Along with rallies held by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, #TeslaTakedown and #HandsOff protests are giving people the opportunity to voice their displeasure with the administration.
YAHOO News Editor
Tue, March 25, 2025
Tue, March 25, 2025
Sen. Bernie Sanders with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Denver, a stop on their "Fighting Oligarchy Tour," March 21. (David Zalubowski/AP)
As President Trump and Elon Musk continue their plan to dramatically reshape the federal government, a growing protest movement is emerging to try to stop them.
Over the past few days, thousands of people have gathered to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York castigate the current administration.
“We will not allow America to become an oligarchy,” Sanders told a crowd of 34,000 in Denver. “This nation was built by working people, and we are not going to let a handful of billionaires run the government.”
At five stops in three states — Arizona, Colorado and Nevada — Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez drew crowds that exceeded expectations.
The rallies by the two high-profile politicians have proven to be the biggest demonstrations of the first months of Trump’s second term, but numerous others have been popping up nationwide. On March 7, a “Stand Up for Science” rally drew thousands of people to Washington, D.C., and other cities to demand a restoration of federal scientific funding cut by the Trump administration.
Yet compared with the Women’s March of 2017, which drew millions of citizens to the streets the weekend after Trump’s first-term inauguration to protest what many saw as the newly elected president’s pattern of sexist rhetoric, the second-term protests have, so far, been much smaller.
#TeslaTakedown
Protesters at a downtown Manhattan Tesla dealership decry Elon Musk's powerful role in the Trump administration, March 22. (Andrea Renault/Star Max)
To hear Musk tell it, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the advisory group Trump has tasked him to lead, is playing a crucial role in addressing what Republicans see as out-of-control spending.
“The country is going bankrupt,” Musk said last week in an interview with Fox News in reference to the growing national debt. “If we don’t do something about it, the ship of America is going to sink.”
But in response to Musk’s efforts to slash the federal workforce and pare back popular social programs, so-called Tesla Takedown protests have entered their fifth week at Tesla dealerships across the country. On Saturday, hundreds gathered at Tesla dealerships in Arizona, New Jersey, New York, California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and multiple other states.
Organizers are planning a “global day of action” at Tesla dealerships on March 29.
“Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he's using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it. We are taking action at Tesla to stop Musk's illegal coup,” reads the text on ActionNetwork.org, a website that says it “empowers individuals and groups to organize for progressive causes.”
The protests against Musk’s actions as the head of DOGE have sometimes turned violent. Over the weekend, the FBI issued an alert warning that acts of vandalism, including gunfire, have occurred at Tesla dealerships in at least nine states. The FBI warned citizens to “exercise vigilance” and to “look out for suspicious activity” on or around dealership locations. On Monday, the agency announced it was creating a task force to investigate recent attacks on the company.
"The FBI has been investigating the increase in violent activity toward Tesla, and over the last few days, we have taken additional steps to crack down and coordinate our response," FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X. "This is domestic terrorism. Those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice."
Tesla Takedown organizers, however, have distanced themselves from any acts of vandalism.
“Tesla Takedown is a peaceful protest movement. We oppose violence, vandalism and destruction of property. This protest is a lawful exercise of our First Amendment right to peaceful assembly,” Action Network said on its website.
‘Hands Off!’
Another test of the strength of the protest movement against Trump will come on April 5, when a coalition of liberal groups is planning nationwide demonstrations, including one at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They’re taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them,” Indivisible, the organization running the so-called Hands Off! protests, said in a social media post.”
Will the demonstrations draw enough people to have an impact on Trump’s agenda? Not according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years," Leavitt told USA Today last week in a statement. "President Trump will not be deterred from delivering on the promises he made to make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers across the country who overwhelmingly reelected him.”
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AOC, Sanders erase Biden as progressive movement moves on
David Weigel
Mon, March 24, 2025
SEMAFOR
The Scene
DENVER, Colo. — Now we know what they really thought.
On Friday afternoon, at the biggest rally of his political career, Sen. Bernie Sanders encouraged some 32,000 people here to organize against “oligarchy,” dismantle the private campaign finance system, and maybe run for office themselves.
He never ran as a Democrat — and they wouldn’t need to, either. The party hadn’t earned it.
“For the last 30 or 40 years, Democrats have turned their backs on the working class of this country,” said Sanders.
The Vermont independent shared the stage with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called for “a Democratic Party that fights harder for us.” They were introduced by Jimmy Williams, the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, who denounced Democrats for not raising the minimum wage or expanding Social Security when they held the House, Senate, and White House.
