WASHINGTON: Demonstrators across the United States gathered Thursday for May Day rallies against Donald Trump, protesting his administration’s policies and attempts to push the limits of presidential power.
The protests were organized by a loose network of left-leaning activist groups, which said the rallies were taking place in more than 1,000 locations.
Hundreds to thousands of protesters gathered in many of the nation’s largest cities from New York to Chicago and Los Angeles, while a number of smaller towns also had demonstrators turn out in their streets.
“We believe that the ultra wealthy are trying to take over the country and suppress the working class and the middle class,“ Shane Riddle told AFP outside the White House in Washington.
The 54-year-old, who works for an education union in the eastern state of Virginia, fears the United States “could turn into an authoritarian type of government if our citizens don’t stand up to this president and its billionaires allies.”
Various rallies held across the capital brought together hundreds of people, with similar turnout in New York, while several thousand demonstrators congregated in Los Angeles, AFP photographers on the scene observed.
In Houston, Texas activist Bernard Sampson denounced the administration’s rapid deportation of undocumented immigrants, defending the migrants as the people who “work in your restaurants or the people that build your homes.”
Americans ‘are angry’
The protests come as Democratic elected officials have struggled to find an effective strategy against Trump’s far-reaching shake-up, and with fairly minimal mass mobilization by opposition protesters.
“I feel like I haven’t heard anything from the party at all,“ Izabela Cabrera, a 22-year-old student told AFP in Washington.
“Clearly the American people are angry, and clearly we’re trying to fight for change,“ she said, “but I don’t think the Democratic Party is really grasping at that right now.”
The chief organizer of Thursday’s protests was the group 50501. Its name is meant to represent 50 protests in 50 states and one movement and it has been behind previous calls to demonstrate.
A rally in Philadelphia organized by the AFL-CIO, America’s largest union federation, was headlined by leftist Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been touring the country for weeks to mobilize opposition.
The demonstration, titled “For the Workers, Not the Billionaires,“ alludes in part to the exceedingly wealthy individuals in Trump’s administration, including Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk, who heads the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” cost-cutting effort.
“Today in America, one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 52 percent of American households,“ Sanders said.
At May Day rallies across the globe, from France to the Philippines, anti-Trump themes were also visible.
May Day, which is celebrated in many countries as International Workers’ Day, is not a public holiday in the United States, which marks Labor Day in September.
