“Activists are calling for people to stop working and buying things for a day to bring down Donald Trump,” The Independent reported on February 2. A nation-wide general strike has been called for February 17 to protest the Trump administration.
Vincent Emanuele is a writer, activist and radio host who lives in the United States. He's a member of Veterans for Peace and the National Writers Union. A former US marine and Iraq War veteran, he spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Pip Hinman about the first days of the Trump administration and the mass protests that have broken out.
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How would you describe the political atmosphere in the US after the Trump inauguration?
It did not take Donald Trump long to begin the war on immigrants, refugees and Muslims that he promised during his presidential campaign.
On January 27, he signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US for at least 90 days and suspending the admission ofallrefugees from any country for at least four months, among other measures.
It also did not take long for many thousands of people to send a loud message in response: No ban, no wall, let them in!
Pressure has mounted on Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May to pull the plug on a planned state visit to Britain by far right US President Donald Trump On January 30, a petition to bar her new pal from Britain sailed past the one million mark.
The petition, which within hours smashed the 100,000 figure required to trigger a debate in Parliament , came as May faces a backlash, with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn leading calls for the invitation to be withdrawn.
The Women’s March Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles was released by the organisers of the Women’s March on Washington, which drew 500,000 people onto the streets.
The day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, January 21, more than 4 million people joined “Women’s Marches” across the United States to protest the new Commander in Chief’s promised attacks on women’s rights.
Hundreds of thousands more took to the streets around the world, with protests on every continent, including Antarctica. In London alone, about 100,000 marched on the day.
On January 19 six Canadian and two French activists travelling from Montreal, Quebec to Washington, DC to attend the Women’s March on Washington were stopped, questioned, and ultimately refused entry at a land border crossing near Champlain, New York.
“We said we were going to the Women’s March on Saturday and they said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to pull over’,” Sasha Dyck, told the Guardian.
For the next two hours, US border agents searched their cars, examined their cell phones, and fingerprinted each of the eight-person contingent.
"President Donald Trump wound up fulfilling his promise that his inauguration would break records, just probably not in the way he had in mind," US Uncut noted on January 22. "The Women’s March, an anti-Trump protest aimed at standing up for women’s rights, is now estimated to be the largest one-day protest in United States history."
In response to the election of right-wing billionaire Donald Trump as president elect in the US, a “Dump Trump” protest was organised on November 12.
The action was in solidarity with African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQIA people, the disabled and women, all of whom have borne the brunt of attacks by Trump and his supporters as they exploited xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia and misogyny during the long election campaign.
The feminist movement has been sent into a spin following the election of Donald “Grab her by the pussy” Trump in the US. While the consensus is that the election of Trump is a disaster for women, the debates around the would-be benefits of Hillary Clinton remain fierce.