Hundreds of thousands of Americans turned out on Saturday to participate in more than 1,200 protests organized by over 150 activist groups to protest the Trump administration. It was the first moment of the second Trump administration in which the Republican Party’s opposition achieved something approximating the scope and potency it enjoyed during the first Trump administration. Growing apprehension over the president’s global trade war might have augmented the protesters’ numbers. Indeed, as the New York Times put it, the demonstrations were an exercise in outreach to the “newly alarmed.”
The “newly alarmed” who persuaded themselves to give the revivified “resistance” a shot might have been just as unnerved by the alternative to Trumpian chaos. In Washington, D.C., demonstrators unfurled a massive Palestinian flag and were treated to hectoring lectures about the evils of the Israeli government, which probably seemed quite beside the point to those whose apprehension over their 401(k) piqued their curiosity. The guillotine — now a universal symbol of the politically unhinged, irrespective of partisan affiliation — made an appearance. Fans of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s alleged murderer and his lunatic cause took the opportunity to demonstrate where their political sympathies lie.
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