Revolution of Love: How America Welcomed Its New President

On January 20, Donald Trump took office as the President of the United States. Counting the number of people who attended the inauguration ceremony has already turned into a row between the media and the new administration — although, at first, the President agreed with a figure of 250,000, having noted that by sight it seemed like one million or even 1.5 million. Based on the number of trips in the Washington D.C. Metro, Trump was greeted not as actively as his predecessor (571,000 trips on the inauguration day in 2017 versus 1.1 million in 2009 and 782,000 in 2013). Still, we have to take into account that very few people voted for Trump in the capital itself (a little over than 4% of voters). The President’s address was in many ways a retelling of How to Make America Great Again — although at times it unexpectedly resembled a speech by Bane, an antagonist from one of the Batman movies.

The metro service also counted the number of trips during the Women’s March on Washington that took place the next day: a little over a million. The organizers reported 500,000 participants in Washington alone; there is also information about 400,000 participants in NYC and 750,000 in Los Angeles. According to the organizers, the march is not a protest against Trump being elected, but calls to protect the least privileged members of society. The protests took place in over 600 cities all over the world and had over 4,5 million male and female participants, many of them wearing knitted pussy-hats. Scarlett Johansson (“I did not vote for you <...>; I want to be able to support you. But first I ask that you support me. Support my sister. Support my mother. Support my best friend and all of our girlfriends”), Angela Davis (“The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance: Resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music”), and Madonna (“Welcome to the revolution of love. To the rebellion. To our refusal as women to accept this new age of tyranny. Where not just women are in danger but all marginalized people. <...> And to our detractors that insist that this March will never add up to anything, fuck you”).

The inauguration has stirred up all sorts of different people. Shortly before it started, 500 anarchists and antifascists caused a disturbance, their slogan being “Make racists afraid again!” They broke the windows of the Bank of America, McDonald’s and Starbucks, as well the the windows of limousines. However, it seems that their actions look insignificant compared to Saturday’s events.