Thousands take to the streets in New York City in a “Hands Off!” demonstration to voice their opposition to Donald Trump’s administration on April 05, 2025, in New York City.
This was apparently the weekend that Democrats decided to try to get back that protestin’ feelin’ before it’s gone, gone, gone. Is this a popular restart of a resuscitation of the Democratic Party? It is always possible, but a closer look indicates that what appears to be a lively uprising might simply be the shudders of a political party whose life is draining away.
According to Democratic advocates, there were over 1400 “Hands Off” protests all around the country scheduled. That sounds impressive, but even so-called mainstream reporters are not quite jumping in the way they have done in the past. An ABC News clip that includes a reporter covering the aftermath of a rally on the National Mall is titled “Thousands protest Trump and Musk in rallies this weekend.”
Thousands? It’s an interesting numerical estimate. Though the reporter dutifully passes on the claim of the organizers to have had 100,000 protesters without comment, there are no overhead pictures of the crowd for a viewer to adjudicate such a claim.
The “thousands” estimate for the nation seems to be consistent, however. The Detroit News published an article about protests that gives context to what’s happening: “From the National Mall and Midtown Manhattan to Boston Common and multiple state capitols, thousands of protesters assailed Trump and billionaire Elon Musk ‘s actions on government downsizing, the economy, immigration and human rights.” The main part of the article focuses on a protest in Wyandotte, Michigan, whose attendance was 300. And the only other protest it refers to is one in Palm Beach, Florida, that also had about 300 attendees.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel’s Saturday article about the protests was a bit more upbeat about numbers, rejoicing in the claims from organizers “estimating a couple thousand at each of the Hollywood, Miami and Boca Raton protests and about 500 in West Palm Beach.”
All this bragging about “thousands,” particularly in a state such as Florida that has over 23 million people, may bring to mind the famous scene in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” in which ‘60s supervillain Dr. Evil, having been thawed from his cryogenic state after thirty years, steals a nuclear warhead and demands “one million dollars” to the laughter of a group of UN representatives.
The unimpressive and fuzzy numbers are made fuzzier when one reads a CNN account of the weekend that cites the Democratic organizing group Indivisible’s claim that 600,000 people had signed up to protest at the rallies, “some of which took place in major cities like London and Paris.”
America is rising up! Especially in…Europe? One can’t help but speculate that if the crowds are any better over there, that the cause is surely some USAID money that still hadn’t been spent before the grants got cancelled. The crowds here, as many observed, didn’t seem to have the same number of paid professional protesters.
What the “Hands Off” events had instead may well have been genuine grassroots Democratic protesters. But the lack of focus they brought reminds one a bit of Will Rogers’s jibe: “I belong to no organized political party; I am a Democrat.”
Media descriptions portray the events as against “Donald Trump and Elon Musk.” And when you ask what the specific issues are, you find out that it really is, well, everything. “The majority of protestors,” the Sun Sentinel account says, “couldn’t pinpoint which issue worried them most; their concerns varied from democracy to immigration, education, social security, LGBT rights, healthcare, climate change, research funding, and national parks. Multiple people carried lists of all of the issues they were worried about attached to their signs.”
I’m no paid political consultant, but I doubt that the most effective rally strategy is to write really long lists of political causes on hand-held signs. Even assuming one could make out those listed problems on the signs, some issues are fictional, some are losers, and some are crazy.
Among the fictional, some protesters apparently think Donald Trump is going to do away with Medicare and Social Security entirely. Among the losers is the desire to allow “transwomen” (read: men) to compete in women’s sports and use women’s restrooms and locker rooms.
In the crazy camp is the revolution still desired among aging radical protesters. Minnesota journalist Dustin Grage posted a picture on X/Twitter of the protest at the state capitol in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Saturday featuring the Democratic Socialists of America who were “all white, half of them masked.” As Grage added, “Not a single American flag in sight, but they did bring one for Palestine. Fascinating.” Fascinating indeed.
The writer whose nom-de-plume is Cynical Publius reposted journalist David Marcus’s film of a protest in Charles Town, West Virginia, that had about 200 protesters. As Marcus observed, they didn’t seem to be paid protesters, “but the median age appears to be about 70.” As Cynical Publius observed, his own study of the footage from around the nation seems to bear out the same results: this is a bunch of older white Democrats with “an almost complete lack of black and Latino people.” So much for the party of diversity.
“The Democrat Party,” he concluded, “may not exist in ten years.”
As the line often attributed to Yogi Berra has it, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” But this speculation about the Democrats has some warrant to it. Though some Democrats would like to move past the radicalism of the last decade, it is hard to see how they can do it when their party infrastructure is so tied to radicalism.
It would be tempting to say the Democrats gave it the old college try. But the problem is that, apart from the radicals at elite institutions, many of whom seem to be foreign students in danger of losing their student visas, the college kids are leaning right these days.
Democrats had a lock on “cool” for a long time. With their celebrity endorsers and celebrity politicians, and a little bit of help from the paid protester class, they could put on what might pass for a mass movement when they needed to. Today, however, both the reality and the illusion behind that period are gone. They have no Obama-like political celebrity sensations. And their attempts to demonize Trump have utterly failed.
A Daily Mail/J.L. Peterssurvey, the results of which were released on Saturday, shows that even with the controversies over Trump’s tariffs, Trump’s approval rating climbed 4 percentage points from their last survey a week ago, from 49 percent to 53 percent. His gains were among 18-29-year-olds (where his cumulative gains since March 7 total 13 points) and Democrats and independent voters, where he gained 6 points. Apparently, some in the Democratic Party are OK with Trump’s hands on the executive branch.
Once asked if he thought the radical playwright George Bernard Shaw was a “coming peril,” English writer G. K. Chesterton laughed and called him a “passing pleasure.” Watching the old hippies on parade this weekend, it’s tempting to say the same of the Democrats.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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