On the day that US President Donald Trump paraded tanks and troops through Washington, DC in a display of military might on his birthday, millions of people across the country had another idea. No kings.
Hours before the $45 million military parade got underway on a rainy day in the US capital, people had begun gathering in city centres, college towns, highway overpasses, and even in traditionally Republican rural communities to protest against the US president.
The protests happened in more than 2,000 localities overall, with some cities, such as New York, holding around a dozen events in different neighbourhoods.
Some crowds were estimated to be well over 100,000, such as in San Francisco, where a march from the Mission District (a historically Latino neighbourhood with a diverse immigrant community) to City Hall shut down city streets for hours.
“Without a viable democracy, we can do nothing to protect health or mental health, or change the direction of climate change,” Robin Cooper, a San Francisco-based psychiatrist taking part in the protest told The New Arab.
“This is a huge number of people saying no to fascism, no to authoritarianism, and yes to democracy,” she said, while a circle of demonstrators beat drums and waved flags.
“This feels like the size of marches during the Vietnam era,” she said.
After pausing briefly, she recalled that those tended to be centralised in big cities, whereas the anti-Trump protests have reached deep into rural America. And she believes the threats facing the country are much bigger than one specific war.
Standing beside her, Susan Rosen, another healthcare worker wearing her scrubs, told TNA that the Trump administration’s policies have hit close to home.
“My daughter worked for the department of public health. She’d been there for five years. She was an incredible worker in terms of HIV research, surveillance with the CDC [Centre for Disease Control and Prevention], support services for those infected by the disease, and she got fired. Her job was eliminated,” she said, adding that her daughter’s husband’s job in medicine is also now in danger of losing funding.
“We may be losing our future scientists and teachers of the next generation in science and research,” she said. “It’s enormous. And I think the administration, what they’ve done is just one thing after another to overwhelm the US population in a way that makes it harder to focus.”
Nearby, demonstrators waved the flags of Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Palestine, and Ukraine, as well as the rainbow pride flag (with June being Pride Month). Many held the American flag, some of them upside down in a sign of distress, though many brought out the stars and stripes as a way to “reclaim the flag” following accusations that the protests were "un-American".
Most of the signs, in both English and Spanish, were homemade, almost each one different in its messaging – from condemning ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and US support for wars abroad to general denunciations of the Trump administration as undemocratic.
The nationwide gatherings took place just hours after Minnesota Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were fatally shot, with another lawmaker and his wife surviving the shooting. All demonstrations were subsequently cancelled across the state as the manhunt for the suspect was under way.
The mass protests also took place a day into Israel’s airstrikes on Iran, which have already seen multiple exchanges of fire between the two countries, resulting in more than a hundred deaths and around 400 injuries.
This comes just over a week after mass protests began in Los Angeles over the Trump administration’s surge in migrant arrests, with many of them apprehended at their workplaces, sparking fear and anger throughout the country.
“The country was founded by immigrants. This is clearly just racism,” Brian O’Loughlin, a local resident, told TNA. “The administration is once again showing us that you can’t hide what you are. They’re racist.”