On Saturday, April 5th, tens of thousands of New Yorkers flooded Fifth Avenue to partake in the nationwide Hands Off protest organized by Indivisible in partnership with nearly 200 other political organizations.
The turnout dwarfed that of the Presidents’ Day protest, NYC’s last major demonstration against the Trump administration, which pre-dated many of the administration’s actions that have made headlines in recent weeks, from the imposition of tariffs to cuts the the Social Security Administration to the arrests of foreign-born activists on dubious constitutional grounds.
Protesters I spoke with cited all of these concerns when I asked why they had ventured out on a rainy Saturday, but most of them were more general in their criticisms, almost as if the opposition to Trump went without saying: they were there to defend “the rule of law” and “our constitutional rights.” I can’t say I found any of their answers all that surprising.
In search of drama, I walked against the crowd and parked myself on the corner of 41st and Fifth, where about half a dozen Trump supporters were alternatively absorbing and deflecting the taunts and epithets of passersby. The incivility flowed mostly in one direction; these men seemed to serve an almost spiritual role, the receptacles for the rage of twenty-thousand liberals.1
I spoke mostly with an Indian-American guy who looked about thirty. When I asked if he could find anything to criticize about Trump, he answered by praising him for cutting funding to Pakistan’s Islamist government. He railed particularly against universities and Qatar-funded academic departments that indoctrinated American youth. Was the president an autocrat? Sure, but he was also the “lesser of two evils” who would protect the United States from the left’s reflexive multiculturalism, which he feared would lead to “sharia law.”
It occurred to me that both he and the protesters had shown up with the ostensible aim of defending liberal values.
I was also struck by this guy’s contention that the people filling the streets were all radical leftists. He also seemed less interested in defending Trump than he was in dismissing the crowd as “sheeple” who all want to “defund the police” and who take their political cues from “The View.”
Whatever truth there may be to that caricature, its aptness would seem inversely proportional to the size of these protests. If the protesters I spoke to were right when they told me that this is “only the beginning” of a popular repudiation of Trump, then then it follows that the most radical elements will be diluted: that unlike a couple months ago, a dominant message won’t be Down with capitalism! but instead, perhaps, Stop the trade war. In other words, that the normies will far outnumber the radicals.
There were lots of normal-seeming people on the streets on April 5th.
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