Women’s March plans big pre-inaugural anti-Trump demonstration

A few of the more than 500.000 who participated in the Women's March the last time Trump was inaugurated. Another massive event led by the group is planned for January in the capital with many others around the country. | Jose Luis Magana/AP

WASHINGTON—Faced with a pending reactionary regime in Washington, headed by a misogynist president Donald Trump, the Women’s March is planning a massive protest in D.C. on Jan. 18,  2025, two days before the Republican gets sworn in for a second presidential term. Immediate actions, including demonstrations in the nation’s capital and online gatherings of groups like Win with Black Women, are already happening.

The key theme of the coming massive protest in Washington, as of a smaller protest on November 9 and a 15,000-person march on the White House a week before that, is to declare that women will force lawmakers, including the new Republican-run Congress, plus Trump, to restore the federal constitutional right to abortion, which the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court majority ended two years ago.

A national online gathering of Win with Black Women was held recently in which Angela D. Alsobrooks, a Black woman elected to the Senate from Maryland, declared that Vice President Kamala Harris, in her campaign, “made tremendous strides for all of us.” The Black community came out to vote for Harris, she declared, as she enumerated various victories of Black women, including two elected to the Senate.

Reaching a key goal of the current and coming uprisings of women, the restoration of the constitutional right to an abortion, will not be easy, however. Trump, after flip-flopping upon seeing the massive public revulsion against the Supreme Court ruling that took away that right—a decision fueled by the three justices he named—now says, “Leave it to the states.” And right-wing GOP-run states have and are enacting draconian anti-abortion laws, banning abortions and criminalizing women who seek them and MDs who perform them.

Meanwhile, on the federal level, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., is laying the groundwork for his ruling Republicans on both sides of Capitol Hill to enact a national abortion ban.

The Women’s March marshaled a snap “We won’t go back” demonstration of hundreds of people against Republican Trump’s platform, in front of the building of its creators, the radical right Federalist Society. “Feminists against fascism,” their lead, big bedsheet banner declared.

But the group’s leader warns anti-Trumpism is not enough. Progressives need “a compelling vision” to take to Congress and the public during Trump’s coming term, Women’s March Executive Director Rachel O’Leary Carmona adds.

“Part of what drove the loss on Election Day is part of what’s difficult inside the progressive movement: We actually need a compelling vision of the future and a story about that vision that people want to hear,” she told a TV interviewer.

“I was very disappointed to see Donald Trump preyed on the fears and difficulties of the last few years related to the COVID-caused global inflation,” Carmona told the interviewer, using the official name for the coronavirus. “Incumbent governments had fallen to inflation-related economics and we”—the elected U.S. government—“had joined them.”

Carmona rejected as “preposterous,” the opinion of some “moderate” Democrats that the party in this election focused too much on women’s rights and not enough on issues that appeal to the working class.

The majority of women, of course, are part of the working class. Setting one group off against the other is not the answer.

Progressive politicians, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., the Senate’s longest and strongest supporter of workers, say the answer is the party must focus on women’s rights, workers’ rights, income inequality, and corporate greed—and do so in plain language people can easily grasp.

Sanders rejects arguments by so-called moderates that the Democratic left wing pulled the party too far away from what voters care about, by focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion and “catering” to its constituencies, including workers—especially union workers—and voters of color.

“The essential unit of democracy is just one person and when one person has their fundamental bodily autonomy under attack, it means democracy is also under attack. I don’t think that focusing on women is the problem. I think that focusing not enough on women’s issues is the problem,” Carmona said.

The two marches in November are not the end of the story. Neither is the march in January.

“You are not going to take our joy,” Carmona added.

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Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.

John Wojcik

John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People's World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and '80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper's predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.