With President Trump constantly flooding the zone, there’s a chance to think ahead about the possible implementation of the Insurrection Act. One of Trump’s presidential actions calls for the Secretary of Defense and Homeland Security to submit a joint report by April 20. The report will offer “any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational…
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On Monday evening, the U.S Supreme Court ruled that, at least for now, the Trump administration can continue invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants. The ruling comes after President Donald Trump issued an executive order last month asserting his right to use the law. The ruling wasn’t a total win for Trump, however, as judges included in their order stipulations on the…
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The Trump administration’s latest sweeping cuts to international food aid will kill millions of people across the world if implemented, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has cautioned, in the latest warning of the deadly consequences of the Elon Musk-led USAID cuts. Citing numerous officials and organizations, The Associated Press reported on Monday that the Trump administration has ended…
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President Donald Trump, now well into his second term, is hell-bent on retribution, threatening journalists, political opponents, judges, academia, pro-Palestinian protesters, and more, with jail, budget cuts and deportation. His authoritarian crackdown on free speech and political dissent comes just as a new book is out documenting the FBI’s repression in Hollywood at the beginning of the Cold…
Japanese Americans gather at Santa Anita Assembly Center in 1942 shortly before being shipped off to one of the 10 internment camps set up by the U.S. government in World War II.
Is there a Trump Internment Camp in your future? In addition to scooping immigrants up off the streets and disappearing them, will the Trump administration start arresting and incarcerating its domestic political opponents? Will Trump Inc. partner up with Geo Group, the nation’s largest private prison company, that gave a million dollars to a super PAC supporting Trump’s campaign? Imagine the manosphere humming with snatch-and-grab job opportunities for the now-pardoned January 6 insurrectionists?
Consider some recent developments: The abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was clearly detained because of his pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University; a video of masked ICE agents — essentially secret police — near Boston stopping and arresting Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and PhD student at Tufts University, who is in the U.S. on a valid visa; the deportation of 250 purported Venezuelan gang members to a notorious gulag in El Salvador with no due process, in defiance of a federal court order that the plane deporting them turn around and come back to America.
Internment/Concentration Camps
The terms “internment camps” and “concentration camps” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they have had distinct historical and functional differences. Internment Camps have been primarily used to detain specific groups considered security risks during wartime, and political opponents. During World War II, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were rooted from their homes and forcibly relocated to 10 hastily constructed camps. The interned lost their property, were isolated and suffered major deprivations.
Concentration Camps — also known as Death Camps — have generally been associated with mass detention, harsh conditions, forced labor, and extermination. Historically, they have been used to imprison perceived enemies of the state, political opponents, ethnic groups, or other marginalized populations.
The historian Roger Daniels, author of Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans, concluded that “scholars should abandon the term” Japanese internment and use the term concentration camp.
Setting the stage
During the 2024 presidential campaign Trump said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country” — rhetoric eerily reminiscent from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. On the campaign trail, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance escalated immigrant-bashing rhetoric with claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said he was looking “forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla.” He added that “Perhaps they would serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.”
As people are being dragged off the streets across America, it is time to consider the revival of internment camps in this country not only for immigrants, but for Trump’s political opponents as well.
The U.S. used internment camps during World War II, and more recently for alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Justification for internment in these camps vary from military necessity, to national security, but the underlying function remains consistent: isolating and punishing perceived enemies of the state.
Alternet’s Alex Henderson recently reported on the possible reintroduction of detention camps to sequester opponents of Donald Trump. “Some fear that the U.S. could emulate the ‘illiberal democracy’ model of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary, where technically, there are still voting rights, but checks and balances are so eroded that the Fidesz Party is entrenched and dominant,” Henderson wrote. “Others fear an even more disturbing scenario in which the U.S. embraces an outright military dictatorship like Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet or Spain under Gen. Francisco Franco, a.k.a. ‘El Generalísimo’.”
Journalist Christopher Mathias’ forthcoming book is called To Catch a Fascist. In a recent MSNBC op-ed, he noted that, “over the last eight years as a reporter covering the far right, … neo-Nazi talking points, especially around immigration, [has] enter[ed] the mainstream discourse with horrifying, accelerating speed.”
Mathias noted that in a conversation with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “JD Vance asserted that Germany is suffering an ‘invasion’ of people who are ‘totally culturally incompatible’ with ‘western civilization.’ This purported ‘invasion,’ Vance said, will lead to a ‘civilizational suicide’ if it’s not stopped. It barely triggers a 24-hour news cycle anymore when the vice president and …Trump, use the same language as fascist mass murderers.”
