Nothing to lose any more? Then go and protest, hard. It's too late to undo the damage already caused, but a huge part of why Trump was able to rise to power was because there was by far not enough protest against him.
Distribution is somewhat like this...
Say there are 10,000 people affected by this
5,000 probably have skills to pivot to something else, don't give a shit about future billionaire's kid's problem. People wouldn't want to be scientists if they can't also have a decent career.
2,000 people have means to survive and can't afford to fight the thugs on street
2,000 people are desperate, but otherwise marginalized by current admininstration (immigrant, mexican, black, muslim,... whatever) but don't want to sacrifice their extended family too.
1,000 people are desperate, have the courage to fight (probably white).
If the future of curing the billionaire's kid relies on 1,000 people sacrificing their life... oh well....
France's "yellow vests" or Germany's "Pegida" might disagree with you on that one. Both were pretty darn effective.
> They are good for one thing and one thing only: meeting other people who are just as angry as you about something
Also, Pegida was Nazis protesting that there wasn't enough Nazism happening, so I don't know why you bring them up as an example of a successful protest.
There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this claim. For one thing, it's not clear that trump voters respect protestors in the first place. For another thing, we're an extremely geographically distributed population, and most of our cities already swing strongly blue. This means protesting is generally a high-effort, low-return activity.
Whatever will provide friction I do not know, but I don't think protests are going to play a major role outside of maybe providing a narrative about how angry people are. But it's important to note that a significant number of people vote for Trump because he makes certain people angry.... If the right people "protest" in a ridiculous enough manner, you're going to likely strengthen the resolve of his base. Granted, I suspect this isn't much of an issue with science funding, but it's something to keep in mind.
My attitude is: if this country doesn't want science research, let it, follow the research overseas, and let your absence speak for itself.
They do respect one thing, just like their master does: strength. Show up in force, in overwhelming numbers, and all these "don't tread on me" people suddenly find out that, whoops, they aren't the top dogs any more. It used to be the case that you got beaten up or worse for showing up in KKK outfits, these days you got pseudo-edgy kids on social media with them.