Millions March & Spicer's "Alternative Facts"

500,000+ marchers gathered on the National Mall in D.C.

Throughout the course of the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump spent a lot of time boasting about having built a populist movement.

But yesterday was a rude awakening for The Grabber-in-Chief as he and other conservatives got a first-hand lesson in just what a genuine populist movement really looks like.

One that couldn't simply be dismissed with fake news.


Less than 24 hours after being sworn into office in front of a crowd estimated to be less than half of the 1.8 million who came out to see President Obama sworn in back in 2009, millions of people around the world took to the streets of cities and towns large and small to march in support of women and express opposition to Trump's election, conduct, statements, policies and Cabinet choices.

Aside from major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington D.C., cities like Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, Sacramento, Nashville all saw sizable turnout that some estimate could be as high as four to five million people nationally.

It could be higher, there were over 600 different marches in the U.S., including 51 in California alone - there were marches on every continent of the globe in places like Paris, London, Berlin, Melbourne, Australia as well as in New Zealand and Nigeria as well.

And contrary to commonly held assumptions about America being divided by conservatives in the mid-west and south, and pockets of "liberals" ensconced in large urban cities and on both coasts, as a Twitter user named Mel noted in a Tweet, "Don't ever tell me that Arkansas doesn't care. Don't write us all off as ignorant rednecks. We are out here. #Women'sMarch" reminding people that folks in "Red States" like Arkansas also came out to march on Saturday.

Another Twitter user named Diane Kaplan from Anchorage, Alaska observed, "Largest crowd I've ever seen in 33 years in Anchorage and it's 15 degrees out and white-out conditions."

Thousands gather in front of the State House in
Trenton, NJ on Saturday morning.

It wasn't nearly as cold as that on Saturday morning in Trenton, New Jersey but it was still a cool and damp January morning.

I was up at 7am and picked up my 82-year-old mother and two of her friends from Princeton, an elderly Jewish couple, as well as my mother's neighbor from across the hall - an elderly Jewish woman.

We found ample parking in the lots outside the state office complexes and it was about a five-minute walk to the Trenton War Memorial where the march began with a rally and some speeches.

The march was orderly, well-planned and peaceful; it was the epitome of textbook non-violent resistance.

On the sidewalk as we followed the crowds to the War Memorial, a representative from the ACLU was handing out small blue cards with instructions on what to do if in case of being stopped by the police; which proved unnecessary as everyone was peaceful.

Marchers, including me, actually went out of their way to wave at the Trenton police officers who were guarding various intersections, and greet them and thank them.

By the time we reached the steps in front of the Trenton War Memorial, over 1,900 people had already packed the theater inside where the speeches took place.

An overflow room inside was also filled to capacity with another 1,000 marchers, but large speakers had been set up outside the building where the stairs and plaza in front were packed with marchers.

Crowds listen to speeches at the Trenton War
Memorial before marching.

While my mother did manage to make it inside the theater, I ended up outside on the plaza in front of the building as I'd lingered outside to take some photos of the crowd.

You can see my vantage point from the photo I took at the left where I stood near the rear of the plaza balcony next to the flagpole.

To my right and left hundreds of other people stood packed together listening to the speeches, and behind and below the plaza were thousands of more people stretching back over five hundred yards.

It's not easy to describe the feeling that I had being shoulder to shoulder with people of different ages, races, religions, sexual orientations and socio-economic backgrounds.

Any such differences were instantly rendered meaningless in the face of our common mission, not just to march.

But to stand up for women's rights and express our collective opposition to Trump.

There was a common sense of purpose, a feeling of optimism and reassurance after weeks of anxiety about Trump's winning the election.

While it was a March for Women, that issue was like a solid platform that held a wide range of progressive issues including climate change, mass incarceration, immigration policy, voting rights and racial equality.

I was standing behind a blond-haired white guy in his 20's wearing a gray sweatshirt with "Black Lives Matter" hand-written in black marker on the back - I was actually surprised at how many white people I saw wearing messages or holding signs supporting Black Lives Matter.

(Remember the elderly Jewish couple I drove to the march? They told me they had a Black Lives Matter sign alongside a Hillary Clinton sign outside their Princeton home - both signs were defaced.)

Sign I got from New Jersey Working Families

But there was also a feeling of humor and wit at the march too as people used creativity to channel their frustrations and anger over Trump and the extremist Republicans who've coopted our government through misinformation, voter suppression, character slander, fake news and gerrymandering onto signs.