Mathias interviewed Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, who told him that “Concentration camp regimes always need a group they can turn into outsiders by making its members seem so dangerous that the government needs to remove those people from society. You can’t typically do that without years — years! — of rhetoric demonizing them. Even with the Nazis, it took more than five years from Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany until the mass roundup of Jews as a group began with Kristallnacht in November 1938.”
Pitzer’s One Long Night, which looks at concentration camps from their origins in the late 19th century to modern-day detention facilities. Historically, these camps, across different countries and political ideologies, have been used as tools of oppression, control, and genocide. Concentration camps were used during the Spanish-Cuban war, by the British during the Boer War, Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags.
Terrorizing the opposition
Mathias noted that “In Myanmar in 2015, the regime allowed journalists to visit the camps where Rohingya Muslims were being detained. In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, photographers were allowed into the National Stadium, where people were being detained and tortured. ‘Even the Nazis allowed New York Times and Times of London reporters into their early concentration camps in 1933,’ Pitzer told him. ‘They wanted their targets to be terrified, but they were proud of what they were doing.’”
“The arc of concentration camps is twofold,” Pitzer told Mathias. “First, there’s supposedly some very bad group so dangerous that the government says they have to be removed from society. Second, the definition of who’s dangerous expands, often coming to include political opponents and rivals.
“If the government can arrest civilians with no criminal record and put them on planes out of the country without accounting for who they are or for any actual legal process — as has been happening in recent weeks — what would stop them from deporting whomever they like?” Pitzer continued. “Or from saying they had deported detainees while actually disappearing people to black sites internally? If the courts can’t enforce due process and find out who’s being detained, where they are now and what’s happening to them, then we’re all vulnerable.”
Given the Trump Administration’s predilection for demonizing political opponents and the mainstream media, defying judicial orders, and trampling on the rule of law, is it wishful thinking or delusional to believe that internment camps can’t happen here?
The post Are There Trump Internment Camps for Political Opponents in America’s Future? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
President Donald Trump on Monday publicly backed an annual budget of roughly $1 trillion for the U.S. military as his administration rushed ahead with a destructive tariff scheme that amounts to a major tax increase on American households, with working-class families set to bear much of the pain. Speaking to reporters at the White House during a sit-down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin…
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Donald Trump’s Executive Office has ordered federal agencies to name a chief AI officer, develop strategies for expanding their use of artificial intelligence, and to make the purchase of American AI products and services a chief priority. The memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Tuesday (AEST) puts into effect an executive…
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We live in perilous times. The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing.
First, the notion of government as a democratizing public good and institution of social responsibility—that once held power to account, protected the vulnerable, and nurtured the ideals of justice and collective responsibility—is being methodically destroyed. The common good, once seen as the essence of democratic life, has become the enemy of the neoliberal fascist state. It is not merely being neglected—it is being assaulted, stripped bare, and left to rot in the shadows of privatization, greed, and brutality—the main features of gangster capitalism.
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President Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Republican President William McKinley, highlighting his use of tariffs as a model for economic policy. But as critics note, Trump’s tariffs, which are intended to protect U.S. interests, have instead fueled a stock market nosedive, provoked tit-for-tat tariffs from key partners, risk a broader trade withdrawal, and could increase the federal debt by reducing GDP and tax income.
The federal debt has reached $36.2 trillion, the annual interest on it is $1.2 trillion, and the projected 2025 budget deficit is $1.9 trillion – meaning $1.9 trillion will be added to the debt this year. It’s an unsustainable debt bubble doomed to pop on its present trajectory.
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In 2023-2024, students in solidarity with Palestine launched the largest campus movement in the U.S. since the anti-Vietnam War protests, and chapters of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and Educators for Justice in Palestine sprang up to support them. The Palestine solidarity movement has continued on campuses into 2025, but has come under increasing repression as higher education…
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A new report highlights how at least seven U.S. citizens — but likely far more — have been detained, deported or otherwise targeted by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. According to the report from The Washington Post, at least seven U.S. citizens across the country, including children, have been detained by the federal government’s anti-immigrant operations since Trump…
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In an op-ed dictated to his attorney from a detention facility in Louisiana, Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil late last week condemned the Ivy League institution’s complicity in the Trump administration’s targeting of Palestinian rights advocates and campus dissent more broadly. Khalil, who has said he is a political prisoner, argued in the Friday op-ed that Columbia “laid the…
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In one of his many bold, sweeping and likely unconstitutional gestures, President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order that purports to “protect election integrity.” Many experts have already charged that it constitutes a clear abuse of power that flagrantly exceeds the president’s allotted authority. Far from protecting electoral integrity, the order attempts to subvert it…
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Analysts puzzling over the bizarre formula the Trump administration used to calculate its country-by-country tariff rates are wasting their time, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said in a response to the American president that has gone viral in recent days as global markets continue to nosedive. “It’s not economic policy, it’s not trade policy,” Murphy (D-Conn.) said in remarks recorded after Trump…
MANSFIELD, Louisiana — When Desoto Regional Health System took out $36 million in loans last year to renovate a rural hospital that opened in 1952, officials were banking on its main funding source remaining stable: Medicaid, the joint federal-state health program for low-income people and the disabled. But those dollars are now in jeopardy, as President Donald Trump and the GOP-controlled…
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Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.”
