Yesterday saw massive protests against the Trump regime and its increasingly fascistic nature. Millions took part in over 2,700 locations in the US. This was a follow up to the June event that drew between two million and five million people across more than 2,000 locations.
In Chicago, at Grant Park’s Butler Field, at least 10,000 people assembled, many with signs opposing federal immigration agents or mocking Trump. TV stations with feeds from protests warned viewers they could not be responsible for the language used in the signage.
Some of them said “Hands Off Chicago”, a rallying cry that began when the president first announced his intent to send the national guard into the city. Others read “Resist Fascism”, but many others used language unsuitable for broadcast.
The crowd erupted in chants of “Fuck Donald Trump” when Illinois representative Jonathan Jackson took the stage.
…More than 200,000 Washington DC-area residents rallied near the US Capitol. In many cities, protesters wore inflatable animal costumes – a Dada-esque theme created during immigration enforcement protests in Portland, Oregon, to counter the administration’s narrative of a city under the grip of lawlessness and chaos.
In Santa Fe, New Mexico, costumed characters included unicorns, chickens and frogs. “It’s about the absurdity of it all,” resident Amy Adler told the Santa Fe New Mexican while wearing a lobster suit she described as an ode to Portland.
The mood was upbeat and festive with people mocking Trump, with as many signs ridiculing Trump as expressing anger at what he and the Republicans are doing. You can see photos of the protests here.
In news reports about the day, it appears that for many people this was the first time they attended a protest rally. They turned out despite, or maybe because of, Republican attempts to say that it was a ‘Hate America’ rally. They countered that by making it feel festive, with elements of absurdist theater thrown in.
Trump’s Republican Party disparaged the demonstrations as “Hate America” rallies, but in many places the events looked more like a street party. There were marching bands, huge banners with the U.S. Constitution’s “We The People” preamble that people could sign, and demonstrators wearing inflatable costumes, particularly frogs, which have emerged as a sign of resistance in Portland, Oregon.
…In Washington, Iraq War Marine veteran Shawn Howard said he had never participated in a protest before but was motivated to show up because of what he sees as the Trump administration’s “disregard for the law.” He said immigration detentions without due process and deployments of troops in U.S. cities are “un-American” and alarming signs of eroding democracy.
“I fought for freedom and against this kind of extremism abroad,” said Howard, who added that he also worked at the CIA for 20 years on counter-extremism operations. “And now I see a moment in America where we have extremists everywhere who are, in my opinion, pushing us to some kind of civil conflict.”
…In San Francisco hundreds of people spelled out “No King!” and other phrases with their bodies on Ocean Beach. Hayley Wingard, who was dressed as the Statue of Liberty, said she too had never been to a protest before. Only recently she began to view Trump as a “dictator.”
…“It just feels like we’re living in an America that I don’t recognize,” said Jessica Yother, a mother of four. She and other protesters said they felt camaraderie by gathering in a state [Alabama] Trump won nearly 65% of the vote last November.
“It was so encouraging,” Yother said. “I walked in and thought, ‘Here are my people.’”
“Big rallies like this give confidence to people who have been sitting on the sidelines but are ready to speak up,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said in an interview with The Associated Press.
It appears that at some of rallies there were provocateurs hoping to provoke violent confrontations so that the protests could be discredited but the rally goers refused to take the bait and instead informed the police as to what those people were doing.
I tried to attend the local protest rally in Monterey. I went early, well before the scheduled start of 2:00pm, hoping to get a parking space but it was hopeless. As I approached, even when I was well more than a mile from the venue, I saw that all the parking was taken on all the side streets and in the lots of private businesses,. This is a town where they have few parking meters and you can usually get free street parking easily. I had to drive at a crawl because of the large numbers of people walking to the protest site, most carrying homemade signs denouncing Trump and the current state of affairs. I did not see anyone in inflatable costumes as frogs or other things but I could only see a small fraction of the crowd as I drove by. Drivers honked their horns, gave thumbs up, and waved in support. Given that Monterey is a small town with just about 30,000 people, it was a massive protest.
I returned home unable to attend the protest but despite my failure to be an active part, I felt good about it, feeling, like Jessica Yother in the above article, that these were my people and that there were a lot of us.
I went to the event at the Chrysalis stage in Columbia, Maryland. Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Sarah Elfreth spoke, among many others. There were a lot of folks dressed up as animals, more penguins than anything else I think, but I also saw a shark and a unicorn. Maybe penguins are the east coast equivalent of frogs?