NEW YORK — Opponents of President Donald Trump’s administration took to the streets of communities large and small across the U.S. on Saturday, decrying what they see as threats to the nation’s democratic ideals.
The disparate events ranged from a march through midtown Manhattan and a rally in front of the White House to a demonstration at a Massachusetts commemoration marking the start of the American Revolutionary War 250 years ago. In San Francisco, protesters formed a human banner reading “Impeach & Remove” on the sands of Ocean Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Thomas Bassford was among those who joined demonstrators at the reenactment of the Battles of Lexington and Concord outside of Boston. “The shot heard ’round the world” on April 19, 1775, heralded the start of the nation’s war for independence from Britain.
The 80-year-old retired mason from Maine said he believed Americans today are under attack from their own government and need to stand up against it.
“This is a very perilous time in America for liberty,” Bassford said, as he attended the event with his partner, daughter and two grandsons. “I wanted the boys to learn about the origins of this country and that sometimes we have to fight for freedom.”
Elsewhere, protests were planned outside Tesla car dealerships against billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk and his role in downsizing the federal government. Others organized more community-service events, such as food drives, teach-ins and volunteering at local shelters.
The protests come just two weeks after similar nationwide protests against the Trump administration drew thousands to the streets across the country.
Some of the events drew on the spirit of the American Revolutionary War, calling for “no kings” and resistance to tyranny.
Boston resident George Bryant, who was among those protesting in Concord, Massachusetts, said he was concerned Trump was creating a “police state” in America as he held up a sign saying, “Trump fascist regime must go now!”
“He’s defying the courts. He’s kidnapping students. He’s eviscerating the checks and balances,” Bryant said. “This is fascism.”
In Washington, Bob Fasick said he came out to the rally by the White House out of concern about threats to constitutionally protected due process rights, as well as Social Security and other federal safety-net programs.
“I cannot sit still knowing that if I don’t do anything and everybody doesn’t do something to change this, that the world that we collectively are leaving for the little children, for our neighbors is simply not one that I would want to live,” said the 76-year-old retired federal employee from Springfield, Virginia.
In Columbia, South Carolina, several hundred people protested at the statehouse. They held signs that said “Fight Fiercely, Harvard, Fight” and “Save SSA,” in reference to the Social Security Administration.
And in Manhattan, protesters rallied against continued deportations of immigrants as they marched from the New York Public Library north towards Central Park past Trump Tower.
“No fear, no hate, no ICE in our state,” they chanted to the steady beat of drums, referring to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Marshall Green, who was among the protesters, said he was most concerned that Trump has invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 by claiming the country is at war with Venezuelan gangs linked to the South American nation’s government.
“Congress should be stepping up and saying no, we are not at war. You cannot use that,” said the 61-year-old from Morristown, New Jersey. “You cannot deport people without due process, and everyone in this country has the right to due process no matter what.”
Meanwhile Melinda Charles, of Connecticut, said she worried about Trump’s “executive overreach,” citing clashes with the federal courts to Harvard University and other elite colleges.
“We’re supposed to have three equal branches of government and to have the executive branch become so strong,” she said. “I mean, it’s just unbelievable.”
A statement from U.S. Army Europe and Africa public affairs in Wiesbaden, Germany said the soldiers were conducting scheduled tactical training at the time.
Former U.S. Rep. Mia Love of Utah, a daughter of Haitian immigrants who became the first Black Republican woman elected to Congress, died Sunday.
She was 49.
Love’s family posted news of her death on Love’s X account.
She had undergone recent treatment for brain cancer and received immunotherapy as part of a clinical trial at Duke University’s brain tumor center. Her daughter said earlier this month that the former lawmaker was no longer responding to treatment.
Love died at her home in Saratoga Springs, Utah, according to a statement posted by the family.
“With grateful hearts filled to overflowing for the profound influence of Mia on our lives, we want you to know that she passed away peacefully,” her family said. “We are thankful for the many good wishes, prayers and condolences.”
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox referred to Love as a “true friend” and said her legacy of service inspired all who knew her.
Love entered politics in 2003 after winning a seat on the city council in Saratoga Springs, a growing community about 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City. She later became the city’s mayor.
In 2012, Love narrowly lost a bid for the House against the Democratic incumbent, former Rep. Jim Matheson, in a district that covers a string of Salt Lake City suburbs. She ran again two years later and defeated first-time candidate Doug Owens by about 7,500 votes.
Love didn’t emphasize her race during her campaigns, but she acknowledged the significance of her election after her 2014 victory. She said her win defied naysayers who had suggested that a Black, Republican, Mormon woman couldn’t win a congressional seat in overwhelmingly white Utah.
She was briefly considered a rising star within the GOP and she kept her distance from Donald Trump, who was unpopular with many Utah voters, while he was running for president ahead of the 2016 election.
In an op-ed published earlier this month in the Deseret News, Love described the version of America she grew up loving and shared her enduring wish for the nation to become less divisive. She thanked her medical team and every person who had prayed for her.
Love said her parents immigrated to the U.S. with $10 in their pocket and a belief that hard work would lead to success. She said she was raised to believe passionately in the American dream and “to love this country, warts and all.” America at its roots is respectful, resilient, giving and grounded in gritty determination, she said.
