In Seattle, elected officials, punk musicians and media groups are making sweet music in defying Trump
Hundreds of people gathered in front of the United States District Courthouse on the morning of Feb. 17, protest signs in hand, in a demonstration of solidarity for Daniel Medina Ramirez, a 23-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant whose arrest on Feb. 10 has become yet another flashpoint pitting the residents of Seattle against the administration of President Donald Trump and the “America first” policies he espouses.
Ramirez was a participant in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program launched by former President Barack Obama for those who immigrated to the United States when they were young and want to stay in the only country they’ve ever really known.
The program protects people like Ramirez, who remains undocumented, from deportation while they work and go to school, provided their criminal record remains unblemished and they reapply for the designation every two years.
That’s why community members were outraged when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained Ramirez: According to his attorneys, he had complied with the program’s requirements, and the agents betrayed the assurances of the Obama administration that people like Ramirez would be protected in exchange for coming out of the shadows and registering with the federal government.
Peter Mielstrup stood in the plaza outside the courthouse, adjacent to a gaggle of volunteers slapping signs together bearing protest slogans. A number of people in Seattle seem to treat protesting like a sports-fan treats a Sounder’s game: They bought the T-shirt and show up to every one with the zeal of a true believer.
Mielstrup isn’t one of those. The gathering outside the courthouse was his first action.
“I felt it was time for me to start coming out and showing that the people in power do not represent me,” Mielstrup said.
He’s not alone.
Seattle’s residents, government and institutions have seized this moment in political history and put themselves squarely in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. People poured into the streets to express their opposition, rushed to the airports to protect their neighbors and raised money for organizations doing the work to keep the most vulnerable safe.
Mayor Ed Murray stood up for undocumented folks, defiantly announcing that he would cede federal money that goes to Seattle rather than cooperate with any “deportation force” that Trump sends this way. Attorney General Bob Ferguson answered the long-promised Muslim ban with a simple sentiment – see you in court.
The courts themselves interceded when Federal Judge James Robart issued a sweeping order halting the implementation of the ban, earning him the moniker “so-called judge” in a subtweet by the petulant resident of the White House who finally discovered what any middle school student in civics class knows: He may be president, but that does not make him king.
Seattle has assumed a central role in the resistance to the Trump administration, taking the spotlight and demonstrating through word and deed what a moral high ground looks like, and how Seattle, other places and people can effectively block the threat from the federal government.
“It’s really interesting. I think this is a unique moment,” said Knute Berger, a writer for Crosscut.com and an authority on Seattle history. “I don’t think it has an exact parallel.”
Resistance of the officials
Seattle has a long, proud history of protest born out of the strength of the labor movement around the timber and dock worker trades, “rough and tumble people,” as Berger calls them. That fire kindled anew in the 1960s and 1970s around the Vietnam War and presidency of Richard Nixon, died down and resurged around the economic populism of the World Trade Organization protests in the 1990s and Occupy movement of the early 2000s.
This moment feels different, Berger said, because it’s rare for the people and political establishment to find themselves aligned in opposing the federal government so broadly.
“Officialdom has not been part of the resistance,” Berger said. “You can go back to the anti-war period, the city was not an anti-war city, and state politicians were not anti-war politicians. This confluence of [Gov.] Jay Inslee, Bob Ferguson, Ed Murray and this kind of unity that the city council has shown, it’s pretty unusual.”
Indeed, it’s hard to get nine people to agree on anything, particularly when their politics and interests are as diverse as those of the Seattle City Council. The chambers sometimes become a stage for political grandstanding, prioritizing scoring points to the detriment of interpersonal relations.
But since the election, city councilmembers have gotten behind a massive event meant to help undocumented people get legal help, made Seattle one of the first cities to declare its support for Standing Rock and opposition of the Dakota Access Pipeline, going so far as to take city funds out of the project altogether by divesting from Wells Fargo. They embraced the title of Sanctuary City, even as they had to begin planning for significant budget cuts in retaliation from the federal government.
Opposition to the Trump administration became a focal point for this newfound unity.
On Feb. 7, when the council voted to formally break ties with Wells Fargo, several councilmembers demonstrated tension over verbiage in the law that set standards on criteria for Seattle to engage in future business relationships.
In his remarks, Council President Bruce Harrell addressed the “inside baseball” and asked his fellow councilmembers to direct their energies away from each other and toward policies of the federal government.
“When I see my colleagues and we start playing inside baseball as councils are wont to do, I am mindful of the fact that we are not the enemy,” Harrell said. “The enemy are the egregious actions of Wells Fargo Bank that we do not condone at all. Our enemy is the federal government’s ignorance relative to dapl project and what we stand for and what our values are.
“We have to always be mindful of who our opponent is,” Harrell said.