“For the Democratic Party to ever win back the majority, they have to represent the working class and not the corporate class,” said Williams.
The blunt talk barely made ripples in Washington, where Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are often covered as problems for their party. But as they reboot their movement, progressives who traded loyalty to Joe Biden for big policy victories — from the Green New Deal to clemency for Leonard Peltier — are breaking ranks with the Democratic Party and its feeble brand. Sanders is stepping up efforts to recruit Democratic and independent candidates, and Ocasio-Cortez is taking a larger role in responding to the Trump administration.
And unencumbered from their 2024 task — to make a progressive case for Biden, and then, for Kamala Harris — they are no longer selling his presidency as a success.
Know More
When he secured the 2020 Democratic nomination, Biden made a deal with Sanders and other progressives, giving them a role in drafting the party platform and incorporating their ideas into his campaign and administration. To progressives’ surprise, he often responded to their direct actions; climate activists protested with Ocasio-Cortez for a New Deal-style “climate conservation corps,” and he created one by executive order.
“When it comes to domestic policy, President Biden probably would go down as one of the most effective presidents that centered the working class,” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times in January.
But Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza smothered progressives’ good will. In Denver, Sanders mentioned the former president just once by name, when he denounced Trump for maintaining “the horrific Biden policy of giving more money to Netanyahu to destroy the Palestinian people.”
Now Biden, who’s made just two public appearances since leaving Washington, is a non-factor in his party. His achievements, including trillions of dollars of infrastructure, health care and climate spending, are being pulled down by his successor. Democrats rarely talk about Biden’s role in those programs as they fight (and sue) to save them.
The erasure started before Biden left office, with Sanders crediting Trump’s victory to “Democratic leadership” that defended the “status quo” and lost working class votes.Sanders and other progressives had taken another tone during the campaign, defending Biden and his record. (So had Williams: IAPUT endorsed Biden, then Harris, in the 2024 election, and he praised “Union Joe” as the best president for labor in generations.)
“We came out of that economic downturn a lot faster than anyone dream we would have, and you can thank President Biden for that,” Sanders told a crowd in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on June 28 — the day after the disastrous CNN debate with Trump that unraveled Biden’s campaign and damaged Democrats’ argument that voters could overlook his age. “Biden’s policies, by and large, are for the working class of this country, and we’ve got to appreciate that.”
In conversations on Monday, progressive strategists said that there was no upside to mentioning Biden at all, even when defending programs he funded or created. In Denver, Ocasio-Cortez spoke more positively of the Democrats than Sanders did, praising the state’s senators and Democratic members of Congress by name for opposing the GOP’s spending packages.
“I want you to look at every level of office around you, and support Democrats who actually fight, because those are the ones that can win against Republicans,” she said.
The Scene
DENVER, Colo. — Now we know what they really thought.
On Friday afternoon, at the biggest rally of his political career, Sen. Bernie Sanders encouraged some 32,000 people here to organize against “oligarchy,” dismantle the private campaign finance system, and maybe run for office themselves.
He never ran as a Democrat — and they wouldn’t need to, either. The party hadn’t earned it.
“For the last 30 or 40 years, Democrats have turned their backs on the working class of this country,” said Sanders.
The Vermont independent shared the stage with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called for “a Democratic Party that fights harder for us.” They were introduced by Jimmy Williams, the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, who denounced Democrats for not raising the minimum wage or expanding Social Security when they held the House, Senate, and White House.
“For the Democratic Party to ever win back the majority, they have to represent the working class and not the corporate class,” said Williams.
The blunt talk barely made ripples in Washington, where Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are often covered as problems for their party. But as they reboot their movement, progressives who traded loyalty to Joe Biden for big policy victories — from the Green New Deal to clemency for Leonard Peltier — are breaking ranks with the Democratic Party and its feeble brand. Sanders is stepping up efforts to recruit Democratic and independent candidates, and Ocasio-Cortez is taking a larger role in responding to the Trump administration.
And unencumbered from their 2024 task — to make a progressive case for Biden, and then, for Kamala Harris — they are no longer selling his presidency as a success.
Know More
When he secured the 2020 Democratic nomination, Biden made a deal with Sanders and other progressives, giving them a role in drafting the party platform and incorporating their ideas into his campaign and administration. To progressives’ surprise, he often responded to their direct actions; climate activists protested with Ocasio-Cortez for a New Deal-style “climate conservation corps,” and he created one by executive order.
“When it comes to domestic policy, President Biden probably would go down as one of the most effective presidents that centered the working class,” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times in January.
But Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza smothered progressives’ good will. In Denver, Sanders mentioned the former president just once by name, when he denounced Trump for maintaining “the horrific Biden policy of giving more money to Netanyahu to destroy the Palestinian people.”
Now Biden, who’s made just two public appearances since leaving Washington, is a non-factor in his party. His achievements, including trillions of dollars of infrastructure, health care and climate spending, are being pulled down by his successor. Democrats rarely talk about Biden’s role in those programs as they fight (and sue) to save them.
The erasure started before Biden left office, with Sanders crediting Trump’s victory to “Democratic leadership” that defended the “status quo” and lost working class votes.Sanders and other progressives had taken another tone during the campaign, defending Biden and his record. (So had Williams: IAPUT endorsed Biden, then Harris, in the 2024 election, and he praised “Union Joe” as the best president for labor in generations.)
“We came out of that economic downturn a lot faster than anyone dream we would have, and you can thank President Biden for that,” Sanders told a crowd in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on June 28 — the day after the disastrous CNN debate with Trump that unraveled Biden’s campaign and damaged Democrats’ argument that voters could overlook his age. “Biden’s policies, by and large, are for the working class of this country, and we’ve got to appreciate that.”
In conversations on Monday, progressive strategists said that there was no upside to mentioning Biden at all, even when defending programs he funded or created. In Denver, Ocasio-Cortez spoke more positively of the Democrats than Sanders did, praising the state’s senators and Democratic members of Congress by name for opposing the GOP’s spending packages.
“I want you to look at every level of office around you, and support Democrats who actually fight, because those are the ones that can win against Republicans,” she said.
David’s view
Why does it matter if Democrats and progressives wrap up Biden’s presidency into a story of Democratic failure? It explains the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez project, which in part is about disentangling their politics from a toxic brand and turning it into an anti-establishment cause.
“Trump basically said the system is broken, and I’m going to fix it,” Sanders told me before his “Fight Oligarchy” tour began last month. “Democrats more or less said: You know, the status quo is not perfect, but we’re gonna tinker with it around the edges.”
The senator’s new electoral project is recruiting progressives to run against Republicans and beat them, whether they want to run as Democrats or independents.
“There are a whole lot of people, who voted Republican, who are not crazy about the Republican Party,” Sanders told me in Greeley. “Working-class Republicans don’t want tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to veterans programs.” In the story he’s telling, those voters did not have an ally in the White House who did the right thing for four years; neither party has answered those voters’ concerns.
But Republicans have not forgotten about Biden. During his address to Congress last month, Trump mentioned Biden, “the worst president in American history,” 14 times. In remarks to reporters, the president frequently blames Bidens for problems he didn’t leave him, like a stock market correction. The story Trump and the GOP are telling is that their party is delivering for the working class, rescuing it from the costs and failures inflicted by their last president and the Democratic Party.
Defeated parties have been here before. George W. Bush vanished from Republican politics after leaving the presidency in 2009; apart from a few “Miss Me Yet?” memes and Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama presidency’s anti-terrorism strategy, that team played no role in the Tea Party-era GOP rebrand. Republicans built space to attack their former president’s legacy, with conservative candidates taking down incumbents who had supported Bush’s Wall Street bailout. The party won the presidency again with Trump, who has mocked Bush as a failure.
Parties have also swung hard in the other direction. In 2021, when Trump was beaten but able to run again, his party retconned his presidency into a success. They were boom years, with no new foreign wars, undermined only by a deranged anti-Trump deep state and the COVID-19 pandemic. The few Republicans who criticized Trump over his handling of that pandemic, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, lost to him and endorsed him.
This was never going to happen for Biden, who left office when voters held a far darker view of the economy than they did in 2020. But it’s significant that the progressives are skipping right past it. Democrats’ argument about how they can win back working class voters might start with Biden, who implemented some big progressive ideas and watched more of those voters walk away.
Room for Disagreement
As Biden left office, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel called him a “remarkably consequential one-term president” who “orchestrated the best recovery in the industrial world” and “consolidated the break with the failed market fundamentalism of the conservative era that Trump began.” It’s the sort of analysis many progressives had of Biden — Gaza record aside — until the results came in from Pennsylvania on Election Night.
Notable
In an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Sanders said that Biden “should have done much better” to control the U.S.-Mexico border, and that “when the Democrats had control of the Senate, they did virtually nothing for working people.”
The best story on Biden’s first attempts to get back into the conversation and defend his legacy is this NBC News three-hander, which covers a meeting between Biden and the new DNC chair (inconclusive) and the ex-president’s brooding about how the party lost even after forcing him to give up the nomination.
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