After a week of unprecedented tariffs, stock market chaos and political upheaval, more than a thousand demonstrations are taking place across the US today.
Opponents of President Donald Trump and his ‘number two’ man, billionaire Elon Musk, are rallying across the US to protest government downsizing, the economy, human rights and other issues.
More than 1,200 Hands Off! demonstrations have been planned by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organisations, labor unions, LGBTQ+ advocates, veterans and fair elections activists.
Organisers say: ‘This is a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history.
‘Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights—enabled by Congress every step of the way.’
The protests are happening at the National Mall in Washington DC, state capitols and other locations in all 50 states.
Speaking at the National Mall rally, Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign advocacy group, criticised the administration’s treatment of the LBGTQ+ community.
‘The attacks that we’re seeing, they’re not just political. They are personal, y’all,’ she said.
‘They’re trying to ban our books, they’re slashing HIV prevention funding, they’re criminalizing our doctors, our teachers, our families and our lives.’
‘We don’t want this America, y’all. We want the America we deserve, where dignity, safety and freedom belong not to some of us, but to all of us.’
In Boston, demonstrators held signs saying ‘Hands off our democracy’ and ‘Hands off our Social Security.’
Mayor Michelle Wu said she does not want her children and others to live in a world in which threats and intimidation are government tactics and values like diversity and equality are under attack.
She said: ‘I refuse to accept that they could grow up in a world where immigrants like their grandma and grandpa are automatically presumed to be criminals.’
In Florida, hundreds of people demonstrated in Palm Beach Gardens, a few miles from Trump’s golf course in Jupiter, where he spent the morning at the club’s Senior Club Championship.
Archer Moran of Port St. Lucie, Florida, said: ‘They need to keep their hands off of our Social Security.
‘The list of what they need to keep their hands off of is too long. And it’s amazing how soon these protests are happening since he’s taken office.’
Trump, meanwhile, has continued to promote his policies as being in the best interest of the US.
But fierce opposition has been seen against the Trump administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close Social Security Administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut federal funding for health programs.
Musk, one of the president’s advisers who owns Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has played a key role in government downsizing as the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
Organisers say they hope Saturday’s demonstrations will be the largest since Trump returned to office in January.
This past week has been tumultuous after Trump announced a wide-ranging package of tariffs against more than a dozen countries.
The FTSE 100 plummeted on Friday on its worst day of trading since the start of the pandemic, while markets on Wall Street also tumbled.
After the tariffs announcement, London’s top stock market index shed 419.75 points, or 4.95%, to close at 8,054.98 on Friday, the biggest single-day decline since March 2020 when the index lost more than 600 points in one day.
The Dow Jones fell 5.5% on Friday as China matched Mr Trump’s tariff rate.
But not every location targeted by the new tariffs has a government to watch on – or even human inhabitants.
A group of uninhabited islands near Antarctica, covered in glaciers and primarily home to seals and penguins, have been hit with a 10% tariff on goods.
Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, external Australian territories, don’t export anything anywhere, let alone to the US, and it’s thought humans haven’t even stepped foot there for nearly a decade.
There is a fishery in the territory, but there aren’t any buildings and no human habitation at all.
Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director turned critic, commented: ‘The penguins have been ripping us off for years.
‘For far too long, the penguins on the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands in the Antarctic have ripped off American taxpayers. That ends today.’
They alongside the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island and Norfolk Island – other ‘external territories’ which are part of Australia and not self-governing – have been listed separately to the mainland on Trump’s tariff list.
