The rhetorical genius of the ‘Hands Off’ protests
With Saturday’s Hands Off protests against President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, Resistance 2.0 has arrived with a handy new slogan.
Held at more than 1,300 locations in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., the protests were organized by a coalition of groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Greenpeace, Human Rights Campaign, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, and others. Hundreds of thousands of people attended.
The “Hands Off” slogan lent itself to a simple but powerful image that gave protesters a ready-made framework for expressing their grievances against the current administration: posters bearing all-caps lettering reading “Hands Off!” with a red line dashed through the “O” for emphasis. Signs at protests across the U.S. read “Hands off our bodies,” “Hands off our schools,” “Hands off our Social Security,” and “Hands off our free speech.” It was both the name of the protests and the rhetorical scaffolding that protesters could make their own.
Unlike Trump’s first term, which was met by a massive Women’s March the day after his 2017 inauguration, Trump’s second term didn’t inspire an immediate protest movement. Musk’s slashing of government workers and agencies via the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), though, sparked organized protests at Tesla showrooms nationwide and provided a first look at the visual rhetoric of a new era of anti-Trump sentiment.
Many of the anti-Tesla protest signs featured pro-democracy messages and showed the image of Musk saluting at Trump’s inauguration with anti-fascist and anti-Nazi slogans. Those sorts of images and messages still appeared at Hands Off protests, but the unifying slogan streamlined the effort. These weren’t protests against an abstract threat of fascism, but against a current and ongoing expansion of executive authority.
The protests also came at an inflection point. Trump’s tariffs have sent markets into free fall and increased the possibility of a recession. Musk’s efforts, meanwhile, appear not only to be unpopular but also poison to his electric car company, which announced last week that sales were declining. All of this gave fuel to the first true protest of the Trump administration, at a time when Trump and Musk continue to push the bounds of their power.