Crowds of demonstrators gathered across all 50 US states on Saturday in what was expected to be the largest nationwide protest of Donald Trump’s second term.
Tens of thousands of protesters marched through Washington DC, New York and Boston as part of the more than 1,200 “Hands Off!” demonstrations planned across the country to denounce Mr Trump and Elon Musk’s “hostile” attack on Americans’ rights.
The “mass mobilisation day” is a protest against Mr Trump’s economic agenda and the aggressive government cuts led by his billionaire “first buddy” Mr Musk.
Nearly 600,000 people signed up to attend the protests, which included demonstrations in Canada and Mexico, against the string of controversial executive orders Mr Trump signed on his first day in office.
It comes days after Mr Trump announced hundreds of billions of dollars of “reciprocal” tariffs on America’s trading partners on Wednesday, triggering a global stock market meltdown.
As an estimated 20,000 anti-Trump protesters spilled out beneath the Washington Monument, Mr Trump was in Florida playing golf at his club in Jupiter, before returning to his Mar-a-Lago estate in the afternoon.
Protesters waved signs accusing Mr Musk of being a “fascist”, portrayed Mr Trump with a swastika on his forehead and vowed to “fight the oligarchy”.
Some carried Ukrainian flags and others wore Palestinian keffiyeh scarves and carried “Free Palestine” signs, while Democrats from the US House of Representatives criticised Mr Trump’s policies on stage.
The protests follow a wave of demonstrations at Tesla facilities across the country in the wake of Mr Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team slashing 200,000 federal jobs. Mr Trump denounced the protests, which at times descended into vandalism, as domestic terrorism.
Much of the president’s agenda has been restrained by lawsuits contending he has overstepped his authority with attempts to fire civil servants, deport immigrants and reverse transgender rights.
Hours before Saturday’s US protests were due to start, hundreds of anti-Trump Americans living in Europe gathered in Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris and London to voice their opposition to Mr Trump’s sweeping US foreign and domestic policies.
“This is an enormous demonstration that is sending a very clear message to Musk and Trump and congressional Republicans and all the goose-stepping allies of MAGA that we don’t want their hands on our democracy, on our communities, on our schools and our friends and our neighbours,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, one of the groups organising Saturday’s events.
At the start of Mr Trump’s first term in 2017, hundreds of thousands of protesters joined the Women’s March on Washington to demonstrate against his presidency.
While stars including Madonna, Helen Mirren and Whoopi Goldberg joined grassroots protesters the day after Mr Trump’s first inauguration, celebrities were notably absent from Saturday’s protests.
It comes after critics claimed Kamala Harris’s campaign, which included a carousel of the world’s biggest stars, made her appear out of touch with voters.
Terry Klein, a retired biomedical scientist from Princeton, New Jersey, was among those who gathered by the stage beneath the Washington Monument on Saturday.
She said she drove down to attend the rally to protest Mr Trump’s policies on “everything from immigration to the DOGE stuff to the tariffs this week, to education. I mean, our whole country is under attack, all of our institutions, all the things that make America what it is.”
Speaking at the Washington demonstration, Jamie Raskin, a Maryland congressman, accused Mr Trump of having “the politics of Mussolini and the economics of Herbert Hoover.”
The Democrat politician told the crowd:“Our founders wrote a Constitution that does not begin with ‘We the dictators,’ the preamble says ‘We the people,’… No moral person wants an economy-crashing dictator who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Across the country in Los Angeles one protester dressed up as Marie Antonette and held a sign reading: “Musk & Trump say: let them eat cake”.
White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston said: “President Trump’s position is clear: he will always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries.
“Meanwhile, the Democrats’ stance is giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens, which will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors.”
Discussion about this post