PORT TOWNSEND — An estimated 800 people filled the Jefferson County Courthouse steps, spilling out across the yard and filling Jefferson Street, to protest President Donald Trump and business mogul Elon Musk on Monday.
“Democracy is the main issue here, and that’s what we’re fighting for,” said Gina McMather, an organizer with Indivisible Port Townsend, which organized the protest. “Trump and his puppet master are dismantling things.”
Protests took place across the Peninsula on Monday, with rallies also occurring in both Port Angeles and Sequim.
McMather, a former world history teacher, said she is concerned about the foreign effects of recent funding cuts to the United States Agency of International Development (USAID).
“Think of the millions of people who depend on that in refugee camps,” she said.
Loss of jobs
Bryan Sluis, a project manager for the state Department of Transportation, said he has a number of friends who worked for the National Park Service who have lost their jobs.
“A lot of the people that I’ve talked to were planning on working at Olympic or Rainier or at North Cascades (national parks),” Sluis said. “They received an email that they were terminated. People don’t really understand how that can affect their lives. They’re in their 20s and they’re trying to start out their life and make a positive impact. They have now been left hanging out to dry.”
Esther Cramer and Brian LaVere traveled to the Port Townsend protest from Oak Harbor.
“I want them to stay out of our U.S. Treasury,” Cramer said. “He (Musk) doesn’t have the clearances to have his hands in there. He’s been given the ability to read and take information; it’s scary. I think it was crazy for Trump to pardon all of the (Jan. 6) criminals and go after the FBI, who are trying to uphold the rule of law. Bottom line, the future of our children and our children’s children is at stake. We can’t just complain. We have to get active.”
Cramer said elected Democrats need to do more. She said she doesn’t feel represented.
“I believe we have a burgeoning authoritarianism,” Cramer said. “Which I never thought I would see in my lifetime.”
Trump is trying to attack the constitution, Cramer said. She specifically called out the 14th amendment, which grounds birthright citizenship.
“I’m a latina,” Cramer said. “I grew up in Chicago, my mother had proper documentation, but she was not a U.S. citizen. She is now. My brothers and sister were born in Mexico, Michoacan.”
Cramer wondered if even she could eventually be impacted by ramped-up efforts to clamp down on immigration.
Barbara Tusting held a sign which read “No hate, no fear” on one side and “Immigrants are welcome here” on the other side.
“We’re all immigrants here,” Tusting said. “My grandfather took a banana boat from Panama. My great grandmother took a slow boat from Ireland. We are all immigrants, except for the Native American people. Everybody belongs. That’s what makes America.”
Port Townsend Mayor David Faber also attended the protest.
“I’m very concerned about what’s going on,” he said. “The expansion of executive authority is particularly concerning. America is one of very few presidential system democracies that haven’t slid into autocracy. It’s worrisome what we’re seeing now with the abdication of power by Congress. The executive orders that are grossly out of scope with what the president’s powers are under the Constitution are just being treated as though they’re law. That’s really worrisome.”
Faber said he is concerned in his capacities as a citizen, as mayor and as a lawyer.
The crowd was full of signs on Monday. One read “resist the billionaires.” Another read, “We the people must stop the coup.” A third read, “defend the U.S. Constitution,” and another read, “reject fascism.”
A man carried a sign which read, “Nazis are bad, remember?”
David White, who traveled from Poulsbo, held a sign with a Swastika as the “S” in Tesla.
“Why is Musk going over and supporting the neo-Nazi party in Germany?” White asked. “Why is vice president (J.D.) Vance meeting with the neo-Nazi party in Germany?”
According to several national publications, Vance recently met with Alice Weidel, the leader of AfD, a far-right party in Germany. Musk spoke recently at an AfD rally, according to national publications.
“When you start dehumanizing people and seeing them as subhuman, all sorts of cruelty is possible,” White said. “Everything I’m seeing from the current administration is, ‘We don’t care if we break up families. We don’t care if these people have been working here for 20 years. We’re are going to deport them anyway.’”
That has got to stop, White said.
“On my sign is a picture of Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute,” said John Piatt, a research scientist who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey for 37 years. “Everybody knows that’s what it is. That’s not funny to me.”
Piatt said both of his parents served in the second world war and that he spent part of his childhood in Germany, 20 years after the war.
“It wasn’t a distant memory,” he said. “We lived in a small village. We lived among people who were Nazis. Many regretted it and some didn’t.”
As a child, Piatt visited the Dachau concentration camp, built in 1933 and in use until 1945 at the end of the war. He remembered asking his parents to explain photographs of thousands of corpses piled like sticks.
“The depravity that goes with this is beyond comprehension,” Piatt said. “Until you see it yourself and realize humans can do this. The one thing my parents told me, ‘Don’t think for a second that this only can happen in Nazi Germany, ‘cause these are just people.’ Humans are humans.”
Piatt said Trump and Musk are not immoral, they are amoral.
“It’s not like they have morals and they’re deliberately violating them. They have no morals,” Piatt said.
Linda Martin, who has been involved with Indivisible Port Townsend since its formation in 2017, said immigrant rights, women’s rights and LGBTQ rights are among the top of her concerns.
”We’re very concerned for our gay and trans friends,” she said.
Indivisible Port Townsend also organized the peoples march on Jan. 18, which saw more than 600 people attend, Martin said.
Indivisible Port Townsend meets at 5 p.m. on the second Tuesday of every month at the Unity Center across from Blue Heron Middle School, Martin said.
For more information, visit https://www.ptindivisiblehuddle.org. To join their newsletter, email McMather at gmcmather@gmail.com.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
A Presidents’ Day rally against President Donald Trump’s policies was held Monday in front of the Clallam County Courthouse. A crowd estimated between 100 to 200 people rallied on both sides of Lincoln Street. (Dave Logan/for Peninsula Daily News)
