A smorgasbord of homemade placards and posters and a crowd of 400 or more protestors filled the parking lot and overflowed onto the street outside Ulster County's Restorative Justice and Community Empowerment Center on Broadway in Kingston Tuesday afternoon. What seemed to be a very empowered community were there to voice opposition to the Trump administration's blitzkrieg of executive orders and other actions targeting ... just about everything having to do with the environment, international relations and equal treatment under the law. Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin were prominently featured as secondary villains.

The event was part of a nationwide day of protest organized by Indivisible, a national progressive group organizing against Trump and his allies since 2016. The Kingston rally was put together by local chapter Indivisible Ulster County.

According to chapter member Christine Dinsmore, the response to her group's call out exploded after Trump's nationally televised Oval Office confrontation and humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, here last Friday seeking U.S. support against Russia's invasion, now in its second year. Evidence of that could be seen in the many signs along the lines of “Trump is a Russian asset” and “Here's My Apology. Kiss My Ukrainian Ass.”

Other standout popular wisdom included “America is a No Kings Zone,” “Deodorize Politics – It's Smelling Awfully Musky,” and “Support U.S. Workers, Send Musk to Mars.” One sign simply read “No,” which its creator explained was “meant to save time. People are busy, you know?” Another, asked about the lengthy screed squeezed on her placard explained that she “could have used a billboard.”

Complaints of “dictatorship” and “coup” notwithstanding, the crowd was upbeat and cheerful when not booing speakers' descriptions of alleged MAGA perfidy, the atmosphere enhanced by the music of Tin Horn Uprising, a brass band that has become a regular feature of Hudson Valley political protests. A variety of costumes including an Abe Lincoln figure and a MAGA dragon were also present.

On a more serious and impassioned note, Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Community Center Executive Director Richard Heyl de Ortiz warned that “support for LGBTQ plus parents and students has been removed. There's been a chilling effect on schools and service providers right here in Kingston. The leading provider in our area of gender-affirming care scrubbed the mention of trans from their website. If you go to their website and you click on the URL that used to exist, you get an Error 404. So imagine what that's like. That's telling a whole group of our friends, our family members, our neighbors, they do not exist.”

(Heyl was referring to the Institute for Family Health, whose erasure of “trans” he placed at the feet of its “higher-ups” rather than locally, whose staff were, he said “honestly flummoxed.”)

The Rev. Evelyn Clark of Kingston's New Progressive Baptist Church was especially fiery at the podium, calling for a boycott of private businesses that cooperate with the Trump agenda. “This is the same old song being sung out of a different hymnal, from Jim Crow to affirmative action to DEI,” she said. “Whether it's black people or brown people, whether it's women or disabled people, it's sung by a people who are fearful of losing their power ... So we are demanding that companies and corporations stand up against the tyrannical rantings of an unchecked wannabe king.”

The gathering's concluding remarks came from Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger. “They are tearing down the basic support structures of society,” she said. “They are trying to criminalize the very idea of inclusiveness, mutual respect and common decency in order to impose their own narrow, selfish ideology. I want to assure you that here in Ulster County, we will continue to protect the vulnerable. We will continue to protect the environment. We will continue to protect public health. I promise you that Ulster County remains committed to inclusiveness, respect and common decency.”

When Kingston Wire happened to engage with Ulster County Democratic Committee Barbara Graves-Poller, who was present but not a speaker, she challenged our suggestion that the Democratic Party has been slow to respond to Trump's onslaught.

“All the electeds we have here and all the way up the chain are trying to govern and to resist fascism,” she said. As for protests, she said, “Community members know there's a shared anger and they're energized. So events like this are incredibly important.”