In cities and small towns across our region, demonstrators voiced their discontent with their efforts to undermine democracy and infringe on our freedoms.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans let Trump and Musk know they’ve had enough.
Protesters from all corners of Postindustrial America took to the streets to express their discontent with the duo’s penchant for anti-Democratic policies, the firing of thousands of federal employees, rollbacks of environmental protections, and much more.
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and small towns throughout the region made clear they don’t like the direction in which the country is moving since Trump returned to office vowing to dismantle the democratic and economic order of the nation.
Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, tens of thousands of people took to the National Mall, where lawmakers addressed the crowd to express their frustrations.
“Our founders wrote a Constitution that does not begin with ‘We the dictators,’ the preamble says ‘We the people,’” Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin said. “No moral person wants an economy-crashing dictator who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The protests were largely peaceful, though there was an incident in Lafayette, Indiana, when a man in a truck reportedly pulled out a gun and approached protesters, prompting authorities to detain him before eventually letting him go without charges.
Since returning to office, Trump and his DOGE-leading hatchetman Musk have upended the political and economic order and threatened to do much worse, including gut Social Security and slash Medicaid.
Their cruelty toward migrants, including a Maryland man mistakenly swept up in an ICE raid and sent to a hell-on-earth prison in El Salvador, has particularly roiled those opposed to the edicts they contend are part of a rapid march towards authoritarianism.
The mass show was reportedly just the first of what protest organizers contend would be a series of demonstrations across the country expected to stretch into the summer, a movement that will surely rile Trump into a heavy-handed response not unlike this summer of 2020 crackdown outside the White House when he ordered authorities to clear the area outside the White House so he could performatively hold up a Bible (upside down, if you recall) outside a church.
Let’s hope their voices were heard by those GOP lawmakers currently silent about their slide towards fascism and an unraveling of the world economic order that has served America well since the end of World War II.
I won’t hold my breath they will, but I’m certainly keeping my fingers crossed.
