May Day rallies could open a new chapter of resistance

The goal is not just protest, but disruption: 'No business as usual.'

Tomorrow could be an inflection point for the fight back against the Trump/Musk regime, as labor and grassroots groups stage over 1,300 May Day events across the country, some of which are likely to be more disruptive than the protests we’ve seen so far.

Organizers say some protests in major cities will likely end up blocking traffic, and that there may be some acts of civil disobedience as well.

“It’ll be a sort of different tone than some of the previous actions,” said Saqib Bhatti, executive director of Bargaining for the Common Good, one of the organizations on the steering committee for the May Day National Day of Action.

“Our goal is to make clear that there will be no business as usual while they’re causing a crisis in our communities. We’re going to take the crisis to their doorsteps,” Bhatti told me.

It will also be a trial run for the kind of nationwide general strike that many activists are hoping will be the next major step in the resistance.

“We’re very much interested in figuring out how do we start building the muscle to have folks coordinating around the country in major disruptions,” Bhatti said.

As for blocking traffic, Bhatti indicated that might be the inevitable result of large turnout. “If you have a massive rally in a downtown on a business day, that shuts things down in a way that it doesn't on a weekend,” Bhatti said. “The goal is to have lots of people out there and if you have enough people you block traffic,” he said. “It doesn’t take much to block traffic because that’s just people spilling out into the streets. So I think there will be some traffic obstruction because we’re expecting a lot of people to turn out.”

Another difference is that some of the scheduled protests are going to be outside the offices of corporations that have enabled the Trump/Musk regime – and not just Tesla.

“I think we've done a great job with previous protests like ‘Hands Off’ – really expressing our anger,” Bhatti said. “With this action what we’re trying to do is to get people to turn their attention to who is causing the mess and how we hold them accountable.”

In a “virtual rally” held online Tuesday evening, May Day Strong organizers said the protests will open a new chapter of resistance.

“It is a warning shot,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement. “It is a starter gun for the next four years, saying that we're going to show up again and again and again using nonviolent direct action, using strikes, using every tool at our disposal to actually take back our democracy, to build the country that we deserve.”

Indeed, some union locals will go on strike on May Day, including University of California workers and Oakland schoolteachers.

The Demands

“This is not charity. This is not a request. This is a demand – and we’re ready to fight for it,” the organizers write on their website. The demands are as follows:

• Stop the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration.

• Protect and defend Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on.

• Fully funded schools, healthcare and housing for all.

• Stop the attacks on immigrants, Black, indigenous, trans people, and other communities.

• Invest in communities not wars.

Expect a particularly strong showing in Chicago, where labor unions and community organizers are promising a “really huge” crowd focused on immigrants’ rights and workers’ rights. May Day became known as International Worker’s Day to commemorate Chicago’s Haymarket affair in 1886 and the campaign to secure an eight-hour workday.

In Philadelphia, Sen. Bernie Sanders will be the headliner.

Will law-enforcement crack down on these protests more than they have on previous ones? The American Civil Liberties Union held a Zoom training session on Tuesday night reemphasizing the need for protesters to know their rights – and speakers anticipated the possibility of arrests. For instance, they encouraged protesters to turn off biometric unlock functions on their phone.

What JB Pritzker Said

The May Day event comes right as some political leaders are ratcheting up their calls for action against the Trump/Musk regime.

Most notably, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Sunday told New Hampshire Democrats that the time for action is now.

“The reckoning is finally here,” he declared. “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” he said. He ended his speech with this exhortation:

Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box and then punish them at the ballot box.

They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact – because we have no alternative but to do just that – that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.

And when the courage of our civic leaders wavers – when they fail to stand up for our country in its moment of greatest need – then we should remind them that cowardice always comes at a cost.

Here’s the full video of his speech.

Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Pritzker’s remarks “clearly can be construed as inciting violence.”

‘Moral Mondays’ Come to Washington

The Rev. William Barber is bringing “Moral Mondays” – the weekly protests calling on legislators to act morally that he originated in North Carolina – to Washington.

“Moral Monday has never been just kind of a fellowship where we come to feel good. We come to cry,” Barber said during a sermon outside the Supreme Court on Monday. (Here’s the video.)

“In this country right now you have people – and you're watching them – get up in the morning and the only thing they can think about is how many people they can hurt? And they got the power – at least the temporal power? That's a time for mourning,” he said.

