MILWAUKEE — As Donald Trump entered the Fiserv Forum on Monday, the first night of the Republican National Convention, thousands of delegates and GOP faithful stood and raucously cheered.
Five blocks south, at Zeidler Union Square Park — one of two so-called First Amendment zones that city and U.S. Secret Service officials had designated for protests this week — there was no sign of a convention going on at all.
At the precise moment Trump appeared inside the arena, there were exactly zero people in either Zeidler or the other designated zone — Haymarket Square, one block north of the convention.
That those zones — as well the entire downtown area outside the hard perimeter where people were allowed to pass through and congregate — were utterly barren, despite what progressives have said is a groundswell of opposition to the former president, underscores one the biggest surprises of the week: There was very little protest activity during the GOP’s four-day nominating convention in the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.
“I am very disappointed,” said Omar Flores, the lead organizer for the Coalition to March on the RNC, the only large leftist protest to have taken place in Milwaukee during the RNC.
That two-hour protest went off without a hitch during the day Monday, before the convention officially opened.
But attendance at the rally — organizers say 3,000 people turned out; Milwaukee police estimate 700 to 800 — was far short of organizers’ expectations, despite their pouring all their energy into it. More notably, perhaps, there were no substantial protests in the days that followed.
Milwaukee police had braced for a week of conflict and protest, bringing in more than 4,000 officers from more than 100 outside state and local departments to reinforce its ranks.
But it never materialized. A few small groups of protesters and counterprotesters screamed at one another outside a main security entrance to Fiserv on Wednesday, and on Thursday, a group of about 100 people protesting police brutality marched peacefully for five blocks and back. As of Thursday afternoon, only 12 people had been arrested in the convention area, according to the Milwaukee Police Department, mostly for disorderly conduct.
Progressive organizers in Milwaukee and elsewhere said there were a number of likely reasons for the lack of demonstrations. They said protesters, both locally and across the U.S., were saving their energy for next month’s Democratic National Convention, 90 miles south in Chicago, where some of their preferred causes, like ending the war in Israel, have a more appropriate audience in an incumbent administration. They also said some potential participants in Milwaukee had worried about the open-carry laws in Wisconsin, where it is legal to carry a gun in public without a permit, and criticized city officials for releasing security plans and protest zone details too late for most groups to adequately organize.
“I think it’s all based on the fact that the vast majority of the mass social justice movements in this country are focusing on the DNC,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network and one of the lead organizers behind the main protest effort in Chicago, called the Coalition to March on the DNC.
“That focus really is on the Democrats and on Joe Biden, and I believe it’s because of the centrality of the issue of Palestine,” added Abudayyeh, who also played a substantial role in helping to organize the protest Monday in Milwaukee.
“People are still out here in condemnation of Trump’s racist and reactionary agenda, in condemnation of the Republicans’ racist and reactionary agenda. That’s absolutely true. That’s why we were there on Monday,” he said. “But when it comes down to it, Biden is in power. Biden is responsible for the war [in Israel], Biden is responsible for supporting it,” Abudayyeh said. “And it is the core issue that will bring out tens of thousands at the DNC in August.”
Flores agreed that even among the groups he helped organize, he noticed a sizable contingent of people who indicated to him they were reserving energy for Chicago.
“The DNC, I do think, does have an impact on attendance [at protests] here in Milwaukee. There’s been people coming from out of state and all that, and trying to convince people to come twice, within a little over a month, to the Midwest for protests is a hard sell,” Flores said.
“A lot of people are very excited to get to the DNC because, you know, it is the incumbent party. Joe Biden has been the target of these Palestinian protests. And so I think a lot of people are feeling very motivated to protest against the Democrats,” he said.
Flores added that he’d received “concerns from our coalition partners” regarding Wisconsin’s open-carry gun laws, calling it a “scary concept” that “weapons were allowed within the soft zone” but noted that “it’s nothing that we couldn’t have addressed or couldn’t mediate.”
Both organizers also suggested the weather — which, earlier in the week, rotated between scorching heat and thunderstorms — played a role in the scant protest scene.
“The weather has had something to do with it,” Abudayyeh said. “Threats of storms, it was super, super hot of course.”
The limited protest convention footprint in Milwaukee isn’t entirely unusual. During the 2016 RNC in Cleveland, for example, all the ingredients were in place for major protests to break out — including not only an angry progressive contingent but also a Republican Party that had not yet fully embraced Donald Trump. But only a handful of substantial protests broke out and there were no major clashes between rival protesters or with police.
But expectations of what can be possible amid heightened political tensions has changed in the eight years since due to several violent domestic crises, including the deadly 2017 clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and, most recently, the attempted assassination on Trump on Saturday.
Groups on the ground in Milwaukee this week, for their part, pointed out that they were active.
The anti-war group Codepink led a pair of small demonstrations Tuesday that each featured about a half–dozen participants. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, together with a homeless advocacy group called the Poor People’s Army, led about 80 people on a mile-long walk Monday.
And on Tuesday, the shooting by five police officers of a knife-wielding man about a mile from the convention area prompted local outrage — but also a peaceful and modestly attended candlelit vigil and no major protests.
Codepink co-founder Medea Benjamin said attendance at her group’s events was about on par with what it expected, given heightened security concerns.
“Milwaukee is a very small town,” she said. “There were a number of us who came in from outside, but it didn’t augment as much as it would in Chicago.”
During one of those Codepink events, group member Nour Jaghama was arrested outside the Pfister Hotel in downtown Milwaukee while attempting to protest a brunch hosted by Arkansas GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Codepink national co-director Danaka Katovich, who witnessed Jaghama’s arrest, said the incident underscored the kind of elevated security risks inexperienced protesters might not want to face following Trump’s assassination attempt.
“It was something we were worried about,” she said of the increased police presence.
Other than that small handful of events, however, the streets of downtown Milwaukee were almost entirely empty and quiet at nearly all other moments through the four days of the RNC.
“It’s just stunning,” said Clifford Lee Johnson said Wednesday as he and three friends stood holding signs protesting against Trump inside Zeidler Union Square Park.
The four were the only ones there.
Johnson theorized that “maybe the assassination attempt somehow scared people off.”
“Or,” he added, “maybe a lot of people have a feeling that’s just like, ‘Why? What’s the point?’”
City officials said their protest zone planning wasn't the reason for the low protest activity — but also acknowledged surprise that so little had occurred, other than the Coalition to March on the RNC event on Monday.
“Yes, there have been a few smaller unscheduled protests, in addition to the one parade route, the designated parade route — so it’s not nonexistent,” said Jeff Fleming, a spokesperson for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson and the city of Milwaukee. “We just wanted to make sure that people had the opportunity — whether they exercised that or not.”
“We are focused on having given the opportunity for people to express their opinions, to do it in a place that’s relatively close to the convention activity — and that’s safe for everybody,” Fleming added.
Flores, for his part, said that despite his disappointment, he hoped the success of his group’s protest — which he said took nearly two years to organize — would serve as an example that a large, meaningful, peaceful protest was possible.
“I hope it sends a message that they can do this,” he said. “We showed this week that it is possible — and that we can do it in a family-friendly way.”
