8 million people forced Trump into hiding

On March 28, 2026, eight million Americans took to the streets in all 50 states in what organizers are calling the largest single day of domestic political protest in American history. More than 3,200 events took place across the country, from New York City to Driggs, Idaho, a town of fewer than 2,000 people in a state Trump carried with 66 percent of the vote. Nearly half of the protests took place in Republican strongholds. The protests went international, with tens of thousands marching in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, and London.

While the country rose up, Donald Trump locked himself behind the gates of Mar-a-Lago from morning until night, skipping CPAC for the first time in a decade and making no public appearance. His official schedule listed Executive Time, a closed-press fundraiser, and dinner. He did not even go to his golf course. Instead, he sat on his phone posting about TrumpRX, attacking Letitia James, pushing war escalation on Iran, and raging at his own Republican senators.

The Breakdown:
Eight million Americans protested across all 50 states in more than 3,200 events
Nearly half of the protests took place in Republican strongholds including Texas, Florida, and Ohio
Rural communities that had never hosted a political protest before showed up for the first time
Protests went international with tens of thousands marching in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, and London
Trump locked himself inside Mar-a-Lago for the entire day and made no public appearance
He skipped CPAC for the first time in a decade after cracks in his base became visible
At CPAC, the crowd cheered when asked about impeachment hearings, alarming organizers
A 30-year-old military veteran and longtime Trump voter told reporters he feels betrayed
Trump posted on Truth Social during peak protest hours attacking enemies and pushing war escalation
Gas prices have climbed to $3.98 per gallon driven by the Iran conflict he chose to start
Oil prices are up roughly 40 percent from pre-war levels
Beef is up 15 percent and coffee is up 20 percent despite promises of cheaper groceries
Independent journalists provided the most thorough coverage of the historic protests
In San Francisco, demonstrators formed a human banner on Ocean Beach echoing Hands Across America
The Iran war is now one month old and has opened visible fractures in Trump's base

More on my daily Substack at: https://heatherdelaneyreese.substack.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm Heather Claney Reese, and you're listening to Hope for America, where every day I bring you the truth about our politics, our country, and the forces trying to destroy them. Together, we cut through the noise, expose the lies, and stay focused on what really matters, fighting for the survival of our country. On March 28, 2026, Donald Trump locked himself away behind the gates of his private club, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, while eight million people across the United States took to the streets to send an unmistakable signal to him and to all of his enablers, we will not let you continue to destroy our country. The message was clear. We are taking our country back in November. The collective action was hard for anyone to ignore, let alone the president of the United States, because while his administration described the protests earlier that week as Trump derangement therapy sessions, they clearly have made him more afraid than he's letting on about the future of his free-for-all presidency, and his ability to stay in office with such an overwhelming public rejection of his incompetence and corruption. And it wasn't just the sheer overwhelming scale of millions of Americans in all fifty states refusing to be silent. It was the individual people, the parents who brought their children to their first protests, the retirement age Americans who have given up their golden years to fight fascism the way their parents and grandparents did before them. The man who showed up with armfuls of American flags, not to sell, but to hand them out, to remind both children and adults that this is our flag, the flag of the United States of America, not the flag of Donald J. Trump. This is the flag steeped in history and symbolism, the one we are fighting for, so that we too can pass it to the next generation the way it was passed to us, with the understanding that this country belongs to the people who love it enough to fight for it. More than 3,200 events took place across the country on Saturday, from New York City to Driggs, Idaho, a town of fewer than 2,000 people in the state Trump carried with 66% of the vote. Nearly half of the protests took place in Republican strongholds. Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had more than 100 events. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah had events in the double digits. Rural communities that have never hosted a political protest before, from Seward, Alaska to East Glacier Park, Montana, they showed up for the first time. And the protests went international, with tens of thousands marching in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, and London, and in countries with constitutional monarchies, they called the protests no tyrants. In San Francisco, demonstrators formed a human banner on Ocean Beach. Their bodies spelled out a message designed to be captured by drone, an echo of hands across America in 1986, when five million people linked arms with neighbors coast to coast to fight hunger and homelessness. And forty years later, that same instinct, the physical act of showing up and choosing to stand next to a stranger because you believe in something bigger than yourself, brought out nearly twice as many people. And this time, what they were fighting for was the country itself. But behind every one of those numbers is a moment that no headline can capture. And I felt that undeniable energy at the No Kings protest I attended with one of my daughters near my home in San