I don’t want to write a very long post, but I just wanted to remind everyone about this.
I recently learnt about protest on February 5th, and just wanted to spread this. The wiki page has a huge table of non-violent protests.
I know many people are disheartened, and in such circumstances, people often resort to violence (sometimes to send messages, sometimes in response to another violence, sometimes in catharsis).
I am from land of Gandhi, and a huge admirer of his work. Many people even in my country today feel Gandhi was useless or found him problematic for n number of reasons, some partially valid, many not, but this post is not about him. What I want to highlight is his idea of Satyagraha - it is essentially a exercise in (and for) truth. 2 famous non violent movements of his time being civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Names give the core ideas away - but essentially - break laws peacefully. To elaborate - 1 of them was against a salt tax law. They just made salt, and did not pay tax. It was both literal and symbolic, in the sense that they stopped paying taxes - and EIC were hit both financially and political power wise.
And these are not the only peacefully protests our land, one of the most recent ones was a farmers protest (for context, in India, majority people are still employed by farming), and roughly after a year of protest, they got there demands met.
I wanted to add a US specific example, and I can’t think of anything better than Stop War protests regarding Vietnam War.
TL;DR - Peaceful protests work, you just have to be persistent
US citizens need to be very careful about their next steps.
If you do this wrong you will hand Trump all the reasons / excuses he needs to enact martial law (and have support for that) and then say bye bye to term limit. You need to think about the next 20 years, about a Trump dynasty etc.