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Demonstrators pack Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.<\/span>Carlos Chiossone\/Zuma<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It is a cliche<\/span> to begin a story about a rally with a quote from a funny sign, but one small piece of floppy brown cardboard floating down 40th Street in Manhattan on Saturday seemed to capture the mood of this weekend\u2019s \u201cHands Off\u201d protests against President Donald Trump: \u201cWhere do I start?\u201d<\/p>\n You could meet a dozen people and hear at least a dozen different existential threats. Hands off Social Security. Hands off public health grants. Hands off student visas. Hands off women. Hands off trans people. Hands off our tax dollars. Hands off Greenland. Hands off books. Hands off 401ks. Hands off immigrants. Hands off Mahmoud Khalil. Hands off grocery prices. Hands off unions. I even talked to a woman clutching a sign that said \u201cHands off Libby\u201d\u2014the popular e-reader for public library systems which is now in jeopardy thanks to massive cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s second administration is \u201cradically more radical,\u201d protestors said. \u201cNight and day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n This barrage of grievances offered a snapshot of the new Trump administration\u2019s multi-front war on modernity. But it also got at something essential about the current anti-Trump movement. People weren\u2019t taking action just to protest what the president and his movement represented, but because of visceral fear\u2014real fear\u2014of what he had already done, and that once impossible things were now very much possible. People had lived through a Trump administration before. They were taking to the streets now, in part, because they had not lived through this<\/em>.<\/p>\n That Saturday\u2019s protests happened at all is notable. After Trump\u2019s inauguration was not met with massive demonstrations, as it had been in 2017, a New York Times<\/em> story declared<\/a> the \u201cResistance\u201d era over. But in recent weeks, as universities, law firms, big businesses, and most of the United States Congress have rolled over, rank-and-file Trump opponents have begun to make their anger heard. Hundreds of people began showing up at Tesla dealerships. Tens of thousands of people flocked to see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez<\/a>. And this weekend, people flocked to rallies in all 50 states, in small towns and at massive demonstrations like the one I attended in New York, where tens of thousands of people packed Fifth Avenue for blocks, as part of a furious new popular front. You can stop asking where the mass opposition is now\u2014it\u2019s here.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a centrist in terms of politics in general,\u201d Linda Brown of New York told me as she waited for the line to move. \u201cBut batshit crazy is batshit crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n I spent a lot of time at anti-Trump demonstrations eight years ago, and the aesthetics now are, in a lot of ways, pretty similar to what they were back then. Saturday\u2019s rallies were organized, in part, by Indivisible, the ur-Resistance group of the first Trump administration that grew from a Google Doc<\/a> into a nationwide network. Cardboard signs displayed straight-from-social media nicknames (Cheeto, Muskrat, etc.) and droll complaints (\u201cI\u2019ve seen better cabinets at Ikea\u201d). Attendees leaned white and boomer. I even saw a few pussy hats.<\/p>\n But if the crowd was similar, marchers I spoke with were responding to a threat they considered considerably more dangerous than the first time around. Trump 1.0 was chaotic and mean and ultimately quite destructive, but it was also\u2014in hindsight\u2014a shell of what it could have been. The administration was filled with a lot of weird guys with short attention spans. \u201cInfrastructure week\u201d became a punchline because it never really happened. But this time around, protestors were stunned by the speed of Trump and Musk\u2019s demolition.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have fucked everything up in how many days, in how many months?\u201d said Jewels Nation, a musician escaping the rain under a stretch of sidewalk scaffolding. \u201cJanuary, February, March\u2014in three months, they have fucked us completely.\u201d She was \u201cterrified\u201d about applying for Social Security, but her fears went deeper than just retirement savings; like other attendees, she believed that the United States had already become a \u201cfascist state.\u201d<\/p>\n The difference between then and now was \u201cnight and day,\u201d said James Davis, president of the Professional Staff Congress, a union representing City University of New York faculty and staff. \u201cIt\u2019s like he\u2019s engineering a cultural revolution from the MAGA right, and now he\u2019s working with no dissent whatsoever and expecting absolute fidelity and loyalty from everyone around him.\u201d With one third of CUNY students being foreign born, and faculty dependent on visas and federal grants, the new administration was striking \u201cat the heart of what we do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s actions were affecting people who came out to the demonstration in tangible ways. Jill Pittman, a union collective-bargaining specialist from New Jersey who was marching alongside her young son, complained that Trump had gutted the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which gets involved in labor disputes.<\/p>\n \u201cI think they\u2019re down to 12 people,\u201d she said. \u201cI use them every day\u2014or used to use them every day.\u201d What Trump was doing was severe enough that she was fearful for \u201cthe day that they make all labor unions illegal.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s new administration was \u201cradically more radical,\u201d said Laurie Russell. \u201cThey\u2019re so much more organized and focused with every single issue that is dear to our hearts, and eradicating everything.\u201d In the first term, she said, \u201cit was just sort of chaos and short-term difficulties.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBefore we just hated him, we hated everything he stood for. And of course he was doing stuff,\u201d explained Paula Demers. \u201cBut this is much broader.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s attacks on universities, Demers said, were a sign that the country was slipping into a Viktor Orban-style autocracy. \u201cThis is really more about democracy itself.\u201d<\/p>\n This was just one protest in one place\u2014albeit one very large protest in one very big place. Perhaps the vibes were different in Marshfield, Mass<\/a>. or Salt Lake City or Bolivia, N.C.<\/a> (Hopefully the weather was.) Ultimately the big story is not what the signs said, but the deep groundswell of anger and unrest that brought so many people in so many places out into the streets and other public spaces of their communities. The message is: crowd large. A lot of politicians and administrators and business leaders, in bowing to Trump, have drawn confidence and comfort from the perceived vibe shift. Events like this puncture that delusion. They are an unavoidable illustration of outrage. Trump may have gotten a lot undone in the last three months, but the opposition never went away, and it may finally be emboldened. <\/p>\n On Saturday, it showed that it is everywhere.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n