MILWAUKEE — Moments after a gunman shot Donald Trump in the ear, the bloodied former president raised his hand in defiance and mouthed the words, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as Secret Service agents led him to safety.
But at a Secret Service checkpoint leading to Fiserv Forum on Monday, where the first day of the Republican National Convention kicked off, demonstrators were angling for another kind of fight.
“Fight, fight, fight, abortion is a human right,” the protesters chanted in an effort to make their faces seen and voices heard to the thousands of Republican politicians and convention delegates in attendance.
“We are within sight and sound,” Alan Chavoya, a co-chair of the Coalition to March on the RNC 2024, declared. The crowd, numbering in the thousands, chanted back: “Sight and sound! Sight and sound!”
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Milwaukee officials have not made this easy for the demonstrators.
The far-left coalition of organizations had sued the city of Milwaukee and the U.S. Secret Service to uphold their right to be heard outside the convention. March organizers met with city leaders on Saturday and said they had reached a “handshake agreement” allowing them to take their preferred march route, which took them within earshot of the Fiserv Forum.
Billed as a “family friendly” event, the march wound through downtown Milwaukee for about two hours. Despite the protesters’ proximity, conventioneers largely ignored them. Volunteer protest marshals on bicycles maintained a robust buffer that mitigated the risk of confrontation, even as the protesters boisterously chanted, “F--- Donald Trump” as they left the security checkpoint outside Fiserv Forum.
Security is always overwhelming at national party conventions such as this. But officials have ramped up safety protocols to even greater degrees in the two days following the attempt on Trump’s life, which also killed a bystander at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania where Trump was speaking.
Undaunted, protesters unleashed a list of grievances against Republicans for anyone who’d listen.
They decried the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
They railed against the curtailment of reproductive rights.
They bemoaned what they view as an assault on the rights of immigrants living — or wanting to live — in the United States.
Trump, who has already arrived in Milwaukee, has suggested he’ll call for “unity” during his nomination acceptance speech at the convention this week.
The demonstrators from Wisconsin and several other states, including Minnesota and Colorado, were having none of it.
“The most utterly fascist elements of the U.S. ruling class have descended on Milwaukee,” Cody Urban, with the International League for People’s Struggle, said during a press conference earlier in the day at Red Arrow Park, immediately across the Milwaukee River from the Fiserv Center.
But he didn’t just single out Trump, bashing both Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden as “two of the world’s largest war criminals.”
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Palestinian flags thronged the march, reflecting one of the coalition’s points of unity: “Stand with Palestine.”
The unanimity of support for Palestine within the protest coalition stands in stark contrast to the Democratic Party faithful, some of who staunchly oppose Israel’s actions and others who continue to back Israel’s bloody, months-long effort to eradicate Hamas, the de facto ruler of Palestine. Israeli attacks have killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, many of whom are civilians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Tens of thousands more have been injured and untold numbers of children, in particular, face starvation.
Hatem Abudayyeh, national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, received resounding applause when he declared that “Israel has no right to exist as a white supremacist settler-colonial state.”
That is a position echoed by Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a Marxist-Leninist group of which several of the speakers claimed membership.
Underscoring the manner in which the issue cuts against both major political parties, Abudayyeh said he expects to see tens of thousands of people marching next month against “Genocide Joe” and “Killer Kamala” — scornful nicknames pro-Palestine protesters have given to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
While a small detachment of protesters heckled perceived counter-protesters with impromptu chants of “Milwaukee don’t like fascists,” Trump’s open promise to consolidate the power of the executive branch and serial flouting of the law — a Manhattan jury convicted Trump on 34 felony counts in May — received scant attention from the protesters.
Asked about a federal judge’s decision on the same day to dismiss charges against Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents, Omar Flores, one of the coalition co-chairs, said at the press conference: “No comment at this point.”
On at least one issue, speakers called out the Republican nominee in a way that drew an implicit contrast with his Democratic opponents, who will gather in Chicago to choose their presidential nominee next month.
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, with Milwaukee-based Voces de la Frontera, blamed Trump for a massacre carried out by a young white nationalist who murdered 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, while echoing the former president’s rhetoric calling large-scale migration an “invasion.”
“It’s undeniable that Trump’s rhetoric, policies and actions have contributed to a climate of increased violence, and legitimized hate crimes by white nationalists,” Neumann-Ortiz said.
She went on to decry Trump for summoning his supporters to Washington, D.C., where they “demanded the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence” during the certification of the 2020 electoral vote on Jan. 6, 2021, and for bringing “the white supremacist and armed Proud Boys into the political mainstream.”
Despite heightened tensions across the country surrounding the attempt on Trump’s life at a Pennsylvania rally over the weekend, the left-wing protesters made it known that their plans to march would remain unchanged.
Preparations for de-escalation at the march proved to be unnecessary even as six employees of the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service strolled through the crowd at Red Arrow Park, and members of a Columbus Police Department “dialogue” team scouted the perimeter.
The only counter-protesters were a handful of anti-abortion activists holding garish posters of aborted fetuses, who were mostly ignored, and a group of Republican National Convention delegates in matching red shirts who passed the park without incident.
Asked for comment about the implications of the assassination attempt, Flores curtly dismissed the question.
“I think the Republicans are experts on political violence,” he said.
Next stop for the protesters?
Illinois, a short drive or train ride away.
Many of the protesters said they plan to also protest the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, and in many respects, the script they used today was indistinguishable from what is likely to be shouted at Democrats.