But perhaps the most important thing about the march was that it was real and it was happening less than 24 hours after the inauguration ceremony.

During the speeches, which included Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman and representatives from the National Organization for Women (NOW), Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Democratic Party and various local grass roots organizations, people in the crowd were sharing updates on other marches taking place around the world.

It was a living, breathing expression of Democracy in it's purest form.

It was an unmistakable message, and a clear warning, letting the Republicans who control the White House, Senate and House know that they do NOT have some kind of blank mandate to do anything they want - and a reminder that Trump lost the popular vote by millions.

It was also a visual reminder to Republicans that Congressional mid-term elections are only two years away, and while Trump won the presidential election, his reprehensible behavior, massive conflicts of interest, refusal to release his tax returns, open embrace of bigotry and vilification of the press have ignited the progressive independent and Democratic voter base and brought them closer together.

As Madonna noted during a fiery speech from Washington:

"It took this darkness to wake us the f*** up."

Sean Spicer's "Alternative Facts" - MAGA!

It's common knowledge that the Republican Party, in cooperation with the Russian government under the orders of Vladimir Putin used intentionally fake online news stories as part of a broader effort to manipulate the outcome of the presidential election.

So it was laughable that new White House press secretary Sean Spicer had the gall to come to the White House briefing room on Saturday and literally lie.

Not just about Trump's inauguration attendance numbers being far less than President Obama's, but as the New York Times noted, he also lied about total Metro ridership on Trump's inauguration day and tried to dismiss the turnout for the Marches for Women that took place all over the globe.

Faced with widespread criticism from the media in the face of overwhelming photographic evidence and facts that exposed Spicer's claims as lies, quasi-delusional White House spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway was quickly dispatched to appear on NBC's Meet the Press this morning where she doubled down on the Trump administration's policy of ignoring truth and facts and defending Spicer by saying that he didn't lie, he "gave alternative facts."

Trump and his top aides can try and justify their lying all they want, they can even introduce a new term for it into the lexicon as Conway did this morning - but the millions of people around the globe who marched on Saturday know the smell of a lie when they hear or read it.

As the Trump administration begins it's first Monday in office tomorrow, you can be sure they'll be slinging a lot of "alternative facts" in the coming days as they try to downplay that fact that a majority of Americans (and millions around the globe) soundly rejected Trump on Saturday.
 
As Trump likes to Tweet, "So sad".

The Asterisk President

Well I can't say that I grinned, but I did manage to bear the entirety of Donald Trump's inaugural speech earlier today.

It wasn't the longest inaugural speech in history, William Henry Harrison spoke for a grueling one hour and 45 minutes on March 4, 1841.

Nor was it the shortest, that honor goes to George Washington's two paragraph speech for his second inaugural address.

After all of Trump's divisive campaign rhetoric and alienation of large segments of the American populace, many were expecting to hear something that at least remotely resembled a call for national unity from today's inaugural address.

But his roughly 20-minute speech turned out to be little more than a pitch to his base (the 38% of Americans who approve of him), a pitch that we've heard before.

From my perspective, it was mostly an unremarkable repetition of the exact same lofty campaign promises that Trump has used over and over during his campaign rallies.

And just like his often rambling speaking style, today's speech was laced with simplistic kinds of pie-in-the-sky promises and devoid of any kinds of policy specifics - lot's of colorful frosting but very little cake. 

There was no shortage of the vague platitudes or blatant hypocrisy that have become his hallmarks.

Kellyanne Conway rocks retro-Republican chic

On the one hand he opened the speech with lofty, almost pious assurances about power being returned to the people.

He talked about bringing back jobs, reigniting hopes and dreams and repeated the same promises he's made to his support base in the rust belt and rural regions of the country.

Trump assured the crowd that, "We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, and never do anything about it."

But then just hours after making those comments, as Alan Pyke reported for ThinkProgress.org Trump sat down with congressional leaders and promptly revoked a cut in fee rates for mortgages that the Department of Housing and Urban Development passed eleven days ago.

The cut in fee rates would have saved mostly poor homeowners with loans insured through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) up to $500 a year and would have made it easier for homeowners with poor credit to obtain mortgages.

How many of the millions of Americans who have FHA-insured mortgages voted for Trump?

And remember folks, he did that just hours after taking office; try to imagine what next week is going to be like.