A minimum 10 per cent tariff on exports to the US will hit low-income countries throughout the region. But exports from Nicaragua have been saddled with an even higher tariff of 18 per cent. Delighted opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have blamed it, rather than Trump, for the country receiving this additional penalty. However, simple examination of the figures shows that Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated in the same way as every other country’s.
Before examining the opposition media’s error-strewn reports, this article first explains the background: how the tariff was set, whether it is legitimate and how US-Nicaragua trade is changing. Then it turns to the opposition’s mistakes and explains how they are using Trump’s actions to bolster their attacks on Nicaragua’s government and people.
How the tariffs were set
Trump’s chart of tariffs has two sets of figures for each country: the “tariffs charged to the USA” and the “reciprocal tariffs” to be imposed this month. Bizarrely, the “tariffs charged to the USA” do not relate to actual tariffs charged on US imports. Instead, they are the product of a calculation based on each country’s trade gap with the US. For most countries, the value of these “tariffs charged” has been set at 10 per cent, on the basis that the US has no trade deficit with them, or only a small one. All of these countries (including Nicaragua’s neighbors) are hit with a “reciprocal tariff” of 10 per cent on their exports to the US, from this month onwards, even if they buy more from the US than they sell to it.
However, a higher “tariff charged” is calculated for countries with which the US is judged to have a bigger trade deficit. For each country, the White House looked up the deficit for its trade with the US in goods for 2024, then divided that by the total value of the country’s exports to the US. Trump, to be “kind”, said he would offer a discount, so halved that figure. The calculation was distilled into a formula.
For example, these are the figures for China:
Based on this formula, the small African country of Lesotho was saddled with the highest “reciprocal tariff” of 50 per cent, while several major SE Asian countries were also hit with very high tariffs.
How Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated
Nicaragua’s “reciprocal tariff” was calculated in the same way. According to US trade figures, in 2024 US goods exports to Nicaragua were $2.9 billion, while US goods imports from Nicaragua totaled $4.6 billion. The US goods trade deficit with Nicaragua was therefore – $1.7 billion in 2024.
The calculation was therefore: trade deficit (- $1.7 billion) ÷ imports ($4.6 billion) = – 0.37, or 37 per cent, halved to produce a “reciprocal tariff” of 18 per cent.
This means that from April 9, there will be a new tax of 18 per cent on Nicaraguan goods sent to the US, payable as a customs duty on their arrival by the company or agency importing the goods.
How Nicaragua might contest the tariff
It seems unlikely that Trump will bend to pressure on the tariffs. However, at least in theory, there are three ways in which Nicaragua might argue that the tariff is wrongly imposed:
Action by CAFTA-DR members is complicated by the fact that Nicaragua is not only worst hit by the tariffs but is also a country that the US would like to exclude from the treaty completely, a point picked up below.
Changing significance of Nicaraguan exports to the US
Nicaragua’s Central Bank divides its trade figures between “merchandise” and products from free trade zones (principally, apparel). This, as we will see, confused the opposition media. This is the breakdown:
These figures exclude services, such as tourism and transport, where trade between Nicaragua and the US is roughly in balance (unlike Guatemala and Honduras, with whom the US has a strong trade surplus in services).
Exports to the US have fallen slowly from over 50 per cent of the total two years ago, as the government looks for other markets. Exports to the Republic of China, for example, were four times higher in 2024 than in 2022, but (at $68 million) are still a small proportion. There are other growing export markets, of which the most notable is Canada (now the second biggest buyer of Nicaraguan merchandise).
The Nicaraguan government’s response to the tariffs is likely to involve continued efforts to diversify trade and keeping a watchful eye on the effects on different sectors of the economy. Producers of products like coffee and gold may be less affected as they already have diverse markets. On the other hand the apparel sector, which until this month enjoyed zero tariffs on its $2 billion exports to the US, is geared to the US market and might find greater difficulty in mitigating the tariff’s effects.
Celebration and misinformation in opposition media
Nicaragua’s opposition media, long financed by the US government, admit that they have been hit by Elon Musk’s cuts. How they are now funded is unclear. However, prominent opposition activists enjoy salaried employment in US universities and think tanks, where they call for sanctions that would hit poor Nicaraguans. Naturally, they welcomed Trump’s announcement.
