an existential threat to democracy.

Some Democrats in Congress have tried to work across the aisle, with dozens joining Republicans last week to support tough legislation on undocumented immigrants. A group of Democratic senators recently released a video declaring that “we’re not here because of who we’re against.”

Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has repeatedly clashed with Trump over the years and has already announced plans to protect his state from federal intervention, has taken a more conciliatory tone in recent days in the wake of the devastating wildfires.

“We’re a little leaderless right now, which is tough,” said Run for Something’s Littman. “We’re in a mess because there’s nothing behind us that’s in the field.

For Wruble, the break from politics came long before the November loss.

In 2022, after years of organizing, Wruble was experiencing burnout and moved west. She gave up her rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn and set up camp permanently in Joshua Tree, slowly building her farm, Kaleidoscopic Desert.

She shows no signs of wanting to return. The farm occupies most of its focus. During our conversation earlier this month, she was interrupted several times by her ranch hand to ask about various animals.

“We need more dog food in the house,” Wruble said after one such interlude. “Those are the issues I’m dealing with now.

But for other supporters of the Women’s March who are still in the fight, Saturday’s event brings a sense of optimism in a moment of despair.

“My friends who are super progressive and devastated after the election are in a state where the only thing we can do is show up and not be quiet and not let people think that all women support Trump,” she said.

But she said the march itself would do little to attract the women who voted for it.

“It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it,” she added, “but it won’t draw them back.”