An estimated 500,000 people turned out Saturday for the Women’s March on Washington, a day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. “We’re going to fight him tooth and nail,” one of the marchers told the Star’s Daniel Da
WASHINGTON— Massive crowds of women thronged the streets of cities across America and around the world Saturday to demonstrate against Donald Trump, marking the divisive president’s first full day in office with a dramatic grassroots outpouring of disapproval and defiance.
In Trumpian parlance: the women’s marches were huge, everywhere. The main event in Washington drew perhaps 500,000 people, more than Trump’s own inauguration the day prior.
In Chicago, the mass grew so giant that the planned march had to be turned into a stationary rally.
Thousands gathered in downtown Toronto, thousands more in Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal and Winnipeg. There was even a march in Antarctica. In all, more than two million people participated.
While the U.S. crowds were biggest in major cities in Democratic states, they were large, too, in places like Boise, Idaho; Lansing, Michigan; and Lexington, Kentucky. Altogether, they served as a reminder of the size and intensity of the liberal opposition to a Republican who won the election with fewer votes than his opponent and who remains disliked by more than half of the country.
They also sent a loud message to Trump from Hillary Clinton’s slice of America: they had not forgotten his sexism and alleged sexual assault, they would not cede him respect just because he prevailed at the polls, and they were not planning to sit silent if he tried to repeal progressive laws or trample on hard-won constitutional rights.
“We’re going to fight him tooth and nail,” said Patricia Tyson, 69, a retired union official, on the National Mall in Washington. “It’s almost déjà vu, but it’s a bad dream: we have to re-fight all the fights that we fought in the ’50s and the ’60s. This is the first time that we have had a president that wants to take us back. We’re not going.”
The global scope of the protests was unprecedented for the day after an inauguration, a historic rebuke of a presidency that has barely started. The Washington event, which began as an impromptu post-election Facebook post by a retired Hawaii lawyer, was a kind of rebuttal to Friday’s surreally traditional festivities on the same grass near the Capitol, in which a candidate who demeaned minority groups, lied without remorse and spoke of groping women “by the pussy” was bathed in all the usual patriotic pageantry.
“This is not normal,” read the sign carried by Kat Whitlock, 52, who flew in from Kokomo, Ind., with her 82-year-old mother.
Neither of them had ever protested before.
“We’re going to make sure that this never happens again,” Whitlock said. “Never.”
The giddy gathering on the Mall was a dizzying shift from the festivities of a day prior. The ground occupied Friday by men in red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps was taken over Saturday by women in knitted, cateared pink “pussyhats,” intended as a statement of support for women’s rights and resistance to Trump. The marchers came from across the country, tens of thousands arriving by bus and carpool and sleeping on the couches of strangers. They swamped subway trains that had been quiet for the inauguration, smashing organizers’ original forecast of 200,000 attendees. They were compelled to attend, many said, by Trump’s sheer odiousness.
“He makes me sick,” said Laura Dale, 39, of Cincinnati. “He makes me sick to my stomach.” The crowd was predominantly white, but there was far more racial diversity than at Trump’s festivities. And tens of thousands of men participated, though women made up the overwhelming majority.
“Just for the support of all these women. I have a twin sister,” said Kerrol Hermit, 20, a Florida State University student who carried a sign reading “Will swap 1 Trump for 10,000 refugees.”
The march was advertised as “intersectional,” and there were signs advocating everything from police reform to transgender rights to the protection of Obamacare, Muslims and illegal immigrants. Thousands of women carried messages demanding that Trump respect abortion rights, which he has vowed to curtail, and Planned Parenthood, the abortion and health services provider he has vowed to defund. Thousands more bore slogans about women’s equality.
But more than any policy matter or statement of feminist principle, the focus was Trump himself.
With signs and chants and selfmade shirts, they denounced, mocked and pleaded with the new president, taking aim at his authoritarian rhetoric, his cosiness with Russia, his treatment of women, even his hands and hair.
“This pussy grabs back,” read the sign carried by Julia Bohan, 28, a designer in New York City.
Francine Cournos, a doctor also from New York, held a sign that said “Super callous fascist racist extra braggadocious.” She is 71, and she had not protested since the Vietnam War.
“There’s never been a worse moment in American history during my lifetime,” she said.
The Washington marchers were joined by the kinds of high-wattage celebrities who shunned Trump’s inauguration. Madonna delivered a profanity-laced speech in which she said “it took this horrific moment of darkness to wake us the f--- up.”
“And to our detractors that insist that this march will never add up to anything: F--- you,” she said. “It is the beginning of much-needed change.”
It was unclear whether the day’s events would spark any kind of lasting movement in the vein of the con- servative Tea Party groups that formed to oppose Barack Obama’s Democratic administration. But many women in attendance said they would return home newly energized, finally out of the funk that overtook them after Trump’s surprise win.
“I’m terrified, but we’re here,” said Genevieve Kersten, 33, of Los Ange- les. “The conversations we were having on the train on the way made me feel like we’re not alone, that there’s still hope.”
Still, there was an undercurrent of despair amid the sea of smiles. Nancy Gilbert, 57, a lawyer in Reno, Nev., said she was afraid of what appeared to be a shift “away from democracy.” Nancy O’Brien, a government employee in Florida, carried a sign that read “Putin put you in, pussy will take you out,” but she was less optimistic than her message.
“He’s such a vile man that there’s no hope,” she said.
Trump and his administration spent part of their first day at the White House lying. After a church service at the National Cathedral, he visited the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency — and dishonestly raged at the media for its coverage of the size of the inauguration crowd, which he falsely claimed “looked like 1.5 million people” and falsely claimed stretched back to the Washington Monument.
His press secretary, Sean Spicer, then delivered an extraordinary official briefing in which he forcefully and falsely claimed Trump had drawn the biggest inauguration crowd of all time, “period,” then left without taking questions.
It was the kind of brazen deceit that validated the central premise of the marches: this president is not like the others, and he requires a different response. On the Mall, though, there was considerable ambivalence about the fact that the gatherings seemed necessary at all.
One message carried separately by dozens of strangers: “Can’t believe we still have to protest this crap.”
“This is the first time that we have had a president that wants to take us back. We’re not going.” PATRICIA TYSON