Anti-Trump protesters descend on DC to rally against Musk’s DOGE cuts, new tariffs: ‘Let’s keep them afraid!’
Tens of thousands of protesters descended on DC Saturday as part of nationwide “Hands Off!” rallies against spending cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and President Trump’s new “Liberation Day” tariffs — with one speaker calling on the crowd to make the two men “afraid.”
The huge crowd assembled with homemade — and in many cases vulgar — anti-Republican signs near the Washington Monument while similar events unfolded in New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
“Trump and Musk, who want to be dictators and want to be kings and lords, they are afraid of the power of love and truth and justice!” declared activist minister William Barber II, who was one of the first speakers at the DC event.
“They are afraid of your unity and diversity. Well, let’s keep them afraid until they change,” he roared. “This is an outright battle for civilization! We are not going to bow to power drunk neofascist extremists.”
A coalition of Democratic and left-wing groups organized the event, which is one of the first large DC rallies against Trump since he reentered the White House in January. Simultaneous protests unfolded at over 1,000 locations across the country, including the Big Apple, at Columbia University and Bryant Park.
Opponents of Musk have vandalized Tesla facilities and vehicles across the country, which Trump, who survived two assassination attempts last year, has denounced as domestic terrorism.
The activist group Indivisible, which has called on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to retire for recently averting a partial government shutdown, and MoveOn.org were prominent organizers.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who served as chief prosecutor in Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021, hailed the “great Rev. Barber” as he spoke next.
Raskin told protest participants they have “the right to call the president deranged for crashing our economy, destroying $6 trillion of wealth and turning my 401k into a 201k.”
“No moral person wants an economy-crashing dictator who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” he said to cheers.
But Raskin included a wide range of other grievances in his remarks.
“We say to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, hands off Greenland! That’s an independent country,” he said of Trump’s attempts to annex the Danish territory. “Hands off Canada! That’s an independent country. Hands off Panama! That’s an independent country. Statehood for Washington, DC!”
Protesters flew Trump baby balloons and chanted “DOGE shit!” — but the event ended mid-afternoon without any obvious instances of vandalism or clashes with police.
The White House on Thursday had canceled garden tours scheduled for Saturday and erected anti-riot fencing in anticipation of possible disruptions. The president himself was out of town for the weekend.
Columbia draws tiny crowd
Columbia University, the epicenter of anti-Israel activism since October 2023, drew a surprisingly small crowd of about 20 mostly elderly participants who held signs including “Democracy, not dictatorship” while chanting “hands off our students!”
Retiree Kathryn Graybill, 71, told The Post “I’m very disturbed that people are being picked up and taken to prisons in other countries without due process. That’s against our Constitution. Our Constitution says that no one should deprive anybody of freedom of speech.”
Gaybrill said that that “happened in Hitler’s Germany and I’m not comfortable with it.”
The Trump administration is in the process of attempting to deport former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil for allegedly passing out pro-Hamas propaganda on campus.
In Midtown, a different group marched past the city’s skyscrapers with heart-shaped signs saying “hands off our libraries” in reference to one of Musk’s recent spending cuts.
Artist Julie Peppito, who made two huge yellow hands carried by protesters, said she and others “painted all the things they wanted the Trump regime to keep their hands off: our rights, our land, all the things we hold dear.”
Sandy and Eddie Pomerantz, two 90-year-old New Yorkers, told the Post that the secret to staying young is “staying in the game.”
“We’re still doing everything we did at the age of 25,” said Eddie Pomerantz, referring to protesting in the 1960s. “It is long, long overdue to charge the president of the United States with the attempted murder of our democracy.”
