Congress members Jamie Raskin, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar among speakers as demonstrators denounce ‘fascism’
Demonstrators estimated to be in the tens of thousands gathered in Washington on Saturday in a display of mass dissent against Donald Trump’s policies that organizers hoped would snowball into a rolling cycle of protests that could eventually stymie the US president in next year’s congressional elections.
Anger with Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, the SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk, was expressed in a sea of placards and banners on the Washington mall, in the shadow of the Washington monument. Multiple messages denounced the two men for shuttering government agencies, cutting jobs and services and – in often graphic terms – for threatening the survival of US democracy.
“Resist like it’s 1938 Nazi Germany” and “Fascism is alive and well and living in the White House”, read two slogans at the Hands Off gathering, organized by the civil society group Indivisible and featuring speeches from a host of other organizations as well as Democratic members of Congress.
The rally, which coincided with roughly 1,000 other similarly themed events across the country, was punctuated by a fusillade of barbs aimed at Trump as well as Musk, whose infiltration into government agencies through the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, without congressional approval, and cash-fueled interventions in election races have been seen as anti-democratic affronts.
“They believe democracy is doomed and they believe regime change is upon us if only they can seize our payments system,” said Jamie Raskin, a Democratic representative from Maryland who is the party’s top figure on the House judiciary committee.
He added: “If they think they are going to overthrow the foundations of democracy, they don’t know who they are dealing with.”
Saturday’s events followed weeks of anxiety among anti-Trump forces that the president had railroaded through his agenda in the absence of adequate resistance from congressional Democrats and minus the displays of popular mass opposition that appeared early in his first presidency.