Errors in reporting on the tariffs showed opposition journalists’ unfamiliarity with Nicaragua’s economy. Confidencial, in a piece translated and reproduced in the Havana Times, claimed that the tariff imposed on Nicaragua ignored a trade surplus “of $484 million in favor of the US” which “has been growing in recent years.” This completely ignored exports to the US from the free trade zones. The same error was made a day later by Despacho 505.
According to Confidencial, the reason for the higher tariff on Nicaragua (and on Venezuela, hit with a 15 per cent tariff) was to punish their authoritarian governments. In reality, the higher tariffs on both countries resulted from the application of Trump’s formula, but this deliberate misrepresentation was to be repeated.
In an “analysis” for Confidencial on April 4, Manuel Orozco painted the 18 per cent tariff as specifically aimed at the Nicaraguan “dictatorship” (again, linking it with Venezuela). Orozco is a former Nicaraguan now living in Washington, working for the Inter-American Dialogue, an NGO funded by the US government and its arms industry. It is most unlikely that he was unaware of how the tariff was calculated; misleading his readers strengthened his argument that the higher tariff was a purely political move.
Further articles in Despacho 505 and Articulo 66 also blamed political factors without explaining the arithmetic behind the tariff. In La Prensa, activist Felix Maradiaga wrongly remarked that the US accounts for over 60 per cent of Nicaragua’s exports. According to him, the supposed weakness of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government means the country will struggle to cope (he disregards its remarkable resilience in dealing with the much heavier economic consequences of the 2018 coup attempt and the 2020 pandemic).
Then, also in Confidencial, opposition activist Juan Sebastián Chamorro made the claim that the new tariffs, which of course he welcomes, are entirely compatible with the CAFTA-DR trade treaty. He argued that Washington’s action is justified on grounds of “national security.” This echoes the absurd classification of Nicaragua (during the first Trump administration, continued by Biden) as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
Opposition media are trying to present the new tariff as the first round of the stronger sanctions on Nicaragua that they have been urging Washington to adopt. They do this regardless of their illegality under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty or wider international law. The possibility of going further – excluding Nicaragua from the treaty – was trailed by Trump’s Latin America envoy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, in January, although he was careful to note the difficulties. But if this were to happen it would delight the opposition even further.
Obsessed with promoting regime change in Managua, these anti-Sandinista activists disregard the effects of tariffs and trade sanctions on ordinary Nicaraguans. On “Liberation Day” Trump showed his indifference to the millions of people in low-income countries whose livelihoods depend on producing food and other products for export to the US. The likes of Orozco, Maradiaga and Chamorro behave in just the same way.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs, are wondering how to survive in an uncertain and contentious educational climate as the Trump administration downsizes the scope and purpose of the U.S. Department of Education — while cutting away at federal funding for higher education. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order pausing federal…
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Jim Lively wants to install rooftop solar panels on his family’s local food market, just minutes from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan. Those panels could help power the RV campground they want to open next to the market and offset other electricity bills. But even though Lively was awarded a $39,696 grant for the project through a U.S.
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Kelly Smith, a 57-year-old New York City resident, is part of the Nonviolent Medicaid Army (NVMA), a growing national movement of poor people who are organizing to stop proposed cuts to Medicaid and promote health care as a human right. “The need for health care unites us all,” Smith told Truthout. “Right now, I’m terrified of losing Medicaid and being unable to get injections for pain…
President Donald Trump’s latest executive order titled “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY” replicates a tactic used by all authoritarian regimes. In the name of countering bias, they distort the nation’s history into self-serving mythology.
History will be used to justify the power of the ruling elites in the present by deifying the ruling elites of the past. It will disappear the suffering of the victims of genocide, enslavement, discrimination and institutional racism. The repression and violence during our labor wars — hundreds of workers were killed by gun thugs, company goons, police and soldiers from National Guard units in the struggle to unionize — will be untold.
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In his first term as president of the United States, Donald Trump launched a trade war against China. In his second term, he has expanded that trade war to many countries around the world.
In a ceremony outside the White House on April 2, which the US president dubbed “Liberation Day”, Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on dozens of countries, including high taxes on imports from top US trading partners: 54% on China, 46% on Vietnam, 25% on South Korea, 24% on Japan, and 20% on the European Union.
Trump falsely claimed that these tariffs were “reciprocal”, but they were actually unilateral.
