Trump’s Fraud & Efficiency Lies Bring Out Mass Protests

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We’ve had a lot of bad news since the Trump inauguration. For those of us in the clean energy camp, there’s been the revocation of our Paris Agreement pledges. Trump issued a series of sweeping executive orders including “terminating the Green New Deal” via funding in the Inflation Reduction Act — former President Joe Biden’s signature piece of climate legislation. Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds have also been frozen.

Mass protests on Saturday decried these and other Trump actions in the largest rallying cry for democracy this year.

People were in the streets across more than 100 cities in the US — “lifting our voices so loudly together,” Michael Moore exclaimed, so that the entire world would hear. Unlike the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, this day was designed to welcome hundreds of people in local gatherings.

Media small and large covered the events.

Hands Off! demonstrations were organized for more than 1,300 locations in all 50 states by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans, and elections activists, according to the Associated Press. In Providence, about 8,000 people marched from Hope High School to Kennedy Plaza. Between 25,000 and 30,000 people flowed from Boston Common to City Hall Plaza. They stood in the raw rain in Connecticut and shared a day of sunshine in Florida.

Regardless of the location, they were part of coordinated mass protests in what Common Dreams called “the largest public rebuke yet to President Donald Trump and top henchman Elon Musk’s assault on the workings of the federal government.” The economic decimation of federal programs is a handshake to right-wing oligarchs while debilitating everyday working families.

It was the largest single day of protest since Trump took office.

Indivisible was one of the core organizing groups behind the day’s mass protests. They stated that millions of participants joined together as they demanded “an end to Trump’s authoritarian power grab,” decrying Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who “are staging a coup.”

The New York Times notes that many of the protesters, “especially federal workers and college students,” were reluctant to give their names “for fear of retaliation.” It’s clear that Trump and his sycophants are in the process of censuring people and institutions that he views as out of step with his worldview.

The “Buy American” Mantra Doesn’t Work in Our Globalized World

During the American Revolution, economic nationalism was existential: It helped spread the view that England was an outside enemy and encouraged people to act against US economic suppression. More recently, the concept has been narrowed to a phrase that invokes patriotism: “Buy American.”

Broad-based Buy American movements historically reject not only foreign goods but also foreign or non-White workers, even those on US soil, explains Amanda Mull on Bloomberg. US worker dissatisfaction and unrest is funneled toward a foreign threat. Big business “can more easily cast itself as an ally of the Everyman.” Buy American scores unity points and “has always been an easy sell across the political spectrum,” Mull continues, although it doesn’t change behavior.

Trump titled himself the “Buy American, Hire American” president during his first term. However, significant opposition has arisen from unlikely bedfellows to his second administration’s chaotic tariff regime. In the contemporary world of globalized supply chains, a Buy American campaign is little more than subterfuge. Few are drinking the Kool Aid that simply purchasing goods made in the US will create a strong country. Honda is a Japanese company that manufactures the Accord in Ohio. The Chevrolet Silverado is manufactured in factories in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Where do these automakers fit into the Trump tariff paradigm? (Maybe he doesn’t know how cars are produced these days?)

Mass Protests: “Hands Off Our Climate Funds!”

By September 2024, the Biden administration had funded more than 60,000 projects from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — projects to rebuild deteriorating bridges, make roadways safer, upgraded ports to be more efficient, modernize airport terminals, and expand public transit and passenger rail services, including delivering the first high-speed rail systems in the country.

Today those projects have uncertain futures.

Youth across the US have been prominent voices in efforts to fight back against such Trump administration climate funding freezes.

The Sunrise movement points out that Donald Trump gained the executive office by claiming he would fight for working people. “We know better,” the Sunrisers say. “Instead, he’s giving the richest men in the country even more money and more power, while they jack up the rent and burn the planet. Why? Because he is their billionaire buddy, and they’ve bought him out.”

Instead of acquiescing to “decades of the .001% amassing wealth while the rest of us suffer,” the Sunrisers continue, they want to “take down the oligarchy.”

The group is pushing for a Green New Deal. They say it is a governing agenda to mobilize every aspect of American society to reach 100% clean and renewable energy, guarantee living-wage jobs for anyone who needs one, and provide a just transition for both workers and frontline communities—all in the next 10 years. The Sunrisers recognize that, for decades, working class communities and communities of color have been the first to be hit by pollution and the last to be rebuilt after a climate disaster. These challenges need to be fought head-on, say the Sunrisers:

• stop the toxic pollution causing climate disasters and illness;
• guarantee a good job with a living wage to all;
• provide clean air and water;
• protect from disaster; and,
• give access to healthy food.

How do the Sunrisers intend to accomplish these goals?

• Expose Trump and far right politician’s corruption.
• Stiffen spines of Democrats and other institutions to become a pro-working class, anti-corruption alternative.
• Build mass organized power.

They’d like you to join in, if you haven’t done so already.

Final Thoughts

It’s warranted to look to philosopher Rebecca Solnit and her 2016 book Hope in the Dark during these times of chaos. She asks us to look closely at a past “that is too seldom recognized.” It was a time in which individuals inspired a “scale of change in the world and the collective imagination” that was “staggering.”

It is such boldness to which Solnit refers that can sustain us today in these days where democracy rests on a fragile precipice.

“There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark; few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom and of justice — and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of. We adjust to changes without measuring them, we forget how much the culture has changed.”