Above photo: Activists in Houston, Texas designing signs for Inauguration Day protests. Vivek Venkatraman.
Demonstrators mobilizing in over 40 US states.
To launch movement pledging to oppose “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”.
Demonstrations have been called in more than 80 US cities, in over 40 states, on the day of incoming President Donald Trump’s inauguration. These cities include Washington DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Montgomery, Chicago, Houston, and New Orleans.
These demonstrations, intended to mark the start of a movement against Trump’s “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”, have been endorsed by a variety of working class and grassroots organizations. These include the Party for Socialism and Liberation, United Auto Workers Local 4811, the Palestinian Youth Movement, United Educators of San Francisco, Black Men Build, the Democratic Socialists of America, the People’s Forum, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, the US Palestinian Community Network, UNITE HERE Local 2, Artists Against Apartheid, CODEPINK, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, and Dream Defenders.
Conveners of the demonstrations have spoken to the variety of Trump’s promised attacks on working people. “Trump is planning to wage war on immigrant families through a brutal mass deportation campaign,” said Claudia De La Cruz, who ran on a socialist platform in her campaign for president against both Harris and Trump, on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. “We will stand up and say NO to these attacks. Trump is a billionaire, was elected with the help of other billionaires, and runs the government on behalf of the billionaire class. All working people, no matter where you were born, should stand together in solidarity against the billionaire class that wants to rob and exploit us all.”
Brian Becker, the national director of the ANSWER Coalition, does not believe Trump’s promises to “put American Workers first.” According to Becker, Trump “ran a con game during the election.”
“His real agenda is to destroy worker’s rights, deport millions of immigrant families,” Becker said. Trump plans to “pave the way for a complete corporate takeover by ending regulations to protect the environment, firing thousands of public sector workers, and transferring ever-larger parts of the national treasury to the military industrial complex.”
Manolo De Los Santos, Executive Director of The People’s Forum, said, “The Trump victory in the 2024 election represents the complete failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of the ultra-right.”
“We can defeat the Trump program not by following the Democratic Party establishment, but by building a massive movement against the ruling class and the political system that gives everything to billionaires while impoverishing an ever larger section of the population.”