The day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time in 2017, Cate Schroeder donned a rebellious pink “pussy hat” and took to the streets, joining a momentous Women’s March in downtown San Jose.

On the eve of his second inauguration two months ago, she posted a message with her Facebook group to remember “self-care,” and suggested her friends volunteer at local creek cleanups or the library instead.

That was January. This is March. And on Saturday, scattered protests across the Bay Area that have been building for weeks appeared bigger and more organized than ever. Planned at as many as 276 Tesla dealerships from Walnut Creek, Palo Alto and Santa Clara and around the globe, the “Tesla Takedown” protests targeted Tesla founder and billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s chainsaw-wielding deputy who has been gutting federal agencies and firing employees.

“It’s actually getting quite big and energetic!” Schroeder said Saturday morning, standing in front of the Santana Row shopping center in Santa Clara where the crowd of more than 200 protesters marched past one of Musk’s Tesla showrooms shouting ‘Elon Musk has got to go!’ “This is a great start, but it’s going to be a long slog.”

What started as almost stunned paralysis among Democrats in the early weeks of Trump’s onslaught of executive orders and federal agency actions, the Trump resistance is gaining traction.

“Only most recently have Democrats started to find their heartbeat and their visibility,” said David McCuan, a Sonoma State political science professor. “It’s taken Democrats some time to get there, but Musk and what he represents is so central that he’s given Democrats something to focus on.”

The anti-Trump movement is also evolving with the times, attempting to meet the moment, if not the energy, of the barrage of news coming out of the White House and Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE.

Along with the Tesla backlash, which has sent its stock tumbling, many Democrats are boycotting Target and giving up their Amazon Prime memberships, protesting with their pocketbooks after those companies followed Trump’s lead in dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Many have been packing raucous town hall meetings, showing up at school board meetings to counter GOP influencers, and lining up at rallies across the country to listen to progressives U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rail against the oligarchy and the billionaire class.

As much as grassroots activists may be finding their footing, however, many remain unhappy with the Democratic leadership and its muddled messaging in response to Trump’s rapid fire actions. Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has been criticized for expressing common ground with Trump firebrands on his podcast, described the Democratic brand as “toxic” in a Los Angeles Times story Saturday.

UC Berkeley Political Science Professor Omar Wasow said the Democratic party could be ripe for the kind of takeover from within that the Republican party experienced with the uprising of the Tea Party in 2009 during Barack Obama’s presidency.

“Whether it’s the Tesla protests or Bernie and AOC, there’s this broad wave of dissatisfaction that looks kind of like the Tea Party and has the potential to lead to the emergence of a movement that generates a new wave of Democratic elected officials who are part of this countermobilization to Trump, and we’re already starting to see signs of that,” Wasow said. “And that’s not inconsistent we saw in 2016, but it feels much more amplified now.”

To many Republicans, whom polls show are maintaining their support of Trump, the anti-Trump movement is doing the Democrats no good.

Jan Soule, president of the Silicon Valley Association of Conservative Republicans, said the socialist rhetoric coming out of the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez rallies is so far to the left she believes it will “destroy” the Democratic party, while the highly-publicized vandalism of Tesla cars is pure “hypocrisy.”

“You want me to comment about the people who believe the ‘green scam’ and bought electric vehicles and are now destroying those electric cars they so loved and embraced?” Soule asked. “I think Trump is doing an amazing job. I’m delighted that the border is closed and they’re stopping the flow of fentanyl into the country. And as soon as we get rid of this stupid sanctuary city crap, we’ll all be a little safer.”

Those kinds of comments – along with Trump describing Tesla vandals on his social media site as “sick terrorist thugs” that should serve 20 years in El Salvadoran prisons – make activist Schroeder feel like she needs self-care all over again.

“I’m fighting to make sure that my Trump-voting relatives still get the Medicaid they need, that they’re not gonna get, right?” she said. “So that’s gotten to us.”

Like Schroeder, Leesa Lovelace, who volunteers with the San Jose chapter of Swing Left that started in 2017, has stopped shopping at Target and Amazon. And Lovelace and the Trump resistance want to be ready to help with whatever strategy will work.

“There’s the protest here and the letter writers here, and the phone bankers and canvassers there,” Lovelace said. “I want to be sure I’m helping facilitate people doing something, not sitting with their head in their hands, just saying, ‘Oh my gosh, what is happening in the world?'”

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