The Protest That Never Happened (According to the White House)

Over the weekend, tens of thousands of Americans poured into the streets for the Hands Off protests, marching, chanting, and waving signs in defiance of the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on civil liberties, social programs, and basic decency.

It was a powerful moment of national unity.

So, naturally, the White House pretended it didn’t happen.

No press briefing. No official response worth repeating. Just a boilerplate statement vaguely claiming Trump is “protecting” Medicare and Social Security, while Elon Musk, now somehow in charge of federal efficiency, dismissed the protesters as “paid and misinformed” from his social media throne atop Mount Delusion.

And just like that, the weekend was memory-holed. Poof. Gone.

They’ve learned a key lesson: if dissent doesn’t disrupt anything, it doesn’t matter. And as long as we keep marching politely on Saturdays, they’ll keep ignoring us by Monday morning. You could set yourself on fire outside the Department of Commerce and they’d still start the week with a tax cut for oil companies and a group prayer to Ayn Rand.

Meanwhile, Trump is disrupting things, gleefully and with maximum damage. He’s nuking global trade with amateur-hour tariffs, collapsing public health infrastructure, and reclassifying civil servants so he can fire experts without making it look like a dictatorship (spoiler: it is). The goal? Controlled chaos.

He’s not fighting fair. So why are we playing by the rules?

We need to understand the game we’re in. Disruption works, that’s why they’re using it. It’s also why they’re counting on us not to.

If we want to be taken seriously, we need to stop being so considerate. That means:

• Weekday walkouts.

• Shutting down commerce and supply chains.

• Flooding phone lines and freezing bureaucratic pipelines.

• Coordinated boycotts that make shareholders sweat.

• Actions that force headlines—and force hands.
  

Let’s be clear, this isn’t about violence. It’s about inconvenience, the only language power understands. Until we learn to grind the gears, we’ll just be background noise to a machine that’s already decided our lives are expendable.

April 19 is the next protest. But if we keep playing it like a weekend street fair, we’ll get the same result: a shrug from the press office, a tweet from Musk calling us "NPCs," and another Monday full of dismantled institutions.

So let’s make it count. Let’s make them notice. Let’s make “business as usual” impossible.

After all, if Trump can crater the economy to protect his ego, the least we can do is delay a few shipments of Teslas.