Every weekday for the past seven weeks, a small but determined crew of anti-Trump protesters has gathered on a Fairlington overpass to greet rush hour commuters.
With signs, a banner reading “No Kings!” and flags of the United States, Ukraine and the European Union, the demonstrators on the S. Abingdon Street bridge wave at the crowded lanes of vehicles driving south on I-395.
A nearly constant stream of supportive honks rises from the highway. A couple motorists give the finger.
The organizer behind the daily “rush hour resistance”? Recently retired Arlington County Board member Libby Garvey.
“What they want us to do is to give up and put our heads in the sand — and then they win,” Garvey told ARLnow. “We’ve got to fight back, so this is the beginning of the resistance.”
‘It just breaks my soul’
Garvey, who stepped down from the County Board in December after 28 years in public office, said she was galvanized to take a stand after watching an explosive public argument between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb. 28.
Feeling “sick to [her] stomach,” Garvey went to the bridge and hung a Ukrainian flag and an upside-down American flag as a sign of protest.
Within a couple days, someone had taken the flags down. So Garvey returned to hang another pair of flags — which vanished within a matter of hours.
“Then I said, basically, dammit! All right, I’m just going to stay,” she said.
Though Garvey was by herself that first day, she said it wasn’t long before other people in the neighborhood started to notice. Soon another malcontent, Garvey’s neighbor Len Funk, joined her on the bridge as she began making a habit of returning there at 4:30 p.m. each afternoon.
In the weeks since, the daily protest has continued to grow. Yesterday afternoon (Tuesday), about a dozen people showed up, waving flags while Funk called out to drivers using a loudspeaker.
Waving a toilet scrubber in Trump’s likeness and wearing a shirt with a Shepard Fairey-style portrait of the president with the caption “nope,” Funk — a Vietnam veteran — told ARLnow that he has never liked Trump, but the last few months have filled him with a new kind of concern.
“The reason I’m out here is, this is not the country that I went to war for,” he said. “We thought Vietnam was controversial, and we learned that it was not winnable, but it was a different country. This is just unconscionable, what this administration is doing to education, to the government.”
Similar to the “Hands Off” rallies that flooded gathering places across the nation earlier this month, the Fairlington protesters aren’t trