“Hands Off is like hands off on all these things, not just our services and benefits, but our rights and our freedoms, all of which are being threatened right now, and we’re seeing it every single day,” MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting said.
The goal, in part, is to bring together people who have maybe been against Trump for years and newly angered Americans, who have fallen victim to the new administration’s mass firings and shuttering of government programs.
“Even people who initially said that Trump was doing what he promised he’d do to his enemies, shaking things up, are now saying, ‘What happened to me—what about me?’” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told The New York Times.
Instead of solely organizing the Saturday protests in strong blue dots across the country—like in Los Angeles or New York City—several “Hands Off!” demonstrations were planned in areas that Trump won in 2024, handily. In Fayetteville, West Virginia, where the least pro-Trump area still went to him by 17 points, there’s a protest at the courthouse. Other Trump strongholds—like Big Spring, Texas; Cookeville, Tennessee; and Glendive, Montana—are also hosting demonstrations.
While liberal places are expected to have a larger turnout, the movement’s vastness differs from past mass protests against Trump, which were often found in liberal hotspots and required people from other areas to travel.
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When asked about the protests, the White House said in a statement that President Trump would “always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries” and that Democrats want to give these benefits to “to illegal aliens.” Trump himself did not post about the protests on Truth Social by early Saturday afternoon, instead writing about how China and “many other nations” have treated the US “unsustainably badly,” adding that “We have been the dumb and helpless ‘whipping post.’”
Musk, the wealthiest man in the world who has played a leading role in slashing federal funding, took to his social media site and amplified a post claiming that these “paid protests” were orchestrated by billionaires and that anyone “funding these uprisings” should be held “legally accountable for the violence and vandalism.” Musk quoted the post, writing, “They will be.”
(The Hands Off! movement said that a core principle to the protests is “a commitment to nonviolent action.”)
At a demonstration in West Virginia on Saturday, one protestor held a sign reading “Stop the Steal,” a reference to Trump’s inaccurate claim that he won the 2020 election, someone was waving an upside down flag, while another attendee cheered with a sign that said “NO KING NO OLIGARCHY DEMOCRACY ONLY!”
