Rosie O’Donnell, the president’s longtime enemy, might like to lead a coup. The former comedienne and conspiracy theorist headlined a resistance rally behind the White House on a rainy Tuesday evening, to protest President Trump’s address to the Joint Session of Congress.
After joking about her crowd size—what looked like less than half the thousand protesters organizers expected (“Look at this crowd of 1.8 million people!”)—Rosie declared independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” she barked, with mounting intensity, until: “And when any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it. That is why we are here!” The crowd went wild.
“The game is over! The internet rules! All media is universal! The truth matters!” One should be accustomed by now to punchy sentences angrily yelled in an outer-borough accent at political rallies. But it’s jarring, never having watched The View, to hear a familiar voice—and wonder what strange mania grips the hard-headed side character from feel-good nineties movies. It’s particularly sad when practical wisdom seems in such short supply.
I got a dose of it from the rally’s emcee Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus (an advocacy group, not an actual congressional caucus—protesters nearby googled to make sure). He fired up the crowd for a relatively unexciting ACLU lawyer, and then introduced O’Donnell as “the one who took this president to task toe-to-toe.” But, rhetorical footwork aside, Yearwood told me before he took the stage, and just as it started to rain, that he hoped for a more unifying message from the president. (Commentators later that evening would contend that Trump pretty much pulled it off.)
“I think the message that we hope [for] is that they continue to put forth a plan for all Americans, independent of Republican or Democrat, for everyone.” He drew a parallel between the Trump coalition and Bernie Sanders voters, “People who felt they were outside of politics, the people I work with everyday,” and guessed his perspective would come across less “hard-edged” than many Democrats’. “There’s some concern that the plans may not make everyone feel comfortable, and they may not, but we’re hopeful that the president puts forth a message that is more inclusive”—and policy to “work for the broader community.”
Other progressive organizers who want to influence policy in the Trump era do take a harder-edged approach. Investment in infrastructure spending, rally organizer Wenonah Hauter from the advocacy Food & Water Watch agreed, should help replace lead pipes that contaminate that drinking water—but opposing Trump’s border wall and maintaining oppositional momentum at the grassroots level still come first. “We believe the 25 billion dollars would be better spent on fixing lead pipes to protect children,” she told me, and repeated on the same stage.
During Hauter’s remarks I met Valerie Baccinelli, 26, who turned out to be a seasoned expert in the preeminent importance of momentum-maintenance in a protest movement. She earned a master’s degree in the subject: macro social work from Monmouth University. And she now applies her training—”all about community organizing and international development”—directing door-to-door canvassers and attending every protest and rally that she can find. For now, there is nothing to gain from common ground messaging: “I don’t think that we can get there until we have a strong enough movement on one side.” The Science March, a climate science demonstration planned for Earth Day, has drawn criticism for its unhelpfully furthering the polarization of research science. But, Baccinelli believes, it will draw crowds to rival the Women’s March—which we weren’t allowed to call the Million Woman March but certainly could have.
Much like a well-attended march, no single presidential address can ever condemn all the offenses an intersectional progressive perceives. Nor can one president. After a heated exchange with a reporter from The Daily Caller, Nat Atwell told me he hadn’t come to the rally to protest the president. “Trump doesn’t come out of a vacuum,” said Nat, a 28-year-old call screener for a radio station. Cultural afflictions and the media outlets that “normalize” them were instrumental in drawing together the Trump coalition: “It’s capitalism, it’s white supremacy, it’s rape culture.” “It’s not the president that bothers me so much,” he said. “It’s beyond the presidency.”
Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block from progressive Jewish PAC Bend the Arc, another organizer, wants the president to repent. President Trump is “George Wallace in the schoolhouse door,” he said—not irredeemable but long overdue for repentance and easily decades away from it yet. “I believe that the president through his campaign, intentional or not, fed into that rising intolerance,” the Rabbi told me, “and he has the opportunity to shift the tide.”
Later that evening, the president would take up the opportunity in the opening lines of his address: “Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.”
Before long, the rally wound down. But with so much left to rally against, some of the resistance marched off to join forces with another nearby protest. Those at the tail end of the procession were not quite sure where the next protest was, but they followed the herd, hoping they’d find Rosie there. She had told us from the podium that she would lead a singalong later in the evening. And, hard as this was to imagine, prolonged sign-waving and standing in the rain—with the possibility of Pete Seeger songs led by Rosie O’Donnell—easily won out over the comfort of a warm, dry living room and a primetime presidential address.
