Anti-Trump rallies on eve of impeachment vote
In Bay Area, across the country, protesters gather to call for president’s ouster ‘A president who thinks he’s above the law is not a president’
SAN FRANCISCO >> Thousands of activists gathered in plazas and on street corners around the Bay Area and across the country Tuesday to back the impeachment of President Donald Trump ahead of an expected vote today in the House of Representatives.
“We have this soulless man in the White House and it’s time for us to get rid of him,” Oakland resident Helen Neville said at a rally outside the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. “To save our democracy is the really important thing, because if we don’t protect the Constitution, we lose our democracy. A president who thinks he’s above the law is not a president.”
Activists said they hoped Trump would be held accountable for using U.S. foreign aid as leverage in seeking an advantage in the 2020 election and obstructing congressional investigations of his conduct.
By turning out in force, many also hoped to rebuke Trump’s
recent suggestions that Americans don’t care about the issue, scoffing at low TV ratings during the impeachment hearings and ridiculing congressional efforts as “impeachment light.” Prominent Republicans have also dismissed the effort as partisan in nature and pledged to defend Trump.
Across the country, more than 600 demonstrations, organized in part by MoveOn.org, were planned for Tuesday, with more than 200,000 signed up by midmorning. In the greater Bay Area, from Hollister to Napa, more than two dozen events were planned.
In San Francisco alone, more than 1,000 people marched to the offices of California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, where they were set to be addressed by Christine Pelosi, daughter of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic strategist.
Pacifica resident Steve Rapport of Indivisible SF donned Colonial-era clothing to take on the likeness of Alexander Hamilton, one of the architects of the U.S. Constitution.
“All they do is double down, and triple down on their lies,” Rapport said of the president and his political allies.
Helen Grieco, an organizer with Common Cause, called on the memory of her father, a World War II veteran who died of service-related causes.
“Have you had enough crimes?” she asked the crowd. “This is not why my father is lying in a military grave today!”
Rallies were also held in Berkeley, Emeryville, Lafayette and Livermore. Among the several hundred who attended the Grand Lake rally was Oakland resident Angie Fryer.
Fryer, who wore a sandwich-board-style sign that read “86 45” and offered passersby a chance to don a Rosie the Riveter-style hand puppet to punch the sign, said she was ready for the House vote.
“I have the same bottle of champagne that I bought to toast our first woman president,” Fryer said.
“When that didn’t happen, I put it in my refrigerator and I wrote ‘impeachment’ on the label,” she continued. “And now I’m going to get to pull it out of the refrigerator (Wednesday) and open it up and drink it. I knew it would happen. I knew that somehow that criminal couldn’t keep it together for a full term.”
Despite her projection of dim prospects for Trump’s conviction in the Senate, Fryer said impeachment was still a meaningful gesture, and not merely partisan: “We still have to do
that. You don’t fight a battle because you might win it. You fight it because you have to.”
Tuesday’s rallies came after a sharp decline in takeit-to-the-streets activism sparked by Trump’s first year in office. This news organization on Tuesday highlighted the drop-off in Trump-inspired protests of late. A survey of news clips found the number of organized Trump protests that brought at least hundreds of people to the streets has plummeted from 32 in 2017 to six in 2018 to just two this year.
“We’ve had rule of law in this country for centuries and if we don’t insist that the president is not above the law, I think our republic is doomed,” said Steve Rosenblum, 65, who organized a rally at Lytton Plaza in Palo Alto. “That’s why people are turning out.”
Contact Jason Green at 408-920-5006, Robert Salonga at 408-920-5002, George Kelly at 510-2086488 and Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409.