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As bad as it is, there are parts of the country where the damage already done by Donald Trump has not yet sunk in. But, as I discovered, Washington, D.C., is not one of them.

On Presidents’ Day, walking down the Capitol Mall, I came across a huge crowd, out in freezing weather, protesting the firing of federal employees. On the Metro a couple of days later, a young woman boarded the train and sat alongside me, carrying a sign “NIH Research Saves Lives.” Curious, I paused the book I was listening to and asked her what was going on.

She told me she’d just been summarily fired as a scientist at the National Institute of Health. After working for four years as a contractor, she’d been invited to become a federal employee and was serving her first year of probation at NIH, during which she’d personally received five awards for outstanding research on mental health. Then, out of the blue, she and her entire team received a pro-forma email from Musk’s DOGE telling them they were fired because their work was not important. Yet, as she pointed out, there’s no government work more important for public health than ongoing research by scientists at NIH and CDC on chronic diseases and possible cures. We were only able to produce a COVID vaccine so quickly, for example, because of the years of research previously done at NIH.

A couple of stops later, she got off the subway, headed to another protest in front of the Health and Human Services Agency, now under the helm of vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I regret I didn’t get off the train with her.

And I’ve been wondering ever since: What’s it going to take for the rest of us to get off the couch and take to the streets in protest against Donald Trump? After only one month, it’s clear that he’s more dangerous than we feared. He makes no bones about his intentions to destroy democracy. This week, he tweeted: “Long Live the King!” And he’s not kidding.

Consider first: Trump assembled the most unqualified gaggle of misfits possible to form his Cabinet, every one of them pledged to destroy the very agencies they’re supposed to lead. And over all of them he empowered Elon Musk, an unelected madman, to gut the federal government.

Musk may be the wealthiest man on the planet, he’s also the dumbest. He fired hundreds of employees at the Department of Energy without realizing their job was to protect our nuclear weapons stockpile – and then had to hire them back. He fired dozens of employees at the Department of Agriculture, only to learn they’d been working on bird flu – and had to rehire them, too. In the wake of three recent plane crashes, he fired hundreds of critical workers at the FAA. He bragged about saving $8 billion by shutting down a diversity office at ICE, but later admitted the program was actually funded for $8 million, not $8 billion. And he promised to eliminate FEMA – which might be fine, until the next hurricane hits. Musk himself should be fired for incompetence.

Meanwhile, Trump swings his own wrecking ball. He ordered an end to birthright citizenship, guaranteed in the Constitution. In violation of federal law, he fired 17 inspectors general and the watchdog head of the Office of Special Counsel. He took over the Kennedy Center, started rounding up undocumented workers and sending them to Guantanamo Bay, started a new trade war with Mexico and China, and banned the AP from White House briefings because they won’t call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

On foreign policy, Trump upended 80 years of American support for democracy by embracing Vladimir Putin, spouting Kremlin propaganda and blaming Ukraine, not Russia, for starting the war.

And the list of outrages grows every day. What more evidence do we need? Trump must be stopped now.

How? One thing for sure: spineless Republicans in Congress won’t do it. Neither will Trump’s flunkies on the Supreme Court. Massive public protests are the only answer. In 1968, demonstrations by millions of Americans stopped the war in Vietnam. More recently, crowds stopped Bibi Netanyahu from gutting the Israeli Supreme Court and drove Syria’s Bashar al-Assad from power.

Americans must hit the streets now to stop Donald Trump while we still have any democracy worth saving. I don’t know who will step up to organize such mass protests, but once the call comes – I’m ready to march.

(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)

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