Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, Staff Photographer
On a bitterly cold Monday afternoon, just four hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, a group of around 150 gathered on the New Haven Green to protest the country’s new commander-in-chief.
The event was part of the “National Day of Action” We Fight Back, and was attended by a diverse, informal coalition of 20 groups, including Yalies4Palestine and Yale Graduate Students for Palestine. It was primarily organized by the Connecticut branch of the Party of Socialism and Liberation, or PSL — a particularly controversial Marxist-Leninist party — and the Semilla Collective, a New Haven-based grassroots organization.
“Some people think that democracy happens every four years, when you go to the ballot box. No, democracy happens every single day,” Norman Clement, a community organizer and the event’s press liaison, said.
Rhetoric at the protest merged advocacy for Palestinian, immigrant, transgender, Indigenous and homeless rights and for food justice with climate activism and anti-Zionism. The goals of each of these movements were, on Monday, fundamentally compatible.
“For us who are active on the front lines, it’s easy to see the connection between what’s happening in Palestine to what happened here in North America with the Indigenous genocide here, and also with chattel slavery,” Robbie Goodrich, a founder and executive director of the Waterbury-focused Racial Advocates for Cross Cultural Education, said. “This is just the most recent representation of that type of violence, not just rhetorical, not just physical, but also in the ontological, where they’re trying to exterminate an entire culture. The mindlessness of the next Trump administration and their supporters will only exacerbate those conditions there and make them even more possible here.”
Goodrich held a PSL sign that read “RESISTANCE IS JUSTIFIED WHEN PEOPLE ARE OCCUPIED” throughout the protest.
Speakers expressed indignation at President Trump’s election as well as a deep resentment toward the Democratic Party — and toward the current political system as a whole. Nicholas Ortiz, one of the event’s organizers, said that the issues at stake went far beyond the 2024 election. He expressed a desire for a new party — along with an overthrow of the capitalist world order.
For Sammy Albright, a member of the New Haven Chapter of Socialist Alternative, Trump is merely a symptom of the “disease” that is capitalism — he described the president as “one of the worst expressions of capitalist decay,” in his view a global phenomenon responsible for the rise of far-right leaders worldwide.
Socialist Alternative, Albright said, wants “to build a movement that can overthrow capitalism.”
“We think that it really was Democrats’ failures that led to the rise of Trump, the rise of the far right people disaffected by them. So we call for the building of a new working class, anti-war party.”
Socialist Alternative has 700 members across the U.S., according to Albright.
Other activists were more focused on sending a direct political message. Clement, who sued city and state police officers after being arrested at a 2017 anti-Trump protest, mentioned the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that took place in New Haven in 2007.
“We’re demonstrating today to say that we’re not going to go back. We’re going to fight back. We’re not going back to sleep just because we can’t do nothing about Trump being president; he’s gonna be president. But we’re gonna fight against whatever agenda he comes with,” Clement said.
Nationally, though, the resistance to Trump has been notably more subdued than the movement that erupted in 2016. The People’s March in Washington, D.C. this Saturday, for instance, attracted around 50,000 protesters — a far cry from the half a million who turned out for the Women’s March in 2017.
Goodrich attributed this to exhaustion.
“A lot of people that were on the front lines the first time, including myself, burnt themselves out, and put themselves in exceedingly grave danger, like we should have.”
While anti-Zionism pervaded the activists’ language, the most pertinent issue that emerged was trans rights. Hours after an unusual inaugural speech filled with both complaints and policy promises, in which Trump declared that “it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” the topic had a particular salience.
Ash Devito, who is trans, spoke at the protest. An organizer with RACCE and a student at Central Connecticut State University, Devito told the News that the protest’s aim was to send a message both to the New Haven community and to the U.S. as a whole.
Karleigh Chardonnay Webb, a sportswriter who is trans and described herself in a speech on Monday as a “proud comrade of the PSL,” mentioned the approximately $215 million that Republicans spent on anti-trans ads.
Webb criticized the notion that trans people were “the reason why the Democrats lost.”
She discussed a shared oppression faced by trans people, Black people, Palestinians and the working class “from Gaza to Glastonbury.”
“Economic violence will come for all the working class,” Webb warned. “It’s time for the working class to organize and realize that workers make the world run because workers run the world.”
While activists spoke, six members of the Connecticut John Brown Club, a branch of a leftist gun-rights group, stood in a circle wearing Progress Pride Flag neck gaiters. Meanwhile, six “marshals” clad in high visibility vests, stood sprinkled throughout the protest.
“If anyone is being antagonistic, please — let the marshals know. The marshals will handle them,” Ortiz said.
Trump took the Presidential Oath of Office just after noon on Monday.
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