America stood up to Trump today

Mar 29, 2026

On March 28, 2026, Donald Trump locked himself away behind the gates of his private club, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, while 8 million people across the United States took to the streets to send an unmistakable signal to him, and all of his enablers: we will not let you continue to destroy our country. The message was clear. We are taking our country back in November.

The collective action was hard for anyone to ignore, let alone the President of the United States. Because while his administration described the protests earlier this week as “Trump derangement therapy sessions,” they clearly have made him more afraid than he’s letting on about the future of his free-for-all presidency, and his ability to stay in office with such an overwhelming public rejection of his incompetence and corruption.

And it wasn’t just the sheer, overwhelming scale of millions of Americans in all 50 states refusing to be silent. It was the individual people. The parents who brought their children to their first protest. The retirement-age Americans who have given up their golden years to fight fascism the way their parents and grandparents did before them. The man who showed up with armfuls of American flags, not to sell, but to hand them out, to remind both children and adults that this is our flag. The flag of the United States of America. Not the flag of Donald J. Trump. This is the flag steeped in history and symbolism, the one we are fighting for, so that we too can pass it to the next generation the way it was passed to us: with the understanding that this country belongs to the people who love it enough to fight for it.

More than 3,200 events took place across the country on Saturday, from New York City to Driggs, Idaho, a town of fewer than 2,000 people in a state Trump carried with 66 percent of the vote. Nearly half of the protests took place in Republican strongholds. Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had more than 100 events. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah had events in the double digits. Rural communities that have never hosted a political protest before, from Seward, Alaska, to East Glacier Park, Montana, showed up for the first time. The protests went international, with tens of thousands marching in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, and London, and in countries with constitutional monarchies, they called the protests “No Tyrants.”

In San Francisco, demonstrators formed a human banner on Ocean Beach, their bodies spelling out a message designed to be captured by drone, an echo of Hands Across America in 1986, when 5 million people linked arms with neighbors coast to coast, to fight hunger and homelessness. Forty years later, the same instinct, the physical act of showing up and choosing to stand next to a stranger because you believe in something bigger than yourself, brought out nearly twice as many people, and this time, what they were fighting for was the country itself.

But behind every one of those numbers is a moment that no headline can capture, and I felt that undeniable energy at the No Kings protest I attended with one of my daughters, near my home in San Diego. The one I attended had hundreds of people, but my oldest was at the larger protest downtown, where she volunteered offering first aid to fellow marchers. Police estimated 40,000 people showed up to that one alone. She told me the turnout was massive, and I believe it, because what I saw at mine was massive too, in a different way. It was not just the size of the crowd, though the turnout was huge for the area. It was what I felt walking through it.

There was a man walking around with armfuls of American flags, handing them out to anyone who wanted one. At one point, two kids walked up to him to get a flag, and he stopped, looked at them, and said, “This is your flag.” It brought tears to my eyes, and honestly it is hard even talking about it now, because he was right. That flag belongs to those children. It belongs to every child in this country, and to every future generation for hopefully thousands of years to come.

The signs were incredible, too. Some were deeply serious, and some were completely inappropriate and made me laugh so hard I could barely keep walking. I am including a couple of them for you to see within my post on Substack. People got creative, because we resist in all different ways, and every single one of those signs was perfect. I saw people of every kind, families with young children, couples with their dogs, what I have started calling resistance dogs, people who clearly came alone and found community once they got there. I walked through the whole thing, trying to read as many signs as possible and trying to thank every single person I could for coming out, because it mattered. Every one of them mattered.

As I watched cars go by, horns blaring in support, my emotions ran in circles. I get angry. Angry that this is how children have to spend their Saturdays. I get angry that parents are giving up time they could be building memories with their families to stand in the sun holding signs because their government has failed them. Trump has already stolen so many years from so many people, and I get especially angry when I think about our retirement-age community members. They should be spending time with grandchildren, exploring, relaxing, enjoying the beauty of this country they helped build. They have carried us this far, and instead of resting, they are back on their feet, in the streets, fighting another unjust war just the way they fought against the war in Vietnam. Only this time, they know exactly what is on the line. They know what they are fighting for, because they have seen what happens when people do not fight.

I also know how difficult it is for so many people right now, not just politically but personally, when you realize that friends you have aligned with for decades, people you trusted, have been lost to something that looks and feels like a cult, or when you start to see that people you thought cared about the world and about each other turned out to be more self-centered than you ever imagined. And yet you turned your grief into action. You spent your Saturday standing against evil. You made your signs and put on your resistance shirts. You rallied your friends and your neighbors, and you gave up your day to fight for this country. I am angry that you had to do that. But I am so thankful that you did.

I try to speak to as many people in the retirement-age group as possible when I go to these events, because there is so much that they have seen and heard and lived through that many of us have not. And I keep thinking that maybe one of the reasons we ended up here, in this moment, in this version of our country, is because somewhere along the way we stopped listening to the storytellers. The ones who told the warnings and the lessons we needed to hear about fascism, about keeping ourselves safe, about what to look for when danger is creeping in. The way that our ancestors passed down knowledge. The core stories of existence and survival, and as much as they have evolved over centuries and into modern times, the purpose has not changed. We need the lessons from the past more than ever, and I am hoping to continue to learn and share so that together we can start rebuilding that much-needed safety mechanism, the one that warns us, that protects us, that reminds us who we are and how far we have come.

