By ARNIE ALPERT, Active with the Activists

Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace. Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.

CONCORD—When I arrived at City Plaza in downtown Concord a bit before noon on Monday, there were already dozens of people milling around, many of them carrying handmade signs.

 It was Not My Presidents Day, and most of the signs were aimed at Donald J. Trump and his new best buddy, Elon Musk. “Stop the Coup.” “Impeach.” “Federal Workers Make American Great.” By noon there were about a hundred people gathered, and by 12:30, I counted about 200.

It was the second demonstration called by a pop-up group, the local branch of 50501, which aimed to hold demonstrations against Trump and his Project 2025 agenda in 50 state capitals on February 5. They did pretty well, holding actions in dozens of cities, including Concord.

Danielle Zobel, a Manchester resident, was one of the organizers, a role that’s new for her. In fact, February 5 was the first protest she had ever attended. But the Trump administration’s agenda got her aroused enough to take to the streets.

“The DEI rollbacks are a big part of it for me,” she said, “because so many of my friends and family fall under that. I fall under that as a woman, but I have friends and family that are Black. I have friends and family that are Latino. I have friends and family that are LGBTQIA. My daughter’s fourteen. She’s going to be going into her formative teenage years as her rights are going to be threatened as a woman, so it’s really important that everyone come out and just take a stand.”

There was no formal program, just some music on a P/A system that could be heard from close by, one person with a megaphone, and a table with water and hand warmers. It was a cold and windy day, so the hand warmers were welcome.

The plan for the day was “to make some noise, much like what we did on the fifth,” Zobel said. “We want to at least get a message out there and make people aware of what’s going on.”

The message? “We the people have had enough. We the people reject Donald Trump as our president.

“This is Not Our Presidents Day, and he’s taking on the authority and power of a king, and that is not his right. He cannot wave away the judicial system. He cannot wave away or sign away our rights as Americans. We don’t need a 51st state. We don’t need a Gulf of America.”

What we do need, she added, is a president who will protect Medicare, protect Social Security, protect seniors, protect veterans, and protect others who are on the margins.

Like Zobel, Lark Moinoto was wearing a yellow lanyard that said, “Event Staff.” Moinoto has been to protests since their mom brought them to a demonstration against the Iraq war when they were 11 or 12, but February 5 and Not My Presidents Day were the first ones they’ve helped organize. “Our goals are to uphold democracy, uphold the Constitution, remove Trump and Elon Musk through peaceful protest” Moinoto said.

By 1 p.m., there were too many people to count, but it seemed like the crowd was twice as dense as it had been a half hour earlier. In the crowd I found John Davis, a Tamworth resident, who told me he had just been laid off from his position at an international aid agency.

Davis has 28 years of experience with humanitarian organizations, mostly in Africa, as he said, “helping some of the most vulnerable populations on Earth when they’re affected by war, natural disasters and extreme poverty.”

In his most recent position, he was supporting programs in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Palestine. When Elon Musk and his team were unleashed on the Agency for International Development, most of that agency’s staff were put on administrative leave. When AID funding, approved by Congress, was frozen, the rapid impact resulted in “people not receiving urgent health care, women not receiving prenatal care, people not receiving HIV drugs and so forth.” At the NGO where Davis was working, 30% of the staff were laid off.

Davis said the United States had been providing 40% of global food, health care, and disaster assistance, which not only sustained millions of lives but also helped this country’s reputation. While international assistance programs can be improved, he said, this approach was more like a meat cleaver. The cuts, which Davis said are illegal, will be challenged, but the damage has already been done.

Chris Butler’s sign was about the cuts to AID, where her son is employed in Senegal. He’s supposed to be supervising 35 economic assistance programs, but he was ordered to clean out his office, his computer was taken away, and his funds were frozen. Butler, a retired guidance counselor from Meredith, said that marching around on a cold February day is not her normal behavior. To the contrary, “it’s very unusual,” she said. “It’s not just about my son. I’m really worried about where we’re going as a country.”

Grace Mattern, a resident of Northwood, was blunt. “There’s a coup going on, and not enough is being done about it,” she said. “People are dying. They’re already dying because of this. It’s so heartless and cruel and stupid.”