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In recent weeks, hundreds of foreign students in the U.S. have received emails from the Department of State informing them that they must leave the country. This “catch and revoke” program is being used to cancel the visas of students who have participated in forms of pro-Palestinian activism the government doesn’t approve of, which may include merely reading or posting certain kinds of content on…
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On March 26, 2025, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish citizen and doctoral student at Tufts University, was walking through Somerville, Massachusetts, on her way to join friends and break her Ramadan fast. As shown in a surveillance video, she was suddenly surrounded by five individuals in plain clothes, their faces concealed by masks. They did not identify themselves. They simply grabbed her…
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On April 5, protesters will converge on Washington to hold a massive march in support of Palestine.
The President has changed since the last big event in DC, but many of the demands have not. Activists are calling on the United States government to stop bankrolling the genocide in Gaza and sever ties from apartheid Israel.
The additional element this time around is the Trump administration’s vast deportation program, which has targeted multiple university students for participating in protests.
“This movement is made of students, workers, teachers, artists, activists, healthcare workers, tech workers and people of conscience all over the world who will not back down in the face of repression and intimidation, and will never back down so long as Gaza is under attack,” reads a statement on the march’s website.
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The stock market plunge has more to do with the emergence this year of China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence tool than with President Donald Trump’s policies, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview released on Friday that signaled little concern about the ongoing nosedive. “For everyone who thinks these market declines are all based…
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Waging Nonviolence (3/19/25)
“Resistance is alive and well in the United States.”
So declared the headline of a March 19 article on the nonprofit news site Waging Nonviolence. Authors Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam, political scientists at Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, outlined how—despite a common belief that grassroots public resistance against the depredations of the Trump Administration is lacking or lukewarm—protests are actually rising dramatically.
These demonstrations, the piece said, “may not look like the mass marches of 2017, but research shows they are far more numerous and frequent—while also shifting to more powerful forms of resistance.”
They note that while
the reconfigured Peoples’ March of 2025—held on January 18—saw lower turnout than the 2017 Women’s March, that date also saw the most protests in a single day for over a year. And since January 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.
The Crowd Counting Consortium, founded in 2017 to collect “publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States,” tracked more than 2,000 protests in February alone.
Chart: Waging Nonviolence
The acts of collective resistance documented by the CCC—as well as by other activism-tracking initiatives, such the “We the People Dissent” Substack—span every state. They focus on advocacy for diverse constituencies and issues under attack from the current administration, including public education, Medicaid and reproductive, immigrant, Palestinian, labor and LGBTQ rights.
Their common thread is opposition to Trump’s fascistic ideology and rapid rash of likely unconstitutional executive orders, such as freezing federal budget outlays approved by Congress, the mass firing of government workers and the dismantling of institutions by the “Department” of Government Efficiency by unelected “adviser” Elon Musk.
But if you relied on articles and broadcasts from the legacy national news media during early 2025, you wouldn’t know the extent of grassroots action prompted by this discontent. A FAIR examination of five major outlets found that coverage of anti-Trump/pro-democracy protests roughly overlapping CCC’s study timeframe (January 22 to February 26) was minimal, and downplayed the significance of this opposition, especially around the inauguration.
FAIR examined reporting on three organized protest events occurring concurrently in Washington, DC, and across the US: The People’s March (January 18), the “50501” demonstrations in all state capitals (February 5) and the Presidents Day protests, sometimes dubbed “No Kings Day” (February 17). Using the Nexis news database and the outlets’ websites, we looked at the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, and at ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings—the top morning and evening national news programs on ABC and CBS—within four days of each of these dates. (NBC was not included in the study because its transcripts are no longer available on Nexis.)
Broadcast coverage was abysmal. None of the four network shows in our study ran any reports focused on any of the three protest events. ABC World News Tonight mentioned none of the events, and GMA referred to only one of them in passing. In their coverage of the January 18 protests, CBS Evening News and Mornings gave more coverage to speculation about violent protest than they did to actual (nonviolent) protest.
The newspapers had more coverage, but their stories tended to be relatively short, buried deep in the paper, or in the form of wire-service reprints. Longer pieces often downplayed the protests’ size and disparaged their significance. The Times and Post tended to focus on DC-based protests, whereas USA Today offered more thorough and accurate articles about the growing nationwide resistance movement.
The January 18 march, centered in Washington, DC, near Inauguration Day, was a reboot of the attendance record–setting 2017 Women’s March spearheaded by feminist nonprofits. The People’s March had a broadened focus on peaceful organizing around a range of progressive issues, and included solidarity actions in every state.
According to CCC data (available for download at the site), on January 18 alone, 352 protests, rallies, demonstrations or marches opposing Donald Trump and/or administration policy were recorded across the country. Though dispersed in a way the Women’s March was not, tens of thousands nonetheless participated in hundreds of acts of protest and civil disobedience around the country.
More than 200 additional on-the-street actions occurred on January 19–20, many linked to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but also including messages against Trump’s agenda, according to CCC data.
