The aerial view of  New York’s Second Avenue at the March for Women on Saturday. Pic grab of FB video from the Daily News.

There was an enormous turnout in city after city for the March for Women today. WNBC is saying that NY saw 400,000 demonstrators. I was there and have been at ‘big’ NY demonstrations since the late 80’s, and I can tell you that this was orders of magnitude bigger than the big anti-war demos predating the invasion of Iraq. Here’s a link to video from the above picture, posted by the Daily News. Remember that the march HADN’T EVEN STARTED yet–the focus of the demonstration was the Trump Tower on 5th Avenue.

New York was not unique in this–huge turnouts in Chicago, Washington DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and thousands of demonstrators hit the streets in London, Paris and Rome. With 700 events on seven continents, it was probably on the order of the Anti nuclear protests in the early 1980s, and the fact that there was solidarity between American and European protesters about the US president doesn’t bode well for an administration that is only 24 hours old. Trump is (to put it politely) a polarizing figure. and  the changes he’s made to the Whitehouse.gov website don’t bode well (no more pages on climate change, LGBT, and civil rights as well as disability issues). 

What this means is unclear. The organizers prided themselves on the fact that nobody got arrested. But someone (lots of someones) underestimated the disgust that much of the general public already has for Donald Trump. The turnout to protest a man who hasn’t been in office for a week yet is amazing, as is the international disgust with him. What happens when/if it falls to Donald J to deliver the ‘game over’ message in coming months?

Meanwhile, as I’ve just been reminded, the majority of White, non-Hispanic voters pulled the lever for Trump. Pew Research Says so. You cannot build a multi-ethnic coalition against Trump without addressing this extremely inconvenient fact. People might want to visit the page of author Ty Alexander, who took a series of insightful pictures of the DC protest. Below is one of them.

A photo from Ty Alexander’s blog. She took a bunch of interesting photos on Saturday’s protest in DC.