Trump came into office falsely claiming that he had a mandate for a reactionary program of deportations, tariffs, austerity, and tax breaks for the rich; but that agenda, and Trump’s strong-arm anti-democratic tactics for implementing it, are now coming up against a huge and growing wave of popular resistance.
For the last six months, Trump and his handpicked cabinet of curiosities, billionaire fanboys, and state and local political allies have executed a series of relentless and often-illegal attacks on unions, immigrants, trans and queer people, federal workers, the movement for Palestine, and institutions of higher education, all in an attempt to weaken dissent, consolidate executive power, instill fear, and pander to the whims of his populist base. Simultaneously, Trump has attempted to appease more traditional sectors of the ruling class — who are increasingly uncomfortable with the instability his policies are creating — with the promise of huge tax cuts and deregulation that will facilitate more exploitation and short-term profits.
This radical, often contradictory, and disruptive agenda has led to a series of crises within his ruling coalition, represented most notably by his recent very public break-up with Elon Musk, but it has also generated a wave of popular backlash. From the spontaneous town hall protests, the vandalism against Tesla dealerships, and the “Hands Off” demonstrations in April, to the current uprisings in Los Angeles and other cities against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents carrying out Trump’s deportation program, millions of people have taken to the streets to protest the Trump administration in the last six months. Saturday’s absolutely enormous nationwide protests were yet another example, and perhaps the largest one yet, of the rising anger against the Trump administration’s policies.
While preparations were being made for Trump’s ludicrous $45 million military birthday parade, complete with paratroopers and about 130 M1 Abrams tanks, masses of people were heading out to protests in small towns and major metropolitan centers across the country. From Los Angeles and San Diego, to Detroit, Atalanta, Philadelphia, and New York City, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions of protesters took to the streets for what organizers called a “No Kings Day,” a reference to the widely-held argument that Trump is attempting to create king-like powers for himself in his second term. Largely leaderless and without a central agenda other than confronting Trump, the protests offered up a smorgasbord of the varied complaints against the second Trump administration from the liberal center to the Left. Most of those protesting came out to express concern about the erosion of democratic rights and to condemn Trump’s authoritarian tactics and his attempts to increase the reach of executive power over the entirety of the federal government. Signs compared Trump to various kings and dictators, including Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, while others made the case more explicitly that resisting Trump was about resisting fascism. However, many protesters also expressed outrage and anger with ICE and Trump’s immigration policies, while others showed up in keffiyehs and with Palestinian flags in support of the people of Gaza, as well as signs demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil.
In New York City, perhaps the biggest single demonstration in the country despite the rain, close to 100,000 protesters turned out to fill Fifth Avenue, marching from the flagship public library branch at 42nd street to Madison Square Park twenty blocks south. Demonstrations in New York included far more young people and a much stronger anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian politics compared to many of the demonstrations in smaller cities. The New York Police Department responded to the peaceful marches in full rot gear. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, which has been witness to some of the fiercest resistance to Trump’s immigration policies, more than 40,000 people marched through downtown LA, carrying signs criticizing ICE, calling Trump a fascist, and demanding that the National Guard leave the city. Immediately after the protest, continuing demonstrations in front of the Federal Building and City Hall were violently put down by mounted police officers, who trampled and beat protesters with their batons as California National Guard units looked on. At least one demonstrator was seen being carried away unconscious after being stomped on by a horse.
These demonstrations, despite the lack of a clear delineation from the Democrats and the broader ruling class, (indeed, there were an unfortunate number of signs in support of Kamala Harris and brunch), are nonetheless an incredibly progressive development. They are the expression of a strong sentiment toward defending democratic rights and immigrants, and reflect a growing resistance to Trump’s entire agenda. Like Occupy, which captured the amorphous outrage that grew out of the economic crisis of 2008, these demonstrations are also an expression of a larger simmering discontent with the entire system and are yet another sign of the ongoing organic crisis that has consumed the United States since Trump’s first presidency. However, we saw how these very same kinds of mobilizations during Trump’s first term were co-opted by the liberal ruling class. We saw how they channeled the outrage against Trump and the mobilizations against police violence and for Black lives back into the Democratic Party, the failed presidency of Biden and Harris. In fact, once all the dust has settled, their biggest lasting legacy may very well turn out to be that they made a second Trump presidency possible. We cannot let that happen again. The Democrats want to weaken and co-opt the movement. They want to separate these protests against Trump from the protests of the precarious youth, immigrants, and union members in LA fighting against deportations. They want to separate the so-called “good” protesters from the bad, and they want to deescalate the fight in LA — which has the possibility of igniting a broader national movement against deportations — through temporary concessions and court orders, even as they continue to collaborate with ICE and support the United States’ reactionary immigration policies.
In order to develop and continue to grow this movement to confront Trump, it is important that we build a broad, but class-independent united front that includes the rank and file of all the labor unions as well as the organizations of the anticapitalist Left, both of which, with some exceptions, such as SEIU and the CUNY PSC, seem to have been largely absent from Saturday’s actions. No matter how limited and liberal the politics of some of these marches may have been, sitting on the sidelines when millions of people are in the streets expressing their anger at the government and fighting for democratic rights, is no way to build the Left or the labor movement. We cannot rely exclusively on the vanguard to defeat Trump. There is a huge window of opportunity to organize the masses of young people, working people, union members, students, immigrants, and all the oppressed who turned out to these protests with anti-capitalist politics and working class methods of struggle, including the formation of neighborhood assemblies to collectively and seriously debate the politics and next steps of the movement, mass walkouts, and strikes.
