Women march against Trump and Republicans in major US cities

Thousands of mostly young women in masks rallied on Saturday in Washington DC and other US cities, exhorting voters to oppose Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in the 3 November elections.

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The latest in a series of rallies that began with a massive women’s march the day after Trump’s January 2017 inauguration was playing out during the coronavirus pandemic. Demonstrators were asked to wear face coverings and practice social distancing.

Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, opened the Washington event by asking people to keep their distance from one another, saying the only superspreader event would be the recent one at the White House.

She talked about the power of women to end Trump’s presidency.

“His presidency began with women marching and now it’s going to end with woman voting. Period,” she said.

“Vote for your daughter’s future”, read one message in the sea of signs carried by demonstrators, who marched through downtown Washington to the supreme court. “Fight like a girl,” said another.

Dozens of rallies were planned from New York to San Francisco to signal opposition to Trump and his policies, especially the push to fill the seat of late supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before election day.

One march was held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, outside the dormitory where Bader Ginsburg lived as an undergraduate student. In New York City, a demonstrator wearing a Donald Trump mask stood next to a statue of George Washington at Federal Hall during the the women’s march outside the New York Stock Exchange.

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“We Dissent”, said a cardboard sign carried by a young woman wearing a red mask with small portraits of Ginsburg, the liberal supreme court justice whose death on 18 September sparked the rush by Republicans to replace her with a conservative, Amy Coney Barrett.

In Washington, Sonja Spoo, director of reproductive rights campaigns at Ultraviolet, said she had to chuckle when she heard reporters ask Trump if he will accept a peaceful transfer of power if he loses to Joe Biden.

“When we vote him out, come 3 November, there is no choice,“ said Spoo. “Donald Trump will not get to choose whether he stays in power. That is not his power, that is our power … We are the hell and high water.”