WASHINGTON—Organized by progressive groups and urged on by union leaders, millions of people in determined crowds surged into the streets and squares of the U.S. and abroad on April 5 to challenge the policies and public worker firings by President Donald Trump and his multibillionaire handler, Elon Musk.
Organized by the grassroots Hands Off! Movement, #50501, Indivisible, Our Democracy, the Progressive Democrats of America, and other groups and endorsed by the AFL-CIO, the crowds blasted the Trump-Musk threat to programs that help people—such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—trample on their constitutional rights, and destroy protections against corporate greed, exploitation, and corruption.
“Stop the coup! Save Democracy!” read one sign in D.C. “The only fraud, waste, and abuse is being perpetrated by Trump and Musk.” Other signs, often repeated with variations, challenged what they described as the fascist direction of the administration. Signs emblazoned with the scales of justice, read, “Hands off the rule of law.” Still another declared, “Checks and balances aren’t treason.”
Crowd counts ranged up to 100,000 at the keynote protest near the Washington Monument, with 30,000 in Chicago, and tens of thousands in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Lisbon, Portugal, and in 1,300 U.S. cities ranging from Anchorage, Alaska, to Honolulu, Hawaii, to far northern Maine to far southeastern Florida.
Suburbs saw healthy turnouts, too: More than 1,000 lined Route 59 in Rockland County, N.Y., for example. There were more than 4,000 in front of the Social Security Administration headquarters in the Baltimore suburb of Woodlawn, Md.—in addition to thousands more in downtown Baltimore.
The protesters made no bones about the sorry state of the union that Trump, Musk, and Congress’s ruling Republicans created in Trump’s first weeks in office, including firing at least 121,000 federal workers without cause—and planning to nullify the contracts covering a million more.
Protesters warned also Trump will hit everyone in the pocketbook. Many noted Trump’s tariffs, imposed on every nation just two days before, will cost consumers thousands of dollars each, while tanking the value of their pensions and 401(k) accounts. “Tariffs are taxes on your grocery bills,” one handwritten sign said.
The marchers advocated not just general resistance but also specific measures to stop Trump and Musk, such as legislation to override Trump’s tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, which a bipartisan majority of senators approved the day before the rallies, and the AFL-CIO’s Protect American Workers Act, to overturn Trump’s nullification of union contracts.
The protest signs and banners were many and varied. In New York and D.C., some signs portrayed Trump, Musk, and Vice President J.D. Vance dressed in Nazi military regalia. In D.C., women carrying a big equality banner paraded in the dress of the World War I-era suffragette army whose protests—and arrests—turned the tide in the fight for women getting the right to vote.
Trump and the GOP are trying to disenfranchise up to 71 million women, too, to weaken the resistance to their dictatorial rule, via a right-wing piece of legislation called the Save Act. That measure was temporarily stalled in the U.S. House but could return.
One man’s T-shirt slammed Trump sweeping the U.S. to deport 11 million undocumented people, most of them Spanish-speaking. It had a picture of Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria and proclaimed “Illegal immigration”—Trump’s phrase—“started in 1492.”
“Equal rights for others does not mean fewer rights for you,” read another sign in D.C., alluding to Trump’s ongoing crusade to wreck rights for people of color and LGBTQ people.
Peace demands
Largely absent from many of the demonstrations, though injected more stringently in a few locales, was the issue of peace, particularly when it comes to the Trump administration’s ongoing backing for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
“The obvious drawback of neglecting the issue of peace in Palestine during the ‘Hands Off’ campaign was clear, but activists raised the banner anyway,” Cameron Harrison, of the Communist Party USA’s Labor Commission said. He pointed to the march in Detroit, where “marchers demanded: ‘Hands off Gaza, hands off the Middle East, and hands off Yemen.”
In other places, such as Los Angeles, Communist Paty members rased the demand for “Hands Off Cuba,” a country which has long faced an inhuman U.S. blockade and is now under intensified pressure from Trump.
CPUSA Co-chair Joe Sims, who participated with a contingent at the march in Manhattan, said it was “the largest protest I’ve seen in New York since the June 12 (1982) peace march” against nuclear weapons.
Aimed at Musk
Many demonstrators aimed their fire at Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” which has been wielding a chainsaw against workers and programs. One sign renamed DOGE “Desperate Oligarchs Grab Everything,” referring to the reason for the Trump-Musk cuts: To help fund a 10-year $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the rich.
Union leaders, with a lot of members under threat—and more threats from Trump looming on the horizon—took strong stands. The day before, the AFL-CIO and many of its allied unions marched into federal courts in San Francisco and elsewhere seeking injunctions against Trump’s arbitrary cancellation of union contracts covering up to one million federal workers at 30 agencies.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler led several union presidents to the speaking stage just south of D.C.’s Washington Monument. Other union leaders spoke up at other marches elsewhere.