We found no mention of any of the People’s Marches on the ABC shows in our study, and no dedicated stories about the protests on the CBS shows we examined. In two segments focused on the incoming administration, CBS mentioned protests generically, only in passing, and focusing solely on those in the nation’s capital.
After noting that “today, thousands of people could be seen protesting the president-elect in Washington, DC,” reporter Jericka Duncan (CBS Evening News, 1/18/25) devoted more time to security measures around potential “violent protests”—a concern repeated in a January 20 segment on CBS Mornings (1/20/25).
New York Times (1/19/25)
The newspapers studied all covered the People’s Protests, but the Times and Post downplayed their significance. The Times (1/18/25) published “‘Angry and Frustrated’: Thousands Protest Trump Days Before His Inauguration,” a thousand-word story that captured the mood and nationwide extent of concern expressed by the events, but made a point of noting that the DC march “paled in comparison to the Women’s March.” It was buried on page A25.
The following day, the Times published a longer (1,600-word) piece on how “The Trump Resistance Won’t Be Putting on ‘Pussy Hats’ This Time,” based on interviews with middle-American activists. The article alleged that “the Democrats who mobilized against Donald J. Trump in 2017 feel differently about protesting his return,” by which they meant defeated and ambivalent. It asserted that “there are few signs of the sort of mass public protest that birthed ‘the resistance’ the last time [Trump] took office.”
There was also a 1,600-word Washington Memo (1/19/25) headlined “Defiance Is Out, Deference Is In: Trump Returns to a Different Washington”:
Unlike the last time President-elect Donald J. Trump took the oath of office eight years ago, the bristling tension and angry defiance have given way to accommodation and submission. The Resistance of 2017 has faded into the Resignation of 2025.
Washington Post (1/17/25)
The Washington Post had two pieces. The predictive “How Resistance to Trump May Look Different in His Second Administration” (1/17/25) came in at around 1,800 words, while the paper gave coverage of the actual DC event, “People’s March Protests Trump” (1/19/25), only 1,400 words. Both were by Ellie Silverman, its dedicated activism and protest movements reporter.
Like the Times’ articles, the former piece was focused on dispirited activists and how the resistance supposedly ain’t what it used to be. It described a “feeling of resignation in the lead-up to Trump’s second administration [that] is a stark departure from 2017, when more than 1 million people took to the streets.” It added that “some demonstrators are sticking to the sidelines,” and warned that some experts “fear that whatever protests do emerge could be even more disruptive and potentially violent.”
The straightforward latter story was more nuanced, focused on interviews with protesters on the diverse issues that brought them there, who maintained that showing up was more important than rally size. However, it didn’t mention that the protest was part of a larger, nationwide mobilization.
USA Today‘s piece on the People’s March (“Thousands Travel to Washington for People’s March Ahead of Trump Inauguration,” 1/18/25), like those of the other papers, covered only the DC demonstration, and dwelt on its smaller-than-2017 size. But it also portrayed fired-up citizens who made a point of being there to take a stand, rather than trying to tell a story of, as the Times said, “accommodation and submission.”
The 50501 protests, short for “50 protests, 50 states, one day,” were the brainchild of grassroots activists on Reddit wanting to take “rapid response” political actions against Trump and Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government Trump and Musk seem to be following. Using mainly social media and the hashtags #BuildTheResistance and #50501, the organizers spurred others to organize and publicize demonstrations in all US state capitals on February 5. According to CCC data, some 159 “50501” or related protests occurred that day (exclusive of counter-protests), from Sacramento, Calif., to Augusta, Maine.
We found no coverage of the 50501 protests in the Washington Post, or on the CBS or ABC shows.
In its sole article, “Thousands Across the US Protest Trump Policies,” the New York Times (2/5/25) devoted only about 600 words to the nationwide rallies. Sara Ruberg’s story accurately portrayed them as “a grassroots effort to kick off a national movement,” quoting a Michigan state representative: “This was organized by people, for people, for the protection of all people…. There will be…more things for regular everyday Americans to plug into.” However, Ruberg depicted the decentralized, quickly organized efforts as something not to take too seriously:
Whether the protests will amount to a sustained anti-Trump movement is yet to be seen.
In the weeks following the election, Democrats were not able to come together under a single message as they did after the 2016 election, when Mr. Trump won the first time. Even the grassroots efforts that once organized large national marches and protests after Mr. Trump’s first inauguration have struggled to unite again.
The piece also said the events only occurred in “a dozen states”; CCC data confirms organizers’ claims that they spanned all 50 states, plus DC. An additional 1:20-minute video of protesters chanting appeared in the online version of this story, featuring passionate slogans like “Stand up, fight back,” “Stop the coup!” and “Impeach Trump” that belie the notion that activists have no uniting message.
