I've reported on protests my entire adult life. The vibes feel different now.
I’ve been covering protests since my earliest days as a journalist.
One of the very first stories I ever worked on was about student demonstrators surrounding the car my university president was riding.
I spent all of summer 2020 taking pictures and conducting interviews at marches in suburban Southern California in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, and that autumn I drove to Phoenix to report on the pro-Trump protests outside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center.
But something feels very different now.
In all the countless demonstrations I’ve been to, it’s rarely been a struggle to get quotes from individual protesters.
When I attended a rally against President Donald Trump on Presidents’ Day in lower Manhattan, though, I found much more resistance to speaking to media than I was used to.
It wasn’t impossible — I still found people willing to talk. But there was a lot more skepticism, a lot more questioning of my motives and my credentials, than I’d experienced before.
A woman pressed me on who I was writing this story for, and ultimately declined when I revealed it was for a blog that I was just starting; I sure picked a hell of a time to start reporting for myself.
A man said “I’m just gonna stop talking” when I asked if he’d mind an interview.
Even those who were willing to speak were far more reluctant to give their full names than they’d ever been before. And given the direction this country seems to be heading, I’m not sure I can blame them — where before I would have insisted on a first and last name, I decided I would be happy just to take down their first.
The sentiments from everyone I talked to were much the same. A mix of fear, anger, and not knowing what else to do other than get out in the street. Which I could certainly sympathize with, as my instinct had been to get out in the street and do interviews.
One woman I spoke to in Washington Square Park, Robin, put it simply: “I’m really scared and really angry.”
Another woman I talked to in Union Square, Barbara, said: “I’m really upset at what’s happening right now in the country. The administration, Musk, all of it. It’s terrible. It’s awful … I was paralyzed the first week, and now I feel like you have to do something and it feels like a thing we can do.”
A husband and wife, Ira and Kristina, told me they’d been going to other protests, too, including one in front of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office in Manhattan — interestingly, they expressed not just “horror and disgust” at the Trump administration, but also frustration with Democrats for not fighting hard enough.
“I want them to vote against everything,” Ira told me. “I want them to make a very firm stand and make it clear that they’re not gonna participate in this ridiculous government. They need to come up with every procedural sand-in-the-gears thing they can do. They need to filibuster when they can. They need to make it as difficult to govern as possible.”
Of course, many of Trump’s actions are coming through executive orders, and Democrats don’t have a majority in either house of Congress. Even acknowledging this, though, Ira still wanted to see more fighting spirit from congressional Democrats.
“What [Trump is] doing is just executive orders and sending Musk out as a hit squad. So I’m not sure what the prospects are,” Ira said. “But when somebody like Hakeem Jeffries, who I admire enormously, says, ‘what do you want us to do?’ — you kind of really need to be thinking harder than that.”
Kristina, who said her parents were born in Lithuania, expressed a lot of concern about Trump’s actions on foreign policy.
“The collusion with Putin and what they’re doing to Europe and Gaza, and Canada and Mexico, I mean, they’re alienating the United States from the rest of the world,” she said.
These words of hers stuck with me, though: “Cutting Europe off, it’s gonna be a disaster. It’s gonna bring about a third world war.”
Is she being hyperbolic? Maybe. But before November 2016 I would have thought it was hyperbolic if you had told me the president in 2025 would be defunding federal agencies through illegal executive fiat. It seems nothing is certain anymore. And I’m just as scared as the rest of the protesters. God help us all.