“Stripping collective bargaining and union rights from workers across the federal government is the very definition of union busting—and a blatant attempt to silence us. We will fight this outrageous attack on our members with every fiber of our collective being,” Shuler said. “This administration wants to silence anyone who fights back—but we aren’t going anywhere.”
Local 21 of the Professional and Technical Employees joined thousands of people rallying in front of City Hall in downtown San Francisco.
“Working people are not backing down. Today in San Francisco we joined thousands of people to say: HANDS OFF our healthcare, our Social Security, our rights, and the public services our communities depend on. #HandsOff!” it tweeted.
“HANDS OFF!! There’s no way they’ll silence a crowd this big, this fired up, this committed to protecting what’s ours! #RiseUp #FightBack” the Chicago Federation of Labor tweeted after another 100,000-plus marched through the Loop.
“We just made it crystal clear: Working people are not backing down. Across the country, we rally, march, and stand in solidarity to defend our rights and our freedom to organize. This is what a movement looks like,” said Shuler.
Destroying public services
“(The) Trump administration is absolutely destroying public services in this country. That’s right. They claim to be making government more efficient,” said National Federation of Federal Employees President Randy Erwin. “That is a joke, people. That is a cruel joke. They’re doing the exact opposite.” It’s “the biggest assault on collective bargaining that we have ever seen in this country.”
Government Employees President Everett Kelley declared Trump and Musk “thought we were easy targets. But let me tell you something about union members and veterans. We will not be intimidated.
“I’m an Army veteran. We will not be silenced. We will not bow down. We’ll stand up and say hands off our union. We’ll stand up and say hands off our contract,” AFGE is the largest union for government workers and stands to lose the most if Musk and Trump destroy contracts.
Prior to the marches nationwide, the AFL-CIO’s new Department Of People Who Work For A Living—itself a sarcastic criticism of Musk’s DOGE—came to the defense of undocumented people, a top Trump target.
“One in five workers in America wasn’t born here. Immigrants are America’s workers, vital to the fabric of our communities, our economy and our labor movement. The agenda of mass deportations is a recipe for economic disaster. The real threat that workers face is not immigrants. It’s corporate greed,” the federation’s department tweeted.
Several signs, and a separate rally here, also criticized Trump’s deportations of at least nine students, at least two of them green card holders and local union activists, and all because of their advocacy of the Palestinian cause. Marchers carried signs with their portraits and demanding their freedom. ICE agents arrested another nine in the San Francisco area the day before the marches.
In South Bend, Ind., home of Notre Dame University, 600 people reserved in advance for the rally called there by the local Indivisible affiliate—and 1,800 showed up, the South Bend Tribune reported.
“We’re telling the politicians, we’re telling Trump that we are not happy with what’s going on,” local organizer Carrie Bowie said. “There’s a possibility that our cost of living could go up $4,000 this year just because of the tariffs and all the other things going on, so we need to raise our voices.”
Already in Constitutional crisis
In Oakland, Calif., marchers pushed the threat to democracy, Indivisible East Bay organizer Nancy Latham told local media after thousands marched downtown from City Hall.
“We are already in a constitutional crisis. If you ask me, there’s already been an authoritarian breakthrough,” she said. Community college teacher Morgan Lynn, costumed as the Statue of Liberty, called the Musk-Trump funding cuts “a form of terrorism.” DOGE, she added, “is a criminal conspiracy. They want to destroy us, so they can privatize everything.”
In Chicago, Anthony Claypool of the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood, told the Chicago Tribune the government is “on the precipice of a fascist takeover as billionaires are sitting in every important” Cabinet position.
There were a few signs emphasizing the weakness of the congressional Democrats in opposing Trump and Musk: “The ruling class will not save us,” one sign read. Several demanded Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who caved in on a key GOP money bill vote the week before, resign, or be ousted. So did two activists on Progressive Democrats’ April 6 weekly call.
Immigration enforcement has “become completely unhinged,” Claypool told the Tribune. He added hate crimes are increasing and due process is being eroded.
That doesn’t concern the Trump regime. The president’s response to the protests was to play golf near his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Trump migrant czar Tom Homan, subject of a demonstration outside his home—vacant at the time—in Sackets Harbor in upstate New York, sneered at the marchers. His ICE agents, the day before, had criminalized an immigrant family in New York City.
“Protests and rallies, they don’t mean anything,” Homan sneered from D.C. “So go ahead and exercise your First Amendment [free speech] rights. It’s not going to change the facts of the case.”
Two million people in the streets on Saturday showed that think otherwise.
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