By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2025-04-05 17:11:02 | Updated at 2025-04-06 09:36:15
16 hours ago
WASHINGTON — Thousands of protesters descended on DC Saturday as part of nationwide “Hands Off!” rallies against spending cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the President Trump’s new “Liberation Day” tariffs — with one speaker calling on the crowd to make the two men “afraid.”
The huge crowd assembled near the Washington Monument with handmade signs for the event — which prompted the White House to postpone garden tours, though the president himself was out of town for the weekend.
“Trump and Musk, who want to be dictators and want to be kings and lords, they are afraid of the power of love and truth and justice!” declared activist minister William Barber II.
“They are afraid of your unity and diversity. Well, let’s keep them afraid until they change,” he roared. “This is an outright battle for civilization! We are not going to bow to power drunk neofascist extremists.”
A coalition of Democratic and left-wing groups organized the event, which is one of the first large DC rallies against Trump since he reentered the White House in January. Simultaneous protests unfolded at over 1,000 locations across the country, including the Big Apple, at Columbia University and Bryant Park.
Opponents of Musk have vandalized Tesla facilities and vehicles across the country, which Trump, who survived two assassination attempts last year, has denounced as domestic terrorism.
The activist group Indivisible, which has called on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to retire for recently averting a partial government shutdown, and MoveOn.org were prominent organizers.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who served as chief prosecutor in Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021, hailed the “great Rev. Barber” as he spoke next.
Raskin told protest participants they have “the right to call the president deranged for crashing our economy, destroying $6 trillion of wealth and turning my 401k into a 201k.”
“No moral person wants an economy-crashing dictator who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” he said to cheers.
But Raskin included a wide range of other grievances in his remarks.
“We say to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, hands off Greenland! That’s an independent country,” he said of Trump’s attempts to annex the Danish territory. “Hands off Canada! That’s an independent country. Hands off Panama! That’s an independent country. Statehood for Washington, DC!”