USA Today (2/5/25)
At 2,500 words, USA Today‘s feature (2/5/25) on the 50501 demos, “‘People Are Feeling Galvanized’: Anti-Trump Protesters Rally in Cities Across US,” was by far the longest and most thorough of any in the study periods. Its lead set the protests in a broader context:
Groups opposed to actions by the Trump administration in recent weeks converged on cities Wednesday across the US to loudly register their discontent, days after widespread rallies and street marches against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Integrating reporting from DC and 10 other capitals and cities (Austin, Salem, Indianapolis, Harrisburg, Des Moines, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, Palm Springs, Calif., and Greenville, S.C.), reporters John Bacon, Karissa Waddick and Jorge L. Ortiz discussed the major concerns of residents in each place, provided background on 50501 and Project 2025, and quoted marginalized people targeted by Trump, such as a trans woman and a refugee from Azerbaijan, along with supportive politicians and the AFL-CIO. The comments included captured the sense of seriousness and commitment of the rallies. It quoted 70-year-old Stewart Rabitz:
“I think a lot of people are now realizing that walking around with signs, people got to get their hands dirty.”… Asked whether he feared retribution, Rabitz said: “You can’t be afraid. I’m willing to be the first one. I’ll be the Tiananmen tank guy.”
GMA (2/18/25)
The 50501 movement also spearheaded nationwide events, some dubbed “No Kings Day,” less than two weeks later, on February 17, to protest Trump’s undemocratic actions and monarchical leadership, coinciding with Presidents’ Day. The CCC tracked 207 such actions on February 17 (excluding a few counter-protests).
Once again, CBS and ABC had no reports focused on the protests. CBS gave them one sentence on CBS Mornings (2/18/25), which led with the controversy surrounding DOGE’s access to private information: “Protests called ‘No Kings on Presidents’ Day’ against Musk and President Trump’s actions were held across the country yesterday, including outside the US Capitol.” ABC (GMA, 2/18/25), too, briefly mentioned “protests popping up in cities across the country,” even including short clips of protest footage—but also used the demonstrations as a brief segue to discuss DOGE cuts and access to sensitive data.
New York Times coverage included one story (2/17/25), provocatively titled “Thousands Gather on Presidents’ Day to Call Trump a Tyrant.” It focused on the DC march, but did give a sense of the nationwide sweep of actions, noting that protestors framed themselves as patriots fighting tyranny. The piece acknowledged that while
Democratic leaders and operatives [are] worried about alienating voters in reacting hastily without reflecting first on why they lost in 2024. Many activists…have voiced frustration at the lack of a more aggressive stance.
The piece, however, was buried on page A18.
For its part, the Post devoted only one 500-word AP dispatch (2/17/25) to the events, “‘No Kings on Presidents Day’ Rings Out From Protests Against Trump and Musk.” But the subhead did note, “Protesters against President Donald Trump and his policies organized demonstrations in all 50 states for the second time in two weeks.”
USA Today (2/17/25)
USA Today published a photo gallery (2/17/25) and a 900-word story (2/17/25) about the Presidents’ Day protests, focused more on regional actions that “swept across the nation” than on DC. Providing important context, “‘Critical Moment in History’: Protests Across US Target Trump, Musk” (2/17/25) led with this:
Groups opposed to President Donald Trump’s agenda and his top adviser Elon Musk converged on cities across the nation Monday to express outrage with slogans such as “Not My President’s Day” and “No King’s Day.”
The rallies, led by the 50501 Movement and other organizations, come less than two weeks after the last round of widespread rallies and street marches.
This broader perspective on the resistance demonstrations may be thanks to the middle-of-the-road paper’s less-insular focus: It covers all 50 states, serves a more diverse audience, and utilizes reporting from its partner papers across the country.
On April 5, yet another grassroots, mass mobilization—organized around the taglines “Hands Off” and “People’s Veto”—is planned for the streets of DC and across all 50 states. Will the legacy media be there and give it the broad and contextualized coverage it deserves? Will they more proactively cover the increasingly localized demonstrations and other forms of political participation—or leave that task to the rapidly shrinking pool of local and regional news outlets? For if CCC’s data is accurate (and it may be an undercount), the nascent pro-democracy movement deserves its own dedicated beat.
Research assistance: Wilson Korik
This post was originally published on FAIR.
The Trump administration has reportedly advanced a shipment of over 20,000 assault rifles to Israel that was paused by the Biden administration over concerns that the weapons would be used by settlers to further their illegal occupation of the occupied West Bank. The State Department notified Congress of the sale totalling $24 million in value last month, Reuters reports.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Donald Trump has imposed a 10% tariff on an island of Penguins.
