All across the country, residents at odds with President Donald Trump’s executive orders are gearing up for city-wide protests Saturday.
Protesters in Gainesville will meet from noon until 2 p.m. Saturday at the intersection of Depot Avenue and Main Street. The 50501 Movement, one of the leaders of the nationwide protests, labeled Saturday “People’s Veto Day.”
“We want to be clear that there is a clear opposition to the Trump-Elon brigade,” said Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, who plans to attend the protest in her hometown.
The rallies are being organized by decentralized, everyday people according to Eskamani.
Saturday’s rally is one of several protests that have occurred since Trump took office.
Opposition to Elon Musk has been a recurring theme in protests, including one in front of the Florida Capitol that saw 75 people, many of whom were veterans, protesting Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts that reduced the size of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
And in Gainesville on March 7, students and professors protested federal funding cuts to research at UF’s Plaza of the Americas.
UF microbiology and cell science junior Lindsay Potts, an organizer of the event, said the protest was in objection to a slash in NIH funding to indirect costs, which cover payment for laboratory maintenance, utilities and support. UF’s negotiated rate of funding for indirect costs was 52.5%; it was cut to 15%.
“This is costing people their whole careers,” Potts, 20, said. “I know teachers who are announcing early retirements.”
Teacher salaries are being indirectly affected, Potts said.
“Money that was once meant for research equipment will be dipped into to pay teachers their salaries,” she said.
She said she thinks American science will slow down, at least for four years, but the long-term effects could be a generation of children discouraged from entering the field.
Though reports suggest his stepping down from DOGE could be approaching, Eskamani said she fears the damage is done.
“I don’t think his influence, his narcissism or bigotry leaves,” she said. “He’s also not the only ultra wealthy billionaire influencing Trump.”
Eskamani emphasized that a key part of Saturday's protests is a response to recent economic declines and the struggles the working class have and will continue to endure.
“We’re operating under the banner, “Hands Off!’” she said. “Hands off our Social Security, hands off our Medicare, hands off our government workers and hands off our democracy.”
Onursal Erol, a UF political scientist and lecturer, “knows a thing or two” about protest, particularly due to his Turkish background, he said.
But he said protests only do so much.
“It is nice that people are civically engaged in issues that are important in their hearts and minds, but they should also be running for offices, engaging their representatives,” Erol said.
Eskamani, a first-generation daughter of immigrants who was the first Iranian-American to serve in the Florida House of Representatives, said she sees the country’s potential.
“But now I’m seeing so much of that dissipate,” Eskamani said.