Diego. The one I attended, I originally thought had hundreds of people, and I later learned it had nearly 2,000. But my oldest was at the larger protest in downtown San Diego, where she volunteered offering first aid to fellow marchers. Police estimated 40,000 people showed up to that one alone. She told me the turnout was massive, and I believe it, because what I saw in mine was massive too, in a different way. It was not just the size of the crowd, though the turnout was huge for the area. It was what I felt walking through it. There was that man walking around with armfuls of American flags and handing them out to anyone who wanted one. And at one point, two little children walked up to him to get a flag, and he stopped and looked at them, and he said, This is your flag. And it brought tears to my eyes, and honestly, it is hard to even talk about now because he's right. That flag belongs to those children. It belongs to every child in this country and to every future generation for hopefully thousands of years to come. And the signs were incredible too. Some were deeply serious and some were completely inappropriate and made me laugh so hard I could barely keep walking. I'm including some of them here in the video so you all can see them. People got creative because we resist in all different ways. And every single one of those signs was perfect. I saw people of every kind, families with young children, couples with their dogs, what I have started calling resistance dogs. People who clearly came alone and found community once they got there. I walked through the whole thing, trying to read as many signs as possible, and also trying to thank every single person I could for coming out because it mattered. Every one of them mattered. As I watched cars go by, horns blaring in support, my emotions ran in circles. I got angry, angry that this is how children have to spend their Saturdays. I get angry that parents are giving up time they could be building memories with their families to stand in the sun holding signs because their government has failed them. Trump has already stolen so many years from so many people. And I get especially angry when I think about our retirement age community members. They should be spending time with grandchildren, exploring, relaxing, enjoying the beauty of the country that they helped build. They have carried us this far, and instead of resting, they are back on their feet in the streets, fighting another unjust war, just the way they fought against the war in Vietnam. Only this time they know exactly what is on the line. They know what they are fighting for because they have seen what happens when people do not fight. And they also know how difficult it is for so many people right now, not just politically, but personally. When you realize that friends you have aligned with for decades, people you trusted have been lost to something that looks and feels like a cult. Or when you start to see that people you thought cared about the world and about each other, they turned out to be more self-centered than you ever imagined. And yet you turned your grief into action. You spent your Saturday standing against evil. You made your sign and you put on your resistance shirts. And you rallied your friends and your neighbors and you gave up your day to fight for this country. I am angry that you had to do that. And I'm so thankful that you did. I try to speak to as many people in the retirement age group as possible when I go to these events because there is so much that they have seen and heard and lived through that many of us have not. And I keep thinking that maybe one of the reasons we ended up here in this moment, in this version of our country, is because somewhere along the way we stopped listening to the storytellers, the ones who told the warnings and the lessons we needed to hear about fascism, about keeping ourselves safe, about what to look for when danger is creeping in, the way that our ancestors passed down knowledge. And as much as they have evolved over centuries and into modern times, the purpose has not changed. We need the lessons from the past more than ever. And I am hoping to continue to learn and share so that together we can start rebuilding that much needed safety mechanism, the one that warns us, that protects us, and that reminds us who we are and how far we have come. And while the country sent a message for the world to see, the president of the United States locked himself away rather than confronting the uprising happening all around him. According to the White House, his official schedule for that day listed three items executive time at Mar-a-Lago, that was beginning at 8 a.m. A closed press MAGA Inc. fundraising meeting at 6 30 p.m. and a dinner at 7 p.m. That was it. He didn't even leave the grounds of his private club to go to his private golf course, which is what he does on nearly every other Saturday that he spends in Palm Beach. On March 28th, the day that 8 million Americans showed up, he stayed behind the gates from morning until night. He also skipped the Conservative Political Action Conference for the first time in a decade. CPAC, which held its final day in Texas on Saturday, has been his home turf for years, the one stage where he has always been guaranteed a standing obation and a room full of loyalists. But this year, even that room was not safe. The Iran War, now one month old, had opened visible fractures in his space that he cannot control with a rally speech. A 30-year-old Army and Marine Corps veteran named Joseph Bullock from Tyler, Texas, who has voted for Trump in every election since 2016, told reporters that he feels betrayed and no longer supports the president. Why aren't we helping Americans? He said. The economy's suffering. Why can't we focus on our own people instead of foreign governments? And on Fridays, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp tried to hype up the crowd by asking, how many of you would like to see impeachment hearings? The question was meant to rally them against the