By mid-afternoon, the crowd had largely shifted from the plaza to the two sides of Main Street, where protesters chanted and waved signs at cars driving slowly by. Some chants, like “the people united will never be defeated,” were familiar from decades of leftist protests. But I was surprised to hear people chanting, “What do we want? Checks and balances!,” not exactly a radical slogan.

“Basically, it’s a coup,” said Paul Elsholz, who drove down from Thornton with a sign protesting government by the billionaires and for the billionaires. “Instead of bitching about all the stuff that’s going on, I feel good about actually feeling like I’m doing something about it.”

Lisa Beaudoin said she found the turnout encouraging. A long-time disabilities rights activist now serving as Executive Director of the NH Council of Churches, she was impressed by “an intergenerational assembly of people who are trying to stand up for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens who are under attack right now, our immigrant communities, our low-income communities.”

“Medicaid is under severe threat,” she emphasized, “because the House wants to pass a tax cut or maintain Trump’s earlier tax cuts. Of course, all of the attacks on our trans siblings are really alarming, and to see such a broad cross section of interest groups out standing up together and calling for justice and peace and compassion is a really powerful message.”

Judging by the frequent honks from cars driving by on Main Street, the message was well received.Some signs carried simple messages, like “Dump Trump.” Others, like “Make Fascism Wrong Again,” “Curb Your DOGE,” and “Deport Billionaires Not Immigrants,” had an ironic twist.

Daniella Wenzel’s sign was wordier than most. She wrote out a new set of lyrics for “Bella Ciao,” a song from Italy’s anti-fascist resistance. “Oh all you rebels, oh take me with you, bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao,” her sign sang out.

“I came today to support the cause of what is going on right now,” Wenzel said, “because we cannot have fascism in the world ever again, not in America, not anywhere else, not in Europe.” Having grown up in East Germany before the Wall came down, she knows a thing of two about repression. “I know what it’s like to be controlled and regulated and spied upon,” she said, “I came to America because of the incentive of freedom, and we cannot lose that.”

On Not My Presidents Day in Concord, she was not alone. When I asked a group of four pedestrians if they had been to the demonstration, they said they hadn’t, but one of them stopped long enough to offer his support. “What we’re facing is a real challenge to democracy,” he said.

A mile away, the ACLU held a “Presidents Day People Power” meeting at the West Street Ward House with about 70 people present. “Together,” the ACLU said in a handout, “we’re standing up against President Trump’s dangerous overreach and defending our civil rights and liberties.”

Devon Chaffee, executive director of the New Hampshire branch, said the national organization has been preparing legal responses to Trump’s initiatives since well before the election. “The Trump campaign was not secretive about the policies that it planned to enact,” she said. The day after the election, the New Hampshire ACLU staff “came to the office and sat around the table and were ready to dive in.” Within an hour of Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, ACLU lawyers were in federal court in Concord claiming the order was a blatant violation of the 14th Amendment. Last week a judge upheld the ACLU position.

The organization is also providing “Know Your Rights” trainings and organizing members to take action on issues including immigration, trans rights, stopping DOGE assaults on public services, and defending public education. Last week they were back in federal court, challenging the Trump executive order banning transgender girls from school sports.

At the West Street Ward House, attendees clicked on the QR codes printed on handouts to send messages to Congress and sign up for further action alerts.

Back at City Plaza, the crowd had thinned out by 5:30 PM, leaving about 30 people waving signs on both sides of Main Street. As she was cleaning up by the archway, Danielle Zobel said the highlight of the event was “the sheer number of people that showed up and the people that drove by kind of showing their support,” especially in light of the frigid weather. The 50501 group is planning more protests, she said, using messaging apps to communicate with each other.

They have a Facebook page and are building a website. A new grassroots organization is just getting started.

“If people want to,” Lark Moinoto said, “any time they have, go out, have a sign, go in front of your town hall or some other easily accessible area and hold a sign for an hour or two. It makes a difference.”

Meanwhile in Keene’s Central Square, about 100 people braved the chilly weather to send the same message as their Concord counterparts, according to Kristen Petricola, one of the 50501 organizers there. “New Englanders are a hearty bunch steeped in resistance to tyranny,” she said.