The entrance to the DC Metro was swamped. A throng of people – mostly women, young and old, knitted pink "pussy hats" on some heads, placards tucked under almost every – were clustered around the station early on Saturday morning, all trying to get to the Women's March on Washington a few kilometres away. Rail workers held them back from the escalators for safety. I could hear muttering about an hour-long hour wait just to get inside.
It was quickly clear this march, conceived in the first days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, would be bigger than the expected 200, 000 people organisers were expecting. From every subway station, taxi and street corner, people poured into the centre of Washington.
![Andrew Dyson](/web/20170129004807im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/i/x/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtyapo.png/1485514263531.jpg)
Silver-haired feminists mixed with young families, Black Lives Matter activists with environmentalists, radical college students, kids and the elderly all forming a swelling human tide around the Capitol. Buoyed by the sight of each other.
I was there to report what was going on, but I never got within listening distance of the stage or speakers. At times I couldn't find the edges of the crowd. All you could do was move, slowly, among it.
![Protesters flooded Washington DC on January 21.](/web/20170129004807im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/w/d/2/u/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtyapo.png/1485514263531.jpg)
"It gives me hope that enough people are willing to stand up," one marcher, Patricia Bennett, a 68-year-old who'd travelled from California told me.
The day before had been quite different. On my way to cover President Donald Trump's inauguration, I slipped straight into the same station, took a couple of seats for myself on the first train, surrounded by a smattering of riders in "Make America Great Again" hats and tired kids in school groups on their way to the National Mall.
You didn't have to be there to know that hundreds of thousands more people came to Washington last weekend to protest against the inauguration of America's 45th President than had come to celebrate him – the pictures told that story – though it sure was something to witness.
But does it really matter, beyond the headlines? The millions turned out to protest across the world two months after Trump's election victory, and a day after the result was formalised. The administration had already begun. All the chanting in the world wouldn't stop the flurry of executive orders that were to come.
![Overwhelming force: Protesters march the day after Trump's inauguration.](/web/20170129004807im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/x/g/j/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtyapo.png/1485514263531.jpg)
Well, it clearly mattered to Trump himself. Size has always mattered to him. To a pathological degree.
According to the Washington Post, he was so enraged by the sight of the millions of protesters around the world and the reporting on his relatively poor inauguration audience that he demanded a fiery public response from his press secretary Sean Spicer, who dutifully shuffled out to deliver a bizarre and erratic slapdown of the media on Saturday evening.
Trump's self-regard is, of course, legend, but the sight of angry protests knocked more than just his ego and bottomless need to be adored – it undercut the narrative that "the people" are unquestioningly with him, that he is the leader of a "movement like we have never seen before", that his ascent to the presidency comes on a wave of unprecedented adoration and support – and that his opponents were always just a middling little bunch of coastal elites, paid protesters and snobby celebrities.
The man has achieved a stunning feat in the past two years – going from being a colourful reality-television star and outsider in a crowded primary to winning the Republican nomination and then the presidency.
He lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes but won the electoral college easily. That would be enough for most leaders.
But Trump isn't a normal president in so many ways. He fancies himself as something bigger, akin to a revolutionary leader almost.
He signed an executive order officially naming his inauguration day America's "National Day of Patriotic Devotion", which has a distinctly Pyongyang ring about it.
He's still claiming the popular vote loss was due to millions of fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton (though has taken no action over this supposedly diabolical fraud).
The day before the election, I watched Trump on-stage at a rally in North Carolina, where the crowd was jubilant and the arena was mostly full – only a small section of seats were empty. It was a good event for him. But he couldn't help help himself – gesturing to doors out of shot for the TV cameras during his address and saying people were still "pouring in". They weren't.
This would all simply be an embarrassing character quirk if it didn't beg the question: what does he want this kingly level of adoration and power for, and what will he try to do with it?
The protests laid bare the very notion that who "the people" are and what they want in America is as contested as ever. Huge swathes of the public reject everything Trump stands for – the nativism, the climate change denial, the willingness to roll back reproductive rights and the authoritarianism, just to start.
They're not just celebrities (though they were irritatingly thick on the ground on Saturday), not just people in New York and Los Angeles, and certainly not people who were paid to be there. His claims otherwise ring a little more hollow today.
Did the Women's March matter for Trump's opponents? It's impossible to know yet. The solidarity seemed a balm to angry, despairing people, but it remains to be seen whether this was simply a moment, or the beginnings of a movement – one that is truly broad enough and electrifying enough to get organised, and one that the Democrats win the trust and support of in 2018 and 2020. That's a much longer, steeper road to march.
But it was a pretty astonishing first step.
Josephine Tovey is a Herald journalist based in the United States.
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