threat of Democrats taking the House. But instead, the crowd erupted in cheers. And Schlapp shook his head and said, No, that was the wrong answer. He asked again, and they cheered again. Either the crowd that CPAC attracts is not paying close enough attention to understand what they were cheering for, or some of them genuinely want this president impeached. And at this point, both explanations should concern the Republican Party. That is why the president could not risk standing in front of that room and hearing something other than applause. So he did not show up at all. But while he made no public appearance, he was not entirely silent. He was on his phone between 3.36 and 3.37 p.m. right as the peak protest hours were winding down. Trump posted multiple times on True Social in rapid succession. He shared a promotion article about his Trump RX website. He posted about another criminal prosecution referral against a woman he is obsessed with. New York Attorney General Letitia James. He shared a Washington Post opinion piece with the headlines assuring his followers that he is not losing his nerve on Iran. And he posted a demand and the Senate filibuster calling his own Republican senators weak and ineffective, and declaring that the Democrats are crazy. Earlier in the day, he promoted a Fox News appearance about the importance of hitting Iran hard. That is what the President of the United States did on the day his country rose against him. He did not lead, govern, or listen. He sat in his private club, promoted himself, attacked his enemies, pushed for war escalation, and raged at his own party. Not one word about the protests. And the more he posts things like the Democrats are crazy, the more the rest of the country can see who the unhinged one really is. This is a man hiding from the consequences of his own failure. And the country he is failing showed up on a Saturday to make sure he knows it. Because at the heart of all of this is a president who only wants to hear praise, lies to the American people, and has never kept a single promise he has ever made to them. He will never truly grasp the depths of the anger, heartbreak, or exhaustion that drove people out of their homes and onto the sidewalks. But if he ever wanted to try, he should start with what he said when he was running for re-election. He promised no new wars. We are one month into a war with Iran, a military operation in Venezuela, and one he has said is coming to Cuba soon. He has threatened Greenland, Canada, and Mexico, among other nations. He promised cheaper gas, and gas prices have climbed to$3.98 a gallon as of the recording of this video and are rising driven by a conflict he chose to start with oil prices up roughly 40% from pre-war levels. He promised cheaper groceries. Beef is up 15%, coffee is up 20%. He promised to release the Epstein files. He has not released them. And at this point it is painfully clear to anyone paying attention why. And for a lot of the people who voted for him, his more loyal followers, these broken promises are becoming impossible to ignore. And yet, even as the cracks in his support deepen and the evidence of his failure mounts, much of the media still is not telling the full story. The scale of what happened on March 28th was historic. Protests in all 50 states, more than a dozen countries, and an organizer's estimating it as the largest single day of domestic political protest in American history. But the coverage from major corporate outlets did not come close to matching what took place. The journalists who got it right, the ones who showed up and reported on the full scope of what was happening, were largely independent. Joy Reid, Don Lemon, Jim Acosta, to name just a few, all three of them came from major corporate networks. And all of three of them, for various reasons, are now independent. And I know that their exits from those networks must have been incredibly difficult, but I want to say something directly. Their independence is a gift to the rest of us. Without independent journalists like them, writers and commenters like me would not have access to the real sourced non-propagandized information that makes this work possible. So if you're able to support independent media, not just me, but the ones on the ground investigating and keeping us informed with integrity, please do. Paid memberships allow us to continue this vital work during these critically fragile times for our country. We are at a crossroads where we will be deciding the future of this country for decades to come this fall. And we need to make sure those bringing us evidence and fact-based news are in it for the long haul. I also want to share a reminder that I am strictly funded by my readers. I do not take sponsored money and I do not do brand partnerships, nor do I accept direct advertising revenue. That is a deliberate choice because it allows me to write with complete independence without any outside influence on what I say or how I say it. So if you ever see my name or likeness associated with a product or service, please know that it is not me. I do not endorse products. Being around so many who see what is happening and who are part of the resistance and who want a better world for our children and grandchildren gave me life while I was at the No Kings rally. It reminded me why I do this and why this work is so important. So thank you all for being in this fight with me, for allowing me to write my nightly posts and to bring you these videos. I'm grateful for every single one of you. Saturday was a good day. Millions of Americans spent their day standing in the sun, carrying flags, holding signs, bringing their children and their parents and their neighbors because they still believe this country is worth fighting for. They are right. And in November, we're going to prove it. And that is why I still have hope for America, and you should too. And remember, no matter how dark the days get, I'll be here every single day, and together we will always have hope for America. I'll see you tomorrow.