Text from the Asheville Watchdog, about the "Hands Off" demonstrations in Asheville, NC on April 5, 2025.
The pleasant weather contrasted with the angry call for urgent action to stop Trump’s broadaxe policies, which have paralyzed many of the federal government’s basic services, cost thousands of local federal workers their careers, and left many anxious about turmoil ahead.
“This has been a dark time for us, and I fear it is going to get worse,” said disabled Army veteran Jay Carey, a combat veteran of several wars. He was invited to give the rally’s closing remarks after gaining public notice when he was evicted from U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards’s town hall meeting in March for protesting the Republican congressman’s failure to fight Trump’s cuts to veterans’ programs.
Carey told Asheville Watchdog after the rally that he expects Trump’s actions will trigger widespread rioting in the coming months.. The rioting would enable Trump to declare martial law and take dictator-like control of the government, he said.
“I’m not even thinking about [coming elections] because I’m not sure we’re going to have any,” said Carey, who served overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. In his remarks to the crowd, Carey drew loud applause and an eruption of sign waving when he raised his fist and cried: “Fight by any means possible! We are the people we’ve been waiting for!”
The Asheville protest was one of an estimated 1,100 across the nation, including in all the counties of western North Carolina, according to organizers. The nationwide chain was expected to be the largest single-day demonstration against Trump since his inauguration in January.
It clearly met that standard in Asheville as local organizers said it was the largest protest to be held in Pack Square for more than a decade. Asheville Police Department spokesman Rick Rice said no official crowd estimate was made, though he said it was “in the thousands.” He said there were no incidents that required police intervention.
The rallies across the country were organized by a coalition of many groups, most unaffiliated with the Democratic or other political parties, but with interests in a range of issues threatened or attacked by Trump’s policies.
The principal organizer of the Asheville rally was Good Trouble WNC, named for the motto of the late civil rights leader John Lewis. The coalition included Indivisible Asheville, a nonpartisan voter-rights initiative; the Western Circle Poor People’s Campaign; Sunrise WNC, a climate-change activist group; Third Act WNC, an environmental group; Asheville Food & Beverage United; and the leftist NC Workers Party.
Brenda Murphree, a founder of Indivisible WNC, said the coalition’s members and the event’s speakers were selected because they lacked partisan affiliation. “We are slipping into autocracy and it doesn’t matter which party you may belong to,” she said in an interview.
Murphree repeated a line from Democratic U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s 25-hour filibuster speech last week, saying, “ ‘It’s not about right or left; it’s about right and wrong.’”
The speakers were led by Buncombe County Commission Chair Amanda Edwards, a Democrat, though she made no mention of the party in her brief address. Others were invited to speak about specific issues threatened by Trump, including his attacks on federal employees in such fields as veterans affairs, Social Security, public health, public education, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Postal Service, and local agriculture.
Shanna Peele, special education teacher and head of the Buncombe County teachers’ union, touched a common nerve with a call to the crowd to become active in a resistance movement.
“This is a billionaire-imposed crisis,” Peele said, “and its victims are our children. Let history record that when everything was on the line, we did everything we could.”
Retired Marine Corps infantry combat veteran Will Nugent told the crowd that he struggled with homelessness and mental health issues after he left the military. He came to Asheville for treatment at the VA hospital and credited that with enabling him “to start a new life.” But Trump’s massive cuts to the Veterans Affairs Department will leave other veterans without help as they age, Nugent said.
“The millionaires employed in the White House are the ones who inflict the most pain and destruction on hard-working Americans,” he said. “There is a divine spark in each one of us, and that spark is being diminished and put out with a lack of empathy, a lack of compassion, and a lack of unity.”
Whether the size and energy of Saturday’s protest will be channeled into a defeat for Trump’s Republican Party allies in the 2026 elections is a question without an answer. Robin Lively-Summers, president of Indivisible and introducer of the speakers, seemed at a loss when asked the coalition’s plan for building on the rally’s success to create substantive change in policies.
“That’s a really good question and I’m not sure I can answer it,” Lively-Summers told The Watchdog. “We’re trying to get as many people as possible engaged to resist the Trump madness, to show up at events like these and to take action.”
“That’s kind of nebulous,” she conceded, but indicated that mass protests similar to the Hands Off! Event would likely be a future tactic and preparation is underway.
“We’re going to be talking about training people to understand what active resistance looks like, what civil disobedience looks like and what people need to know who engage,” she said.
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