It was just another beautiful day in Los Angeles. People jogging, walking their dog with a coffee or smoothie in their spare hand, having brunch—and protesting. Hundreds of thousands turned out for joyous, sun-drenched No Kings Day demonstrations, dozens of them scattered all across the city and LA County on Saturday.
The thing that so many Americans don’t grasp is just how expansive greater Los Angeles is: a sprawling patchwork of neighborhoods and small towns spread across more than 4,000 square miles, each with its own vibe and population mix. This disconnect is true in normal times, but is particularly jarring when LA is the center of national news—as it has been since Donald Trump directed the National Guard to the city on June 7 in the wake of protests over ICE raids. Those images on social media and in the news of tear gas and burning cars in the days since? That was mostly happening in a small sliver of downtown, an area most locals rarely visit—to serve jury duty, maybe, or to visit an art museum. This past week, 98% of this city has been calmly and quietly going about its everyday business.
The difference, though, is that so many Angelenos are alarmed by Trump’s actions and stunned by the maddeningly out-of-whack version of reality being presented to the world. (I can’t tell you how many emails I got from friends asking if my family in LA was safe from the riots.) Sending in the National Guard, and later the Marines, to guard ICE agents as they stage their unpopular raids, and justifying constitutionally suspect measures by describing LA as a “trash heap” rife with criminals—well, the motivation to get out into the jacaranda-lined streets was strong. While hundreds of other actions unfolded throughout Saturday across the country, it would be fair to say that the stakes seemed particularly high in Los Angeles.
I started out my day in West Hollywood Park, the only protest site in spitting distance of both SUR (Lisa Vanderpump’s restaurant, made famous by the reality show Vanderpump Rules) and The Abbey (an iconic gay bar that inspired Chappell Roan’s hit song “Pink Pony Club”). Protesters gathered in two separate areas to cheer rousing speeches on everything from the intricacies of the US Constitution to LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights to immigration and LA’s rich multicultural mix. My favorite, a drag queen wearing fabulous white thigh-high boots, talked about her own immigration story, leaving the small crowd chanting, “Chinga la migra!” (Loosely translated, that’s “Fuck the border patrol.”) A pretty good portion of the protest signs I saw all through the day offered a play on ICE: “LA Heat Melts ICE” or “The Only Place I Want ICE Is in My Horchata.”
The noise of the crowd drowned out great chunks of the speeches, but the gist came through: “It’s exhausting how he wants it to be all about him, but it’s never been about him…. He is only able to rule through a show of force…. We will use this country’s system of checks and balances to stop him…. When it comes to court cases, he’s now the losing-est president in US history.”
A squad of volunteers handed out free water, COVID masks, and small American flags, turning the park into a rippling sea of stars and stripes—a reminder that patriotism isn’t the domain of one party. WeHo protest signs ranged from the truculent (“All Hail Donny the Tiny Dick Dictator”) to the trenchant (“Even the Gestapo Showed Their Faces”). The most popular might’ve been the image of legendary drag queen Divine sneering at a young Trump. Sadly, it’s photoshopped, but that only slightly detracts from its power.
Next on the trail was Los Feliz. The first thing that greeted my eyes was a throng of protesters standing on a traffic island joyfully singing along to Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.” There was no park here, so the large crowd—an eclectic mix of pierced hipsters, parents toting babies, and lots of people with dogs—distributed itself on all sides of the busy intersection. Protesters crossed the road back and forth when the lights changed and marched up Vermont Avenue (home to cafés and vintage clothing shops) and down Hollywood Boulevard, just below Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural landmark Hollyhock House.
This protest felt like a circus with endless sideshows. The sweaty, topless guy on a bike toting a huge wooden cross that said “Love One Another.” The dude dressed as a jester who pranced through intersections bearing a “No Dictators” sign. The Latino dad cosplaying Captain America, who told me he was leaving early because the suit had gotten way too sweaty in the 80-degree sun. But mostly it was about the cacophony coming from the passing cars, honking wildly as they went by. Drivers frequently waved and chatted with the protesters while stopped in traffic, or waved their own signs and flags back at us. It was almost its own parade on wheels—and what could be more LA than that?
At one point a stranger standing next to me confided, “After the week LA’s had, we needed this so much!” Then she looked across the street and laughed, pointing to a protest sign. “That is so true,” she crooned, reading it aloud. “Trump Is a Cunt.”
My final stop was Pasadena, up in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. This protest included residents from Altadena, which nestles nearer the range and burned so badly in the Eaton fire earlier this year. A blast of noise hit me as soon as I stepped out of the parking lot. (I confess: I left my car in a Trader Joe’s lot on false pretenses.) Dense packs of people marched in all directions on two of the city’s main streets, chanting and singing as they passed by such local monuments as Macy’s (the building is an actual landmark, listed in the Register of Historic Places), Target (it’s just a Target), and a few weed dispensaries. A gang of elderly people on mobility scooters whizzed by. A man behind me blowing into a conch shell nearly drove me to madness. Large groups of neighbors and multigenerational families congregated, showing off their signs. One precocious girl shyly held a “Save PBS Kids” sign. A boy who looked like a Leave It to Beaver extra posed for photos with his: “I’m Only 9 and I Know It’s Wrong.”
There were so many other No Kings events across LA County: in the South Bay town of Torrance, where a fourth-grade boy and his dad were recently deported; on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley; and even in fire-damaged Malibu, where people carried signs like “I Didn’t Survive the Palisades Fire to Put Up With This Shit!”
Downtown, a massive crowd gathered peacefully for hours, until late afternoon when law enforcement deployed tear gas, rubber bullets, and officers on horseback to disperse the hard-core remnant of the crowd. I never made it down there, though. I didn’t want to get heatstroke, like the woman I saw who’d collapsed in a heap, with friendly strangers gathered around her fanning her with their signs. And in fact, the only police I saw the entire day were the Pasadena traffic cops who stood in the heat directing the flow of pedestrians and vehicles, as locals walked by shouting, “This is what democracy looks like.”
I wish I could’ve made a sign right there that read, “This Is What Los Angeles Looks Like.”
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