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Elon Musk says Saturday’s protesters were “paid puppets.” That’s not what I saw.

Smart Again
Elon Musk says Saturday’s protesters were “paid puppets.” That’s not what I saw.


Thousands of demonstrators gathered outside City Hall in a protest against the Trump Administration in Los Angeles on Saturday.Jill Connelly/ZUMA

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Massive crowds of Americans took to the streets this weekend. In large cities and small towns, online, and even around the world, people voiced their discontent with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government.

My colleagues and I were there to report on the action.

To Musk and other Trump allies, though, the mass mobilization was evidence of something else: paid dissent.

Both Musk and former New York City mayor and (since-disbarred) Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, for example, think they found smoking guns when they shared videos of protesters who struggled to articulate their thoughts about Trump.

“ANTI-TRUMP & ANTI-MUSK PROTESTERS EXPOSED!” Giuliani wrote on X, alongside a video interview with a protester in DC. “Woke-Left protesters UNABLE to explain why President Trump is a Facist, pulls out a paper handout he was given with talking points AND still can’t explain himself!” In reality, the protester simply appeared uninterested in being on-camera, saying, “I am not really into interviews,” before adding Trump “does everything he wants without following laws.”

Meanwhile, the protester’s friend seemed more comfortable engaging, accurately telling the interviewer—who appears to be someone by the name of Ted Goodman, an intern for the right-wing Daily Caller website—Trump is “trying to control the media,” and that his policies are tanking American tourism. At that point, the interviewer quickly replies, “I don’t want to get into a tourism debate,” and then pans back to the protester who appears uncomfortable on-camera.

Musk chimed in on the same video: “The problem is the puppetmasters, not the puppets, as the latter have no idea why they are even there,” he wrote. “He had to read the paper he was given to understand the sign he was holding,” Musk wrote over a video of a protester explaining what his sign—which said “End the kakistocracy”—meant. Musk also shared several posts from the Wall Street Apes account on X, which has more than 929,000 followers, and right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, who has more than two million followers, alleging—without evidence—that the protesters were paid.

Conspiracy theorist and journalist cosplayer Laura Loomer also alleged that “the radical left is BUSSING IN PROTESTERS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY TO CAUSE CHAOS IN WASHINGTON DC” who she claimed were “pro-Hamas,”an apparent reference to the fact that some were holding Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs.

Characterizations of Saturday’s protesters as bumbling and lacking any conviction could not be further from what I saw in my hometown of Marshfield, Massachusetts. With a population of about 25,000, organizers say about 500 people turned out to protest, a notable size for a town that’s more red than the reliably blue state.

The dozen or so people I spoke to they all clearly explained their concerns about how Trump and Musk’s chaos would affect their daily lives and those of other Americans. Jim Carson told me he was worried about how he would live if Musk cut Social Security. Christine, a protester who declined to provide her last name, said she was worried Trump’s tariffs would jack up the costs of gloves and masks she uses for her work in the medical field. Others were disturbed by the administration’s attacks on scientific and medical research; mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); and the dismantling of USAID. One protester said she had historically been a conservative Independent before registering as a Democrat on Friday.

To the extent that they were “bussed in,” as Loomer claimed, some drove over from the nearby towns of Pembroke, Norwell, and Cohasset, because those towns lacked organized protests of their own. They came out because they felt that they had no other choice; as Carson told me, “I was happy until Trump and Musk came along, and now, we gotta stand up and fight.”

Similarly, my colleagues spoke to protesters of all ages who knew exactly why they were spending their Saturday protesting Trump and Musk. Take Grant, the 15-year-old who my colleague Michael Mechanic talked to at the Princeton, New Jersey protest. He told Mechanic he came out because of “Everything: Doge destroying the government, cutting international aid to everyone, tariffs that help nobody, getting rid of all the DEI programs.”

“I’ve never done this before—if you can believe that!” rallygoer Pam Eberle told my colleague Laura Morel in St. Petersburg, Florida. “I’ll be 71 this year—that’s how important this is to me,” she said, adding she was most concerned about “the dehumanization of people” under Trump.

Disabled protesters who attended virtual events, as my colleague Julia Métraux reported, were worried about how the administration’s attacks on Medicaid, Social Security, and disability education services could affect them. Protesters in New York City told my colleagues they were terrified of Trump’s deportation of immigrants and detaining of student protesters without due process.

Notably, some of Trump’s typically most vocal mouthpieces—White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Communications Director Steven Cheung, Vice President JD Vance, and Donald Trump Jr.—all appeared to be silent on social media about Saturday’s protests. But as my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in a must-read piece about what the protests mean, Trump and his allies ignore or dismiss them at their own peril; they are proof that the mass opposition is everywhere, and that he does not, in fact, have a “mandate” for any of this:

Ultimately the big story is not what the signs said, but the deep groundswell of anger and unrest that brought so many people in so many places out into the streets and other public spaces of their communities. The message is: crowd large. A lot of politicians and administrators and business leaders, in bowing to Trump, have drawn confidence and comfort from the perceived vibe shift. Events like this puncture that delusion. They are an unavoidable illustration of outrage. Trump may have gotten a lot undone in the last three months, but the opposition never went away, and it may finally be emboldened.





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