A number of thousand individuals held aloft indicators and marched via the streets of downtown Denver on Monday afternoon as a part of a Labor Day demonstration that emphasised employees’ and immigrants’ rights.
However by no means removed from the floor of Monday’s congregation at Lincoln Veterans Memorial Park in entrance of the state Capitol was an intense dislike of President Donald Trump and an amazing disapproval of his insurance policies.
“Cease Trump’s Warfare on Us” learn one signal on the rally, which was a part of a nationwide protest effort dubbed Workers Over Billionaires. “The Dying of Reality is the Victory of Evil” learn one other placard.
One particular person held up an indication displaying Trump’s visage with an Adolf Hitler mustache appended and the phrase “Nope” splashed beneath the Republican president’s face.
“He hates unions and working-class individuals,” mentioned Stephanie Jones, an Evergreen resident who has been to a variety of anti-Trump rallies which were held within the wake of the forty seventh president’s November 2024 electoral victory.
Linda Perkin, 75, got here downtown from her senior group, Windsor Gardens, in Denver. Taking a breather throughout Lincoln Avenue from the Wells Fargo skyscraper as a boisterous crowd chanted praises for migrants and laborers and marched up the thoroughfare to the sound of a beating drum, she mentioned she has been protesting for many years.
“I’m very pro-union, I’m very pro-worker,” mentioned Perkin, carrying a ‘My Canine Hates Donald Trump’ sticker on her T-shirt. “I’m glad to see it and I need extra individuals to hitch in.”
Whereas lots of the speeches delivered throughout the rally spoke of Trump’s purported disregard for the working class in favor of the tremendous rich, November’s election outcomes confirmed blue-collar constituencies spurning the Democratic Party in droves and voting for Trump in numbers not seen earlier than.
It’s a dynamic that worries Perkin, who urged her fellow Democrats to “get down within the grime.”
“The Democrats have to get a backbone,” she mentioned, critiquing lofty accusations of fascism and autocracy as out of contact with individuals attempting to get by paycheck to paycheck.
Makes an attempt to venture defiance and energy at Monday’s gathering had been plentiful. Zander Kaschub, who works within the Jefferson County College District’s meals service division, took to the microphone beneath blue skies to extol labor’s political energy — ought to it select to wield it.
“From the fields to the classroom, we’re highly effective and we’re rising,” he mentioned.
Colorado Training Affiliation Government Director Kooper Caraway exhorted the group to “knock that door down” when politicians refuse to take their considerations critically.
“Let’s take to the streets and knock each rattling door down,” he shouted, simply earlier than the group started their march up Lincoln Avenue.
An alphabet soup of left-wing social activist teams manned cubicles at Monday’s rally, together with the Celebration for Socialism and Liberation, the Denver Communists and Colorado Indivisible. The group Notes of Dissent featured a largely brass band blasting out a White Stripes tune to a head-nodding viewers.
The Staff Over Billionaires rally is the most recent in a collection of anti-Trump demonstrations which have taken place in Denver this 12 months, together with a rally in early April in opposition to the administration’s cuts to federal jobs and a good bigger turnout in June for the No Kings rally that focused all issues Trump.
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