And while the country sent a message for the world to see, the President of the United States locked himself away rather than confronting the uprising happening all around him. According to the White House, his official schedule for the day listed three items: Executive Time at Mar-a-Lago beginning at 8 AM, a closed-press MAGA Inc. fundraising meeting at 6:30 PM, and a dinner at 7 PM. That was it. He didn’t even leave the grounds of his private club to go to his golf course, which is what he does on nearly every other Saturday he spends in Palm Beach. On March 28, the day that 8 million Americans showed up, he stayed behind the gates from morning until night.

He also skipped the Conservative Political Action Conference for the first time in a decade. CPAC, which held its final day in Texas on Saturday, has been his home turf for years, the one stage where he has always been guaranteed a standing ovation and a room full of loyalists. But this year, even that room was not safe. The Iran war, now one month old, has opened visible fractures in his base that he cannot control with a rally speech.

A 30-year-old Army and Marine Corps veteran named Joseph Bolick, from Tyler, Texas, and who has voted for Trump in every election since 2016, told reporters that he feels betrayed and no longer supports the president. “Why aren’t we helping Americans?” Bolick said. “The economy’s suffering. Why can’t we focus on our own people instead of foreign governments?” And on Friday, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp tried to hype up the crowd by asking, “How many of you would like to see impeachment hearings?” The question was meant to rally them against the threat of Democrats taking the House. Instead, the crowd erupted in cheers. Schlapp shook his head and said, “No. That was the wrong answer.” He asked again. They cheered again. Either the crowd that CPAC attracts is not paying close enough attention to understand what they are cheering for, or some of them genuinely want this president impeached, and at this point, both explanations should concern the Republican Party. That is why the president could not risk standing in front of that room and hearing something other than applause, so he did not show up at all.

But while he made no public appearance, he was not entirely silent. He was on his phone. Between 3:36 and 3:37 PM, right as the peak protest hours wound down, Trump posted multiple times on Truth Social in rapid succession. He shared a promotional article about his “TrumpRX” website. He posted about another criminal prosecution referral against a woman he is obsessed with, New York Attorney General Letitia James. He shared a Washington Post opinion piece with the headline assuring his followers that he is not losing his nerve on Iran. And he posted a demand to end the Senate filibuster, calling his own Republican senators “weak and ineffective” and declaring that “The Democrats are CRAZY!” Earlier in the day, he promoted a Fox News appearance about the importance of hitting Iran “HARD!!!”

That is what the President of the United States did on the day his country rose against him. He did not lead, govern, or listen. He sat in his private club, promoted himself, attacked his enemies, pushed for war escalation, and raged at his own party. Not one word about the protests. And the more he posts things like “The Democrats are CRAZY,” the more the rest of the country can see who the unhinged one actually is. This is a man hiding from the consequences of his own failure, and the country he is failing showed up on Saturday to make sure he knows it.

Because at the heart of all of this is a president who only wants to hear praise, lies to the American people, and has never kept a single promise he has ever made to them. He will never truly grasp the depth of the anger, heartbreak, or exhaustion that drove people out of their homes and onto sidewalks. But if he ever wanted to try, he could start with what he said when he was running for reelection. He promised no new wars. We are one month into a war with Iran, a “military operation” in Venezuela and one he has said is coming to Cuba soon. He has threatened Greenland, Canada and Mexico too, among other nations. He promised cheaper gas. Gas prices have climbed to $3.98 a gallon and are rising, driven by a conflict he chose to start, with oil prices up roughly 40 percent from pre-war levels. He promised cheaper groceries. Beef is up 15 percent. Coffee is up 20 percent. He promised to release the Epstein files. He has not released them, and at this point it is painfully clear to anyone paying attention why. And for a lot of the people who voted for him, his more loyal followers, these broken promises are becoming impossible to ignore.

And yet, even as the cracks in his support deepen and the evidence of his failure mounts, much of the media still is not telling the full story. The scale of what happened on March 28 was historic, protests in all 50 states, more than a dozen countries, and organizers estimating it as the largest single day of domestic political protest in American history. But the coverage from major corporate outlets did not come close to matching what took place. The journalists who got it right, the ones who showed up and reported on the full scope of what was happening, were largely independent. Joy-Ann Reid. Don Lemon. Jim Acosta. To name just a few. All three of them came from major corporate networks, and all three of them, for various reasons, are now independent. I know that their exits from those networks must have been incredibly difficult, but I want to say something directly: their independence is a gift to the rest of us. Without independent journalists like them, writers and commentators like me would not have access to the real, sourced, non-propagandized information that makes this work possible. If you are able to support independent media, not just me, but the ones on the ground, investigating and keeping us informed with integrity, please do. Paid memberships allow us to continue this vital work during these critically fragile times for our country.

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