A few weeks ago, on Saturday, the 1st of June, a friend and I made the journey from our little town in West Wales to Cardiff. Our main goal was to attend the Stop Trump protest we'd heard was happening that day, but in true activist spirit we decided to book a hotel and make a weekend of it. Our Megabus didn't get into town until around midday, so by the time we had dropped off our luggage and made our way to City Hall Lawn, the march had already begun.
From what I can gather, the protest started with some talks on the lawn and then progressed into the march through central Cardiff, at which point my friend and I joined in. The march was accompanied by placards and megaphone chants, with a couple of police officers shepherding us along. The procession eventually looped back around to City Hall Lawn, where we stopped and listened to a few short speeches by members of various activist groups in Cardiff. Once those had ended, the crowd began to disperse and myself and my friend decided to head off.
I am giving this description here to illustrate that this was, all in all, a fairly standard protest. There was nothing particularly controversial or shocking about it, no milkshaking (sadly) and no significant police intervention. I had never expected the event to be huge or incredibly controversial, even before attending, which is why it came as a surprise to me to hear so many people respond negatively to it before I had even gone. When I mentioned to people that I was attending the protest, most of them were unexpectedly critical of it. This wouldn't come as a surprise if the people I spoke to were Trump supporters, but I knew for a fact that most of them ranged from being indifferent to outright despising him. So why would they be so disparaging of a protest that was against the very man they disliked? The explanations they gave were varied, but most were based in either a misunderstanding of the goals of the protest or a lack of belief in its effectiveness. In the list below, I am going to paraphrase some of the main reasons people had for objecting to the Stop Trump protest and why, in my opinion, the protest was still worthwhile.
Reason #1: "You do realise you won't actually stop him coming, right?"
You do realise that a great way to make a statement come across as painfully condescending is to start it with "you do realise", right? But seriously, I think that this comment stems from a misunderstanding of what "Stop Trump" means: it doesn't just mean "stop Trump coming to the UK on this particular visit", it also means "stop Trump's continued assault on the most vulnerable in society and the general far-right movement of which he is a part". Most of the people attending the protests were no doubt well aware that Trump would end up coming to the UK whether we protested or not (as evidenced by the fact that the London protest was scheduled for after his arrival). The aim of the protest wasn't to literally make Trump's plane turn around and go back to America mid-way across the Atlantic (although that would have been nice), but to create a show of solidarity that aims towards bringing a stop to the harm which Trump is causing overall.
Reason #2: "I don't want to give that man any of my time or energy."
On one hand, I respect the disdain for Trump evident in this comment. On the other hand, I feel like this once again comes back to a misunderstanding of the protest's aims. Stop Trump isn't purely about Trump, as counter-intuitive as that may sound. One of the things that struck me at the march was the diversity of the attendees, not just in terms of things like age and gender (although the march was very diverse in that respect as well), but also in terms of the causes they represented. There were people marching who were representing LGBT+ rights, anti-racism, Palestine, no borders, anti-austerity, women's rights, and so on. It was a great testament to the variety of people who have been brought together under the shared banner of opposing Trump - an aspect of the protest which Stop Trump seem fully aware of. On the Facebook page for the event, the details section contains the following statement:
"When we say "Stop Trump" we are saying stop discrimination, stop war, stop austerity, stop climate chaos, justice for Palestine, respect LGBT+ communities, refugees welcome, celebrate diversity, and resist the suppression of democracy and dissent."That's it, in a nutshell. The protest was fundamentally about showing solidarity with the people who Trump has hurt and has the potential to hurt the most, not about Trump himself.
Reason #3: "Trump just feeds off negative attention like this."
This comment makes me think of Trump as some kind of malevolent, blob-like entity that literally feeds off human emotions, growing stronger every time you so much as say his name - kind of like a reverse Tinkerbell. Mystical, emotion-eating ideas aside, I do think that this "don't feed the trolls" principle of not giving attention to deliberately controversial people does have some validity, but only in certain contexts. If, for example, you get some internet person making vaguely inflammatory statements in the comments section of a YouTube video, you might be perfectly justified in simply ignoring them. Their comments could be irritating and clearly an attempt at starting a fight, so not responding could in fact be the best response you could make. The same thing goes for creators (such as YouTubers - starting to see a theme here) who make unpleasant, potentially-harmful content that doesn't yet have a huge following. In that case, bringing attention to such a creator could very well help to build their audience and eventually end up spreading the ideas you initially wanted to critique. However, this approach does not work for Trump. For one thing, unless you have been living in an underground bunker with no Wi-Fi for the last ten years - and if you have, I envy you - then you will almost definitely know who Trump is. He is also already in a position of power, meaning that he can and will continue to cause harm, whether or not we "feed" him with negative attention. More than negativity, Trump feeds off silence. Ignoring Trump won't make him or his impact go away, so it is important that we speak up and express solidarity with the people he is hurting as often as we can. To be silent is to be complicit, and protesting is one way to break that silence.
Reason #4: "It's not going to make any difference anyway."
Ah, the big one. It's this lack of belief that I think keeps so many people out of activism, or in fact trying to make any change to the society we live in, and that is not a criticism of these people so much as it is of the system which makes them feel that way. I think people perhaps felt this especially strongly about the Cardiff protest, because it wasn't as large as the later protest in London and didn't receive as much media coverage (although it did get mentioned on Wales Online). I've already mentioned why the protest mattered in principle, so let me go over some of the more tangible effects I think this protest has had. For one, it showed solidarity with the marginalised groups Trump and his ilk repeatedly attack. I know I have mentioned this point before, but it's worth stressing. As a queer woman, whether or not someone supports Trump is an indirect litmus test for whether or not they support LGBT+ rights and, by extension, my rights. It's hard to articulate what a nice feeling it was to be at the protest and to be surrounded by people that were willing to stand up in defence of people like me, people who were not staying silent in the face of violence against LGBT+ people, among other marginalised groups. Of course solidarity is just a start, but seeing it displayed so obviously at this protest made me feel very hopeful, which is not something I feel often these days. Another point that some argue is that protests in the UK won't make a difference to events in America, but these protests are also a statement for our government that we are against their support of Trump, and their willingness not only to keep quiet while he enables outrageous human rights abuses but also to then roll out the red carpet for him when he visits the UK. It is my hope that protests like this will make politicians think more carefully about how they approach Trump in the future, even if it is now too late for Theresa May to do so. Finally, even if you think that none of this matters when it happens on the scale of the Cardiff protest, you should know that the event also raised money to transport people to the bigger protest which happened in London shortly afterwards. Most of these points that I've made apply to the London protest as well, if not more so.
If, before reading this post, you were unconvinced by the value of the Stop Trump protest in Cardiff, I hope that you are now at least a little bit more receptive to my reasons for attending, even if you haven't entirely come around to it. At the end of the day, most of us have so little political power in our society that we are left with only two main ways to create change: voting and protesting. Sometimes, voting just isn't enough. I felt that this was one of those times.
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