WASHINGTON: Demonstrators decrying President Donald Trump’s policies took to city streets across the United States on Saturday in the third edition of the “No Kings” rallies that organisers hoped will be the largest single-day non-violent protest in US history.
The two previous No Kings events attracted millions of participants.
Singers Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez headlined a rally at the state capitol in Minnesota, where upward of 100,000 people gathered in an area that became a flashpoint over Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and the incursion of federal immigration agents into Democratic-led urban centres.
Other major rallies took place in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, but two-thirds of the events were happening outside major city centres, a nearly 40 per cent jump for smaller communities from the movement’s first mobilisation last June.
“The defining story of this mobilisation is not just how many people are protesting, but where they are protesting,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, the group that started the No Kings movement last year and led planning of Saturday’s events.
Republican strongholds
With mid-term elections later this year in the US, organisers say they have seen a surge in the number of people organising anti-Trump events and registering to participate in deeply Republican states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Utah.
Competitive suburban areas that have helped decide national elections are seeing “huge” surge in interest, Greenberg said, citing as examples Pennsylvania’s Bucks and Delaware counties, East Cobb and Forsyth in Georgia, and Scottsdale and Chandler in Arizona.
“Voters who decide elections, the people who do the door-knocking and the voter registration and all of the work of turning protests into power, they are taking to the streets right now, and they are furious,” she said.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson in a statement dismissed the rallies as “Trump derangement therapy sessions” of interest only to journalists.
In northern Virginia, just outside Washington, several hundred people began gathering close to Arlington National Cemetery before a planned march across the Potomac River to the capital’s National Mall.
Some passing drivers honked their horns in support, but others slowed down to berate the protesters.
“You’re all idiots,” one man shouted from his car.
John Ale, 57, a retired air-conditioning and heating contractor, said he drove 20 minutes from his home in Virginia to join the march.
“What’s happening in this country is unsustainable,” he said. “The middle class, the little people, can’t afford to live anymore. And he (Trump) is breaking the norms, the things that made us function as a country.”
