Global protests against Trump
More than two million people flooded US cities on Saturday as women opposed to Donald Trump led a peaceful, stunning rebuke against the new US president that was echoed in sister protests around the world.
The Women's March drew members of Congress, world-famous actresses and countless citizens like Joanne Gascoyne of Albany, New York a 78-year-old retired teacher who traveled to New York City with her daughter and two granddaughters.
"I feel people are afraid to vote for a woman for president," Gascoyne said. "I'm really here for women and to inspire my granddaughters to carry on."
The protesters came out for a range of reasons, including immigration, health care and a general antipathy to Trump. But most said they wanted to show support for women and feared that there will be attacks on women's rights during Trump's presidency.
Marches were also held in cities around the world.
The biggest demonstration took place in Washington, where protesters filled Pennsylvania Avenue, the same street Trump walked down a day before during his inaugural parade. In the evening, the crowd moved toward the White House.
On the mall, filmmaker Michael Moore, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, musician Alicia Keys and other speakers emotionally attacked Trump for his views on immigration, Muslims and women.
"It took this horrific moment of darkness to wake us the f--k up," Madonna told the crowd. "It seems as though we had all slipped into a false sense of comfort, that justice would prevail and that good would win in the end."
'It's been a heart-rending time to be both a woman and an immigrant in this country. Our dignity, our character, our rights have all been under attack and a platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday. But the president is not America. His cabinet is not America. Congress is not America. We are America. And we are here to stay,' said Actress America Ferrera.
Actress Scarlett Johansson urged the president to listen to the people's voice: “Support my daughter who may actually, as a result of the appointments you have made, grow up in a county that is moving backwards, not forward, and who may potentially not have the right to make choices for her body and her future that your daughter Ivanka has been privileged to have.”
Trump took to Twitter early yesterday to needle the protesters, including celebrities who took part.
"Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly," Trump tweeted.
A second, more formally worded, missive followed an hour later in which the Republican leader stressed that he respected the right to demonstrate.
"Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don't always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views," he tweeted.
Historian Douglas Brinkley told CNN that people will always remember the inauguration and the march as momentous events.
More than half a million people packed the streets of Los Angeles, according to police there, and similar numbers gathered in New York. Other marches took place in Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, St Louis, Denver and elsewhere.
In Boston, where up to 175,000 people demonstrated, fiery Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren took aim at Trump's campaign of "attacks" on women and minorities.
"We can whimper. We can whine. Or we can fight back!" Warren said to a loud roar.
Saturday's rallying cry was heard far beyond America's shores, with protests held from Paris to Prague, Sydney to Johannesburg, and in some 20 cities across Canada.
March organisers said protests took place in more than 600 cities across the world.
One of the largest was in London, where tens of thousands of women, men and children marched chanting "Dump Trump."
Overall, the protesters were law-abiding, with police reporting only four arrests in 21 American cities. Nobody was arrested in Washington.
The march organizers believe more people came out Saturday for the protests than for Trump's inaugural events on Friday.
Not everyone agrees. Trump, in his first speech after the Inauguration, said the media under-counted the size of the crowd for his Friday swearing-in ceremony.
"I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I'm like, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, Donald Trump did not draw well," he said.
Trump said the unnamed network reported he drew 250,000 people.
Later Saturday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer called his first press briefing and questioned the media's reporting on crowd sizes, saying the Trump inauguration was "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period."
The protesters, which included many men, hit the streets for different reasons, among them health care, the future of the Affordable Care Act, the environment and income equality.
But Trump's stated attitudes toward women and his comments about judging women by their weight and appearance kept coming up, as did his now infamous remarks about grabbing women by their genitalia.
"That's just something that really angers me, and I don't think it has any place in my world," Maeve Kelly, 25 of Lambertville, New Jersey. "It feels like everything we have worked toward, and all that suffragettes worked toward -- so we could vote and be successful -- is threatened now."
Leaders and activists from hundreds of left-leaning groups joined the march, including the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the American Federation of Teachers, as well as pro-immigrant and pro-environment groups.
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