Americans ask 'Elon and Felon' to get their 'hands off' jobs, savings, education etc

TOI Correspondent from Washington: Agitated Americans gathered in the thousands at rallies before government buildings, at neighborhood parks, and even at street corners across the country on Saturday to ask MAGA billionaires to get their grubby "hands off" regular people's jobs and savings, their rights and freedoms.

"Elon and Felon" -- as one poster put it -- were the target of much anger and ridicule at more than 1400 “Hands Off!” protests nationwide organized by a coalition of progressive advocacy groups like MoveOn and Indivisible.

The demonstrations, the first coordinated ones after Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term just ten weeks ago, were aimed at sending a united message of resistance against MAGA policies such as federal job cuts , immigration crackdown , and threats to social security and medicaid funding among other issues roiling the country.

There was a palpable sense of anger at the rally near the Washington monument in the Capital, which has suffered massive job losses after Elon Musk 's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has brought a hatchet to cull the federal employees. Almost 50,000 people turned up for protests where organizers had anticipated a few thousand. Many held acerbic posters with putdowns like "Beware of DOG-E" and "They are eating the checks, They are eating the balances."

From "Hands off my Eggs" to "Hands off Canada" placards expressed resentment over a range of issues, even as tariff turmoil has enveloped the country. There is growing apprehension that a "Black Monday" will follow "Terrible Thursday" and "Frightening Friday," when the markets tanked by more than 10 per cent in the worst two-day loss in dollar terms.

Predictably, Trump surrogates dismissed the protests as a gathering of malingerers funded by Soros, Antifa etc.. The President was out golfing in Florida, where he reportedly won his second-round matchup of the Senior Club Championship to advance to the final on Sunday. Having further inflamed the country -- and much of the world -- with his tariff gambit, Trump posted this message on his social media platform: Only the weak will fail!

While Trump's MAGA base continues to back him, the President's overall poll numbers are starting to go south. On Saturday, the Trump-leaning Rasmussen's daily poll tracker showed the his approval rating at 49 percent while 50 percent disapproved of his job performance.

Meanwhile, immigrants were conspicuously absent at the Hands off rallies because of the recent crackdown on political protests, a right the Trump administration has said is reserved only for citizens. At one rally near Four Corners outside Washington DC, an immigrant bystander politely declined to hold a placard offered by a protestor, evidently fearing the worst. The placard read "Deport Elon."

Over the weekend, the State Department doubled down on its "take-no-prisoners" approach to illegal immigration, revoking all US visas to Southern Sudanese and cancelling issuance of new visas to South Sudan because of the country's tardiness in accepting deportation of its nationals.

Accusing the government of South Sudan of "taking advantage of the US," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said "Every country must accept the return of its citizens in a timely manner when another country, including the US, seeks to remove them."

Separately, the Trump administration on Friday suspended one of its own Justice Department lawyers who admitted in court that an El Salvadoran man was deported despite a court order that allowed him to stay in the US.

That spat is headed for a climax on Monday. The court has asked the administration to bring the man, who is married to an American citizen, back to the US by noon Wednesday. The Trump administration, which rushed to deport the man to El Salvador despite the court's order, now says it has “no authority” to make a sovereign nation release the man.