The woman who confronted former EPA Administer Scott Pruitt at Teaism is organizing another protest of the Trump administration. DC middle school teacher Kristin Mink plans a protest outside of the White House Tuesday evening to run as parallel programming to President Trump‘s national address about immigration.
Major news networks have caught serious flak for choosing to air Trump’s oval office message. As James Fallows notes, none of the “Big Three” broadcast networks carried Obama’s immigration speech back in 2014. Mink’s demonstration, which begins an hour before the president’s remarks, hopes to skewer both major media broadcasters and the GOP that support Trump’s agenda in one swoop.
“It’s important for us to get out there tonight as a deliberate means of contrasting the real plight of real people suffering from this shutdown against the lies Trump is telling to defend the shutdown,” Mink tells Washingtonian.
The planning leans spur of the moment. Feeling frustrated by the plight of many unpaid federal workers, Mink sent out a tweet Tuesday morning calling to boycott Trump’s prime time address. In a matter of hours, the call had gone viral—and the idea for a gathering was born.
Tons of TV cams will be at the WH tonight to air Trump's factless fear-mongering.
Furloughed federal govt workers should meet them there. A huge protest of unpaid govt. workers at the White House would overshadow Trump's rant & actually reflect reality.#BoycottTrumpPrimeTime
— Kristin Mink (@KristinMinkDC) January 8, 2019
Billed as an event to advocate for the furloughed and unpaid government workers during the third week of the partial government shutdown, Mink’s event will lean on neighboring protest “Kremlin Annex”, a anti-Trump rally that’s carried on for 177 days using Mariachi bands, opera singers, and even Rosie O’Donnell. According to Mink, the Kremlin Annex has offered to turn its microphones over to “furloughed workers and any other impacted folks who want to speak out.”
And she hopes their voices are heard farther than Lafayette Square.
“People are worried about losing their homes, their cars, their medications. It’s urgent,” Mink says. “Those are the voices that need to be uplifted. If the press won’t do it on their own, we’ll make them pay attention.”
How many people are expected to turn up tonight? Mink’s unsure, but challenges that it “won’t take all that many to make it bigger than Trump’s inauguration.”
Brittany Shepherd covers the societal and cultural scene in political Washington. Before joining Washingtonian as a staff writer in 2018, Brittany was a White House Correspondent for Independent Journal Review. While she has lived in DC for a number of years now, she still yearns for the fresh Long Island bagels of home. Find her on Twitter, often prattling on about Frasier.