Resistance and rock ‘n’ roll
If one can say anything good about Trump, it’s that he has managed to offend so broad a range of people and stomp on so many sensibilities that the movement against him is forcing conversations about intersectionality and allyship that privileged groups have been able to sidestep when focusing on their specific issue areas.
Intersectionality is top of mind for Malia Alexander, a nursing student and musician in an all-female punk trio called The Dopers, to the point that she made it a focus of her resistance.
Tucked away in an industrial building in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, the band’s practice space is a dimly lit room that seems barely big enough to hold the music equipment and people it contains. Unsecured electrical cords snake along the floor, a trap for the unwary, and the walls are pinned with band posters, marked up set lists and a whiteboard where they’re planning the album they recorded on Feb. 19.
The women didn’t consider their band “political,” styling themselves “indie garage/rock ‘n roll/punk with a little Ke$ha,” writing songs about their personal lives and experiences. But when Robyn Walker, lead guitarist and lyricist, woke up on Nov. 9, she was sitting alone in a state of disbelief and the words and music came out onto the page.
Although they love the song, a pure punk anthem of dissent, the result wasn’t worth the inspiration, they said.
“How many people have to suffer for a shitty punk song?” asked Alyssa Javas, the group’s drummer and vocalist.
When she’s not rocking on bass with bandmates to their post-election jam “Fuck Donald Trump,” Alexander hosts salons called “Pence Against the Patriarchy” in her living room to raise money for groups with missions that the socially conservative vice president attacked while governor of Indiana.
The most recent iteration involved an acoustic music show, and the next will be a series of performances by gender-nonconforming comedians. Alexander makes food to share and encourages friends to put whatever cash they can spare into a bucket. The last event raised $320, which she donated to Planned Parenthood in Pence’s name.
The Dopers plan to throw a concert on March 9 at the Victoria Lounge with two other local bands, Ramona and Male / Female to celebrate Alexander and Walker’s birthdays and raise money for The CAIR Project, which collects money for abortion services, and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a legal organization that took the lead on helping people trapped in airports when the Muslim ban hit.
The moment provides the opportunity to look at resistance differently, to make it work for diverse groups with diverse needs, Alexander said.
“I’m more excited about that idea, re-envisioning what resistance looks like,” she said. “The left is so good at tearing itself apart, chasing after the middle ground. Radical new ways of thinking need to be welcomed.”
Resisting division
There may be no idea more radical to those energized in opposition to the Trump administration than putting down the bullhorn and opening up to the people who live in the sea of red outside Seattle’s deep blue city, but that’s exactly what Mónica Gúzman and her colleague Anika Anand propose to do.
The two Seattle-area journalists launched The Evergrey, an online newsletter and publication that seeks to help Seattleites connect with their city and their neighbors in new ways. They’re hosting a road trip down to Sherman County, Oregon with a busload of their readers to sit down with Trump supporters. The rural county, located two hours east of Portland, voted the inverse of Seattle, 21 percent for Hillary Clinton and 74 percent for Trump.
“What we knew was there is a really admirable curiosity that exists in Seattle’s people and character,” Gúzman said. “I don’t think we’re the kind of city that takes an answer and wants to settle on it.”
In the aftermath of the election, she and Anand fielded a deluge of emails and messages from readers expressing their frustration, confusion and stress over the outcome. Think pieces began flying thick and heavy from all corners asking a central question: If the election came down to the divide between blue urban areas and red rural ones, is it even possible to bridge that gap?
Gúzman believes both sides of the spectrum want to explore the concept, and the trip will be one stab at encouraging understanding, and perhaps catharsis, rather than stewing in pain and betrayal.
“We want to close that distance. And yeah, that’s the voice of the Evergrey,” she said.
Resisting apathy
It’s impossible to tell how long this level of energy and awareness can continue before people begin dropping off again, retreating into the illusory safety of apathy or shielding bruised emotions with cultivated ignorance. The “protest is the new brunch” mentality is draining, resistance time consuming and inevitable losses demoralizing.
Protests ebb and flow, rising up to meet new injustices and retreating in favor of the ongoing, quieter work of movement-building continuing on in the background.
“You can hold a protest march every weekend, and you’ll lose gas over time,” Berger said. “Terrible things happen and you’ll get a spike … I don’t think it’s necessarily sustainable in that it’ll happen at this pace.”
The month since Inauguration Day produced a remarkable surge of energy, galvanized by technologies that make it possible to bring together a disparate group of people in the amount of time it takes to type 140 characters. The test of Seattle’s movement will be whether or not people continue to meet, to plan, to organize and to resist the natural tendency to acclimate to the reality that for some is brand new, and for others is simply more naked in its oppression.
It feels sure that the Trump administration will not stop lobbing up balls to hit. Will Seattle continue to knock them out of the park?