How SB's Big Protest Reflects a Burgeoning National Opposition Movement to Trump

Millions of people in more than 1000 cities sent a clear signal of popular outrage against autocracy and MAGA-Musk vigilantes who are vandalizing the government on behalf of billionaires

The huge crowd that protested the Trump Administration in Santa Barbara on Saturday represented one facet of a vast national mosaic of protest against its radical, right-wing and nihilistic agenda.

The “Hands Off” human billboard that gathered on West Beach, pictured above, summed up the message from a vast collection of citizens outraged by a multitude of actions Trump, Elon Musk and their autocratic government have taken in the past three months, a blitzkrieg of violations, breaches and transgressions of the rule of law, constitutional order and civil rights.

The Washington Post reported:

Organizers said at least 1,300 “Hands Off” rallies were planned by more than 150 groups in all 50 states. Photos and videos on social media showed throngs gathered in public squares or marching through the streets from Boston to Los Angeles.

During Trump’s first term, protests tended to concentrate in Washington but organizers want to spread the rallies out around the country, Jacovich said. Many of smaller rallies are forming organically among neighbors and friends, she said, reaching people who may not have protested last time he was president.

At a time when defenders of American democracy have lamented the lack of organized response to the Trump’s vigilante MAGA posse, the sights and sounds of millions of ordinary citizens taking to the streets was a heartening sign that organized opposition at last is emerging to its dismantling of the federal government and trampling of the principles values and doctrines of liberal democracy.

The headline over Mother Jones correspondent Tim Murphy’s wrap-up of Saturday’s coast-to-coast outrage may have put it best:

“You Can Stop Asking Where the Mass Opposition Is. It’s Everywhere.”

Murphy wrote:

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…

The protest in Santa Barbara was ably covered by members of our small but stouthearted local press corps, from Josh Molina’s report in Noozhawk, Elijah Valerjev’s on-the-scene observations and Ingrid Bostrom’s images in the Indy, Lauren Bray’s complete report at Edhat and Caleb Nguyen’s regional take on KEYT.

Further afield, however, corporate media organizations often underplayed the size and scope of the national day of protest, as press critic Margaret Sullivan noted in “American Crisis,” her Substack column.

For weeks and months, I’ve been reading stories and analyses in major news organizations about how the public resistance to Trump is so much quieter now than in 2017.

But when the protests did happen, much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.

Sullivan did a quick survey and found that the national protest story was in the 20th most prominent position on the Wall Street Journal home page and 8th at the New York Times, where the main photo was, not a demonstration image, but “Trump at the White House with his fist raised.”

“On the Fox News home page, I stopped counting after I scanned 40 articles and scrolled endlessly. I did see a video on Saturday, dismissively headlined, “Liberals rally against President Trump.”

The Washington Post and the Guardian found the story more important, as did CNN, which at one point on live TV had a banner headline: “MILLIONS OF PEOPLE PROTEST AGAINST TRUMP & MUSK.” They had live video from cities around the U.S.”

Mainstream media coverage or not, a national opposition movement to Trump will become hard to ignore, if the energy and enthusiasm demonstrated nationally can be sustained, something the progressive writer Robert B. Hubbell said is essential to withstanding his authoritarian project.

“Every American who values the rule of law should be heartened by the unprecedented turnout for the Hands Off! National Day of Protest on Saturday. Every crowd was larger than expected. Despite millions of Americans in the streets protesting the government, there were no arrests, no violence, no vandalism.

“The protests represented democracy in its most muscular form—the people themselves, making their voices heard without interpreters and apologists, without pundits and spin doctors, without parliamentary procedure and backroom deals.”

Hubbell, whose “Today’s Edition Newsletter” is essential reading, adds:

“Among the many important lessons from the weekend protests, the most important is this:

We must do it again. And again. And again…

We cannot allow April 5, 2025, to be the high water mark of the resistance.

No, April 5, 2025, must be a beginning, a hinge to something much larger and more enduring. It must be our generation’s Lexington and Concord, events that galvanized a new nation into being.”

Amen, brother.

Images: The Society of Fearless Grandmothers formed a “Hands Off” human billboard on West Beach (Ann Shaw photo); The rally filled De La Guerra Plaza (Keith Carlson); Crowd members expressed objection and defiance to a wide range of Trump policies (signs in the crowd by Carlson and Marian Shapiro); Among the speakers, clockwise from upper left, were Myra Paige from Indivisible; Luz Reyes-Marin of Planned Parenthood Central Coast; Primativa Hernandez of 805Undocufund; Jon Bauman of Social Security Works Pac (Marian Shapiro photos).

Many thanks from Newsmakers to Keith Carlson and Judy Effron of Indivisible SB for providing photos from the rally and march.