A decentralized demonstration draws hundreds to Wisconsin Capitol to protest Trump

Yahoo

06-02-2025

Protesters rally Wednesday outside the Wisconsin Capitol building in Madison. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
Julie Mankowski was alarmed from the day Donald Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20 and followed it with a flurry of executive orders and other actions: He erased U.S. policy references to gender diversity, withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, pardoned people convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.
'I knew it was going to accelerate,' Mankowski told the Wisconsin Examiner Wednesday, 'and I did not want them to keep their foot on that gas.'
That is why she was out on the steps of the Wisconsin state Capitol Wednesday, holding a sign declaring 'Forward!' — one of hundreds who showed up to protest the actions that Trump and his associates have taken in the first two and a half weeks of his administration.
People at the rally brandished home-made signs with no shortage of issues on which to call out the 47th president of the United States.
Signs supported the rights of LGBTQ+ people, especially those who are trans and gender-nonconforming. Signs promoted reproductive rights. Signs decried fascism and equated Trump with Nazis.
Signs attacked Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation document that Trump denied any connection to during his campaign but has been widely seen as foretelling much of the president's actions since he took office, including the freezing of federal funds.
Signs defended immigrants — targeted by tough new deportation orders and Trump's attempt, blocked by a federal judge on Wednesday, to undo the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship.
And many signs attacked Elon Musk, the billionaire to whom Trump has given access to an increasingly large chunk of the government, most notably the federal payments system. One called for deporting the South African-born Musk.
The event was both peaceful and raucous. There were no organized counter demonstrators evident, although one or two arguments erupted with lone Trump supporters who worked their way into the crowd.
A small collection of speakers addressed the gathering crowd on the west steps of the Capitol facing Madison's iconic State Street.
One led the crowd in a brief round of singing John Lennon's anthem, 'Give Peace a Chance.' Several reminded the crowd of upcoming spring elections — a primary election Feb. 18 and a general election for the next state Supreme Court justice on April 1.
That prompted a brief chant of the name of Susan Crawford, the Dane County judge endorsed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (in what's officially a nonpartisan race) and viewed as the bulwark against returning the Court's majority from four liberals to four conservatives.
Mankowski was the last speaker of the group, alternating between an uncooperative public address system microphone and a bullhorn.
'We are here because we are facing a threat to our collective existence,' she said. 'We are facing a threat to our democracy and to our freedom.'
She spoke of the hundreds who were there, and countless more who didn't show up.
'Every single person here is in pain. They're afraid, they're angry,' Mankowski said. 'There are people who are not here, who are so afraid they couldn't bring themselves to come.'
The crowd cheered her on, but she sought as well to break through to those whose cheers masked their anxiety and whose anxiety paralyzed their will. Everyone should feel welcome at a protest such as this one, she told them. Everyone should feel permission to raise their voice.
'Every single thing that you can possibly do, you do,' Mankowski said. 'It doesn't matter how small it is. It doesn't matter how little of an impact you think it will have. It will have an impact. We all — we all must be — we all must be grains of sand in the gears of tyranny.'
The eyes of the world are on the United States, she said.
'There are so many people in the world right now who are watching us. They're watching America. Because if it gets a hold here, where are they going now? I do not want a legacy of fascism to be a legacy of our country,' Mankowski said.
A parade around the Capitol followed, with a crowd large enough to stretch more than five blocks — three sides of Capitol Square that surrounds the building.
Afterward, while a portion of the group continued part way down State Street, Mankowski stayed back and talked about her decision to join Wednesday's protest.
An optician in Madison, Mankowski is accustomed to social activism. She took a role in putting together a July 4 demonstration that followed the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2022 overturning Roe v. Wade.
'I'm not shy about what I believe in and I think that being quiet about what we believe in is how we start to get separated from one another,' she said.
She joined an impromptu protest outside the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 29, and returned over the weekend. By then she'd heard about the protest planned for Wednesday — a loosely organized collection of events that were supposed to take place at noon in all 50 states.
Across the country in the days leading up to Wednesday, word spread on social media about the day of protests. Skepticism spread as well, as people questioned the absence of endorsements from high-profile organizations.
The fact-checking site Snopes.com posted an article Tuesday quoting a subreddit moderator who said the protests were 'completely decentralized' in planning and execution. In Madison, some standing activist groups made plans to join, then backed away, uncertain about the event's credibility or safety.
By the time noon arrived on Capitol Square, however, hundreds of people had packed onto the concrete staircase and spilled over onto the grass-covered hillside in front of the building.
Mankowski said she understood why some people had been wary of Wednesday's demonstration, considering the current climate in the country.
She pointed especially to the Trump administration's actions on immigration and birthright citizenship, plans to send deported immigrants to Guantanamo or to prisons in El Salvador, and the use of pictures from deportation actions 'as functionally propaganda images.'
'Those are pictures of human beings,' she said. 'It's not numbers and stacks, that's people that they are using as a tool to make more people afraid: 'If we did it to them, it could happen to you.''
'People are tense and they are on edge,' she said. 'And when things like a protest announcement starts to happen, people don't just think of what it could be for — they think about how it could be used against them, because they're seeing many aspects of their lives being turned against them right now.'
People have lost trust in institutions, she said, and they aren't even sure about their neighbors. 'They feel unmoored.'
Mankowski sees voters as increasingly detached from politics and political news, a consequence, she says, of feeling disenfranchised. 'In their mind their vote doesn't count,' she said. 'And realistically, people who want our democracy to fail want you to think your vote doesn't count.'
The road away from that apathy, she believes, starts with authenticity and connection.
'Being real with people is the best way to reach people, because people are real,' Mankowski said. 'Like, our lives are real, the things we're experiencing are real, and showing them that you, too, are real and that you have real things in your life, things that you care about, that you care about them, that you care about the fact that they are in pain and that they are unhappy and that they are feeling detached from reality.'
She pointed to her poster, which celebrated 'The Wisconsin Idea,' a historic vision of the state's university system that expressed its role as serving everyone in the state. Wednesday's demonstration, with all its informality and diversity, demonstrated that sense of inclusion, she suggested.
'This is supposed to be, we, the people of Wisconsin,' Mankowski said. 'It is not actually an organization. It is the people of Wisconsin — whoever showed up on that day, you know, to do their work.'
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