During the speech he also spoke of building roads, bridges and infrastructure, but how's he planning to do that with a do-nothing Republican congress that vilifies any type of government spending that isn't related to tax cuts for the 1%, military spending, or tax-payer funded subsidies for fossil fuel companies?

Is he aware that he's inheriting THE most unproductive congress in American history? The same one that totally rejected President Obama's proposals to pass a huge infrastructure spending bill (to do the same things Trump promised) and put Americans to work? 

Trump supporters cheer as Republican congressman
prepare to try and gut their Social Security

Instead of offering up an optimistic view of the country, he went back to his vision of a nation on the verge of sinking into the abyss.

The unemployment rate is the lowest in 40 years, the economy has been steadily growing and crime is the lowest it's been in decades, but as he did in his frightening speech at the RNC convention, he once again painted a dark and bleak picture of America.

As he spoke of crime, drugs and inner cities on the verge of the Apocalypse, Trump channeled his inner Dirty Harry and boasted, "This American carnage stops right here."

Remember that's from the same guy who pledged to revoke the federal ban on guns in school zones.

Oh and speaking of "American carnage", according to statistics and data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, in 2016 there were 385 mass shootings in the U.S. and 15,039 deaths related to firearms.

Over the course of the campaign, as Trump sought to push the buttons that energize the Republican voter base, he's been little more than a spineless lackey to the NRA - so I'm curious what his plan to stop the "carnage" is going to be.

As for the 3,780 American children between 0 - 17 years of age who were injured or killed by firearms in 2016, perhaps he's depending on a divine intervention; after all during the speech today he did say, "Most importantly we will be protected by God."

Let's hope so. We certainly won't be protected by this Republican congress who are essentially bought and paid for by the NRA; same congress who've killed over 100 pieces of gun control legislation introduced despite over 400,000 Americans losing their lives to firearms since 911

Nazi salutes were a common sign at Trump rallies

In the wake of Trump unleashing his inner Roy Cohn on Georgia Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis over the Martin Luther King holiday recently, one would have thought today's inauguration speech would've been an ideal opportunity for him to express some kind of desire for racial reconciliation or unity.

Instead he offered up a single vague sentence.

"When you open your heart to patriotism there's no room for prejudice." 

Maybe the white nationalists and Neo-Nazis who gave Nazi salutes at an alt-right conference in Washington back in November to celebrate Trump's election (or the Klan members who marched in celebration) will take that into consideration.

Trump neglected to mention the more than 800 incidents of hate and hate crimes that took place across the U.S. after he was elected; but perhaps the patriotism he repeatedly mentioned during the speech today will take care of that.

Speaking of patriotism there were some pretty strange authoritarian tones in the speech too, he exhorted the crowd to "Buy American and hire American." - despite the fact that the clothes that both he and his daughter Ivanka sell are made in other countries.

How all this is going to play out in a global economy remains to be seen.

Protesters in Washington, D.C. [Photo - Getty Images]

But it's clear that on the domestic front we're going to see varying degrees of chaos in the coming days - 95 people were arrested in D.C. during anti-Trump protests that rocked pockets of the city.

Trump's one day honeymoon is pretty much over, tomorrow hundreds of thousands of people in cities across America and the globe will be taking part in various extensions of the Women's March on Washington - including your's truly.

The mobilization of a sustained, nationwide progressive opposition to Trump and the Republican Party really starts tomorrow morning.

It's been a long week at work and I really wanted to sleep in on Saturday, instead I'm getting up at 7am to meet up with my mother, sister, niece and friends of the family to head into Trenton to march.

As President Obama reminded us, Democracy isn't easy, it's hard; and it's going to take hard work to unravel what's taken root in Washington and in state legislatures across the country.

For thousands of Americans, Saturday is a work day - I'll let you know how it goes in Trenton.

But regardless, the tone of the Republican campaign, the flood of fake news, the interference in our electoral process by Vladimir Putin and Comey's release of an FBI letter days before the election alleging evidence about Hillary Clinton's emails that turned out to have been nothing leave a dark cloud of illegitimacy over the man who was sworn into office today.

And as former White House ethics lawyers Richard Painter and Norm Eisen discussed on an episode of NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross the other night, Trump's conflicts of interests related to his businesses are so extensive and unknown that he could very well find his time in office marred by investigations or charges related to violations of the Constitution.

He is, in the minds of many, a president with a large asterisk.