GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo. — Stationing herself outside a bank building and holding a sign in the unforgiving midday sun, Katie Farnan was multitasking, as usual. She’s a mother of two young children and works for a nonprofit firm but also has a third job: Chair of the town hall committee of the activist group Indivisible Front Range Resistance.
And at noon on this spring Friday, she was the very face of a protest movement run by amateurs that has provided the greatest challenge to President Donald Trump: A distracted mother dispensing fruit snacks to her sons, ages 1 and 3, while hoping to intercept a Republican senator attending a private meeting with bank employees.
“He sticks in my craw,” Farnan said of Sen. Cory Gardner, who hasn’t held a public town hall this year despite activists’ pressure campaign. “It’s my responsibility to try to get town halls with him and if I can’t get town halls with him, I feel like–” She stopped, cut off by 3-year-old Leo’s cries of “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
A few months into Trump’s presidency, resistance to it is much like Farnan — exhausted, sometimes exasperated, but determined. The initial electric jolt of the record-setting women’s marches against Trump across the country and the spontaneous outpouring of protesters to airports the night Trump announced his initial travel ban on certain immigrants have given way to a long slog of activist trench warfare.