The sweeping tariffs, brought in on what he has coined ‘Liberation Day‘, have sparked fears of a global trade war.
Trump announced a 10% ‘baseline’ tariff on imports to the US, however 60 countries will face much higher tariffs of up to 50%. The UK is facing a 10% tariff, whilst the EU is set at 20%.
Hilariously though, he has imposed 10% tariffs on both Heard Island and McDonald Islands (HIMI). The islands are covered in volcanoes and glaciers, meaning no one lives there. That is, other than thousands of Penguins.
— Piyush Mittal
(@piyushmittal) April 3, 2025
“10% tariffs. Beautiful tariffs. And the penguins – big, strong penguins – come up to me, tears in their eyes: ‘Sir, please, no tariffs. We can’t compete with American penguins.’ But I say, ‘America first.’ They don’t like it, but it’s happening.”#TrumpTariffs@YourAnonCentral
pic.twitter.com/QLmLRSluSm
— Canada Hates Trump (@AntiTrumpCanada) April 3, 2025
HIMI, and the waters surrounding them provide vital feeding grounds for whales, seabirds, seals, fish. Additionally, it is the home to some of the most ‘iconic and ecologically significant penguins species’.
The penguins are pissed about their 10% tariff
pic.twitter.com/A4zU5CkVzX
— Septimus Brown (@SeptimusBrown) April 3, 2025
The most common Penguin on HIMI is the Gentoo Penguin, and around 21% of the global population of Gentoo’s live there. There is also Eastern Rockhopper Penguins and King Penguins.
There is no official data since 2003, however that data suggested there were around 32,000 Gentoo Penguins – 21% of the total global population, 160,000 King Penguins, 20,000 Rockhopper penguins and 2m macaroni penguins populating HIMI.
The Prime Minister of the Heard / McDonald Islands Speaks on Trump’s Tariffs pic.twitter.com/I5CiXz50Bi
— Brittlestar (@brittlestar) April 3, 2025
— Binks
(@BinkyBaxter1) April 3, 2025
Countries around the world are warning of a trade war. Trump has clearly not thought this one through though, because sticking a 10% tariff on an island full of Penguins is not going create any extra revenue for the US.
I never thought the US President would start a trade war with penguins, but here we are. What crazy times to be alive. #TrumpTariffs
Last laugh of the night. Night all
pic.twitter.com/jydlfgq6Cj
— Crystal
Importantly, Trump has imposed a higher tariff on an island of Penguins than he has on Russia.
If you’re OK with tariffs on penguins but not on Russia, then you’re in the dumbest cult in world history #TrumpTariffs pic.twitter.com/U1txVNf98k
— Tara Dublin, Rock Star Author (@taradublinrocks) April 3, 2025
MAGA fans claimed this was due to insignificant trade. However X users pointed out that the US imported $3.5bn worth of goods from Russia in 2024.
Maybe Trump has spent too much time watching Pingu and thinks all Penguins can boil a kettle, answer a phone, and trade goods internationally. Because, lets face it, its probably one of the few shows his lack of intelligence could actually handle.
No tariffs for Russia because “trade is so insignificant anyway” say MAGA supporters.
But the penguins of Norfolk Island near Antarctica are being tariffed 10%.
Something fishy going on here…#TrumpTariffs pic.twitter.com/jSQsiyfAZV
— Jennifer Gray (@Tzenh) April 3, 2025
Maybe next he’ll stick a tariff on Narnia?
These Trump tariffs are getting out of hand. #TrumpTariffs pic.twitter.com/DXtA7rcXCo
— Jon Cooper
(@joncoopertweets) April 3, 2025
Was in Zelensky sat in the White House a few month back? Or Pingu?
Penguins cannot fly – but I doubt Trump knows that.
The Penguins of Heard and McDonald Islands departing for the USA to confront Donald Trump. #Tariffs pic.twitter.com/y501wTsYGi
— Jenny Frecklington-Jones OnBlueSkySocialAlso (@JonesHowdareyou) April 3, 2025
It was recently announced that the US is looking abroad to end its egg shortage. Maybe that’s the grand plan here. Scrambled or fried?
Trump imposed his thick as penguin guano tariffs, then waddled off to his golf course in Miami – leaving the US on thin ice. He has been winging it from the start – and every day it becomes even more clear that he has no business in the White House – or on uninhabited islands.
But what did the US expect?
One thing’s for sure, wherever this felon power-tripping president tries to make a state visit next, he’ll get a frosty reception, because Trump is poles away from acting like an actual head of state. And even Pingu knows.
Feature image via the Canary
By HG
This post was originally published on Canary.