Her career in politics exposed Love to America’s ugly side, but she said it also gave her a front row seat to be inspired by people’s hope and courage. She shared her wish for neighbors to come together and focus on their similarities rather than their differences.
“Some have forgotten the math of America — whenever you divide you diminish,” Love wrote.
She urged elected officials to lead with compassion and communicate honestly with their constituents.
“In the end, I hope that my life will have mattered and made a difference for the nation I love and the family and friends I adore,” Love wrote. “I hope you will see the America I know in the years ahead, that you will hear my words in the whisper of the wind of freedom and feel my presence in the flame of the enduring principles of liberty. My living wish and fervent prayer for you and for this nation is that the America I have known is the America you fight to preserve.”
In 2016, facing reelection and following the release of a 2005 recording in which Trump made lewd comments about groping women, Love skipped the Republican National Convention and released a statement saying definitively that she would not vote for Trump. She instead endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the GOP race, but he dropped out months later.
While seeking a third term in 2018, Love tried to separate herself from Trump on trade and immigration while still backing her party’s positions on tax cuts. Despite Republican voters outnumbering Democrats by a nearly three-to-one margin in her district, though, she lost by fewer than 700 votes to Democrat Ben McAdams, a former mayor of Salt Lake City.
Trump called out Love by name in a news conference the morning after she lost, where he also bashed other Republicans who didn’t fully embrace him.
“Mia Love gave me no love, and she lost,” Trump said. “Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.”
After her loss, Love served as a political commentator on CNN and as a fellow at the University of Sydney.
Following Trump’s election in November, Love said she was “OK with the outcome.”
“Yes, Trump says a lot of inconsiderate things that are unfortunate and impossible to defend,” Love wrote in a social media post. “However, his policies have a high probability of benefiting all Americans.”
NEW YORK — Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children’s books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer’s wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple’s two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, “but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny.”
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers’ lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with “communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority.”
Feiffer won the United States’ most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and “Munro,” an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
“My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh,” Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. “Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down.”
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From childhood on, he loved to draw.
As a young man, he attended the Pratt Institute, an art and design college based in Brooklyn, and worked for Will Eisner, creator of the popular comic book character The Spirit. Feiffer drew his first comic strip, “Clifford,” from the late 1940s until he was drafted into the Army in 1951, according to a biography on his former website. He served two years in the Signal Corps, according to the online biography.
After the Army, he returned to drawing cartoons and found his way to a then-new alternative weekly newspaper, The Village Voice. His work debuted in the paper in 1956.
The Voice grew into a lodestar of downtown and liberal New York, and Feiffer became one of its fixtures. His strip, called simply “Feiffer,” ran there for more than 40 years.
The Voice was a fitting venue for Feiffer’s feisty liberal sensibilities, and a showcase for a strip acclaimed for its spidery style and skewering satire of a gallery of New York archetypes.
“It’s hard to remember what hypocrisy looked like before Jules Feiffer sketched it,” Todd Gitlin, who was then a New York University journalism and sociology professor, wrote in Newsday in 1997. Gitlin died in 2022.
Feiffer quit the Voice amid a salary dispute in 1997, sparking an outcry from readers. His strip continued to be syndicated until he ended it in 2000.
But if “Feiffer” was retired, Feiffer himself was not. He had long since developed a roster of side projects.
He published novels, starting in 1963 with “Harry the Rat with Women.” He started writing plays, spurred by a sense of sociological upheaval that, as he later told Time magazine, he felt he couldn’t address “in six panels of a cartoon.”
His first play, 1967’s “Little Murders,” went on to win an Obie Award, a leading honor for Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions.
He ultimately wrote over a dozen plays and screenplays, ranging from the 1980 film version of the classic comic “Popeye” to the tougher territory of “Carnal Knowledge,” a story of two college friends and their toxic relationships with women over 20 years. Feiffer wrote the stage and screen versions of “Carnal Knowledge,” which was made into a 1971 movie directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret. Feiffer also contributed to the long-running erotic musical revue “Oh! Calcutta!”
But after disappointing reviews of his 1990 play “Elliot Loves,” Feiffer looked to the gentler realm of children’s literature.
“My kind of theater was about confronting grown-ups with truths they didn’t want to hear. But it seemed to me we’ve reached the point, at this particular time, where grown-ups knew all the bad news. ... So I hunted around for people I could give good news to, and it seemed to me it should be the next generation,” Feiffer told National Public Radio in 1995.
Having illustrated Norton Juster’s inventive 1961 book “The Phantom Tollbooth,” Feiffer brought a wry wonder to bear on his own books for young readers, starting with 1993’s “The Man in the Ceiling.” A musical version premiered in 2017 at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, New York.
The theater threw a surprise 90th birthday party for Feiffer in February 2019, when he did an on-stage interview to accompany a screening of “Carnal Knowledge.”
In recent years, Feiffer also painted watercolors of his signature figures and taught humor-writing courses at several colleges, among other projects. He published a graphic novel for young readers, “Amazing Grapes,” last September.
His wife said he had great fun writing it, relishing the drawings and story.
“He was,” she said, “a 5-year-old living in a 95-year-old’s body.”
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