Then he went to pray in the Capitol Rotunda, where he got arrested by Capitol Police. As the Religion News Service reported, Barber and two other members of his organization, Repairers of the Breach, were arrested as they “took turns praying, lamenting potential budget cuts to social safety-net programs such as Medicaid, often chanting together: ‘Against the conspiracy of cruelty, we plead the power of your mercy.’”

Barber spoke to Religion News Service after his release. “What we hope is that folks will see this and it will begin to remove some of the fear, and people will understand that this is the time – now – that we must engage in nonviolent direct action to register our discontent.”

The 50501 Origin Story

The Guardian and Rolling Stone both posted features about the grassroots 50501 protest movement last week.

“[I]t’s more like a meme that morphed into a movement,” Rolling Stone explained. “And while 50501 may be the upstart on the block, its first steps resemble those of a juggernaut.”

The piece quotes from the founding Redditor: “The idea of 50501 simply gave people permission to empower themselves at a time when everyone seemed to be struggling and asking, ‘What can we do?’”

The Guardian explained:

As Trump moved quickly to dismantle agencies, policies and norms, slashing through the federal government, people wanted to express their dismay – and they weren’t seeing it from their elected leaders.

“Trump and his cronies are actively trying to take over our country and destroy our democracy, and the Democratic party is not doing enough to stop them, so people are going to step in,” said Hunter Dunn, the national press coordinator for the movement. “That was the basic idea.”

More and More Legal Challenges

More losses for Trump in court:

• A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to restore $12 million that Congress appropriated for Radio Free Europe. “Under the Administrative Procedure Act, actors within the Executive Branch do not have carte blanche to unilaterally change course, withhold funds that the President and the Legislature jointly agreed to spend, and functionally dismantle an agency that the President and Legislature jointly agreed to support,” Judge Royce Lamberth wrote.

• A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction to the National Treasury Employers Union, blocking Trump from terminating the collective bargaining rights for a big chunk of the federal workforce, calling Trump’s move “retaliatory” for the troubles unions are causing him.

• A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from withholding federal funding from schools for engaging in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or teaching about race.

• Another federal judge on Thursday blocked federal agencies from carrying out parts of Trump’s executive order on elections. The plaintiffs had argued that the order’s requirement to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship on voter registration forms violates the Constitution and federal law.

• Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was detained by immigration authorities when he went in for his U.S. citizenship interview, has been released after a federal judge's order on Wednesday.

And there are new lawsuits as well:

• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, after Trump emailed three of the company’s five directors telling them they had been fired. The lawsuit asks the judge to rule that the email “is of no legal effect because the President does not have the authority to take such an action.” The corporation is a nonprofit created by Congress that provides funding to public broadcasters including NPR and PBS.

• Minnesota is suing the Department of Justice over Trump’s executive orders attempting to strip trans people of their rights. As the Erin in the Morning newsletter reported, the suit “comes after months of threats from federal agencies and an investigation into the Minnesota State High School League over its trans-friendly bylaws.”

• The Associated Press reports: “A dozen states sued the Trump administration in the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York on Wednesday to stop its tariff policy, saying it is unlawful and has brought chaos to the American economy.”

There’s No Time Like Now

Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance interviewed Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines. Ressa’s message was this:

Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost…

Americans who are waiting for Trump to cross some imaginary red line neglect the fact that they have more leverage to defend American democracy today than they will tomorrow, or next week, or next month.

Could Trump Be Losing Momentum?

Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, cites some of Trump’s recent retreats and setbacks and finds cause for some cautious optimism:

Trump is losing in court, losing the public, losing over and over, which ultimately means he's losing the one thing critical to the success of autocrats: momentum.

To undo democracy and consolidate personal power, autocrats need to force every other powerful actor and institution in a political system to submit to their rule. To, one-by-one, decide not to resist. It’s a domino effect: Each politician, journalist, CEO, or civil society leader needs to look around, see others folding (or even just slightly retreating), and then decide to do the same.…

For the first month or two, Donald Trump had momentum – his shock-and-awe, flood the zone campaign was damaging and dangerous and often lawless, but it created the appearance and reality of momentum. But as we exit the first 100 days, his forward motion seems to have almost completely collapsed. This will make it much harder for him to succeed in his authoritarian agenda.