April 6, 2025
By the Gonzo Poltergeist
He wasn’t in D.C. watching the protests.
He wasn’t in a war room, crunching numbers on tariffs or fallout.
He was on the golf course.
As tens of thousands of Americans filled the streets this weekend chanting “Hands off!”—protesting everything from the latest round of immigration crackdowns to the DOJ’s Musk-friendly restructuring—Donald J. Trump was teeing off at Mar-a-Lago. The same president who once promised to be “your voice” seemed far more invested in perfecting his swing than confronting the voices roaring outside the gates of his own administration.
From coast to coast, the protests were impossible to ignore. Washington. Chicago. Atlanta. Denver. Portland. Los Angeles. A spontaneous uprising not just of activists and college students, but of nurses, veterans, exhausted Gen Xers with kids on their shoulders, and retirees who remembered the Nixon years and said, never again. The signs were simple—“Hands off our democracy,” “No to autocracy,” “We didn’t vote for Elon.”
Even across the Atlantic, crowds marched in Berlin, Paris, and London, waving American flags inverted in solidarity. A protestor in Trafalgar Square held up a cardboard cutout of Trump and Musk riding a rocket labeled “DEMOCRACY” into the sun. Another sign in Rome read: “America sneezes, Europe gets the flu.”
Back home, conservative media wasted no time firing back. Ben Shapiro called the protesters “emotionally unstable” on his morning show, adding that “crying because you lost is not a political strategy.” On Twitter, the MAGA machine went full tilt with #SnowflakeMeltdown and AI-generated memes of protestors being carted off by Trump riding a bald eagle.
But the tone wasn’t all mocking—some voices on the right sounded like they were hitting the wall. “At some point,” one could imagine a weary GOP strategist muttering into his bourbon, “you have to ask whether it’s still a movement or just a man golfing while the empire burns.”
And yet, for all the chaos, the White House press team remained quiet. No emergency statements. No televised responses. No acknowledgement beyond a pre-scheduled tweet congratulating Trump for “winning” his latest golf round against an economic advisor and “two European elites who couldn’t putt to save their continent.”
This, of course, is the point. When history is burning, distraction is strategy. Bread, circuses—and 18 holes. Nero had a fiddle. Trump has a titanium driver and a luxury bunker on standby.
So the question isn’t whether the protests matter. They do. They’ve rattled glass. They’ve woken the neighbors. But unless that noise breaks through the manicured hedges of Mar-a-Lago, it may remain just that—noise.
Filed from a dimly lit bar where the only thing stronger than the whiskey is the political debate.
