On Saturday, April 5, “Hands Off” protests spanned the United States. At least one million people rallied and marched in a clear sign of the growing rage towards the Trump administration’s attacks on the middle and working classes. Protesters raged about a wide range of struggles and injustices. Among the core messages was that billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to get richer by taking things we need.
Of course, big cities saw some of the largest marches. Despite a cold rain, New York witnessed 100,000 or more filling Manhattan with a loud, passionate, energetic march down 5th Avenue. The national mall in Washington, D.C. also saw a rally of about 100,000. Many protesters were federal, state, and municipal workers and their unions who are under direct attack from Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth. Also in Washington, another connected march saw 40,000 or more marching in defense of Palestinians. Many graduate students, many of them in unions, also took part, forming a “Labor Contingent” for Gaza. Amazon and Google workers were also a presence. Chicago saw tens of thousands gather in the central Loop district for a mass rally. Nearly 10,000 rallied in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland, and in Berkeley about 3,000 rallied at a BART station. Across the Bay in San Francisco, tens of thousands filled Civic Center Plaza. In Baltimore, more than 1,000 rallied in front of City Hall after an earlier rally outside the Social Security national headquarters in nearby Woodlawn. In Portland, Boston, Los Angeles and Atlanta crowds in the tens of thousands marched.
But it wasn’t only in big cities and traditionally Democratic “blue” towns or states that these rallies took place. In Portland and Augusta, Maine, the proudly independent small New England state, an estimated 3,000 rallied in each, with another dozen rallies taking place across the state. In North Carolina, several thousand rallied in Raleigh, while hundreds protested in Durham and Chapel Hill, with another 3,000 protesting in Charlotte. In Asheville, devastated last fall by Hurricane Helene and used by Trump in his campaign for reelection, 7,000 spirited protesters turned out to protest his lack of concern for them. An estimated 3,000 marched in Richmond, Virginia, and thousands more in Austin, Texas, Elon Musk’s recently adopted home. In the small city of Macon, Georgia, 300 rallied, and in at least three separate towns in the small state of Vermont, about 1,000 rallied in each in a cold rain. In Iowa, hundreds rallied not only in the cities, but in nearly a dozen small towns, all of which have voted Republican consistently for decades.
Even in Idaho, a state that has become a sort of promised land for white-supremacist Christian-nationalist groupings that support Trump, a few thousand rallied passionately in Boise against Trump and against recent anti-trans laws passed by their own state legislature. And in Florida, Trump’s adopted home state that has become Republican “red” over the past twenty years, thousands protested at dozens of locations. Hundreds rallied at three places in Palm Beach County, where Trump lives and plays golf at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Even in “The Villages,” a famously wealthy and conservative retirement community in central Florida, an estimated 2,000 took part in the protests.
At every rally participants were angry and energetic, with spirited marching and chanting throughout. Most signs and banners were homemade. Some were creative and comical, mocking the arrogance of the billionaire class. Others were simple, with words printed forcibly with markers or paint on cardboard or poster board, almost physically expressing the anger of the people who wrote them.
These protests occurred in such diverse places and had such anger because these cuts and firings and attacks will hurt tens of millions of workers and otherwise oppressed people, no matter where we are or what color or gender we are or who we voted for. The billionaires want us to pay for their crises, and they want to take money and necessities away from us so they can continue to line their own pockets. The reality is becoming too obvious to ignore, even for many who for too long bought into the lies of the Trump/Musk disinformation machine.
The million or more people who hit the streets last Saturday may be only the beginning. But they give us a glimpse at the potential power that we wield. We don’t need to wait for the Democrats, or the courts, or someone else to come to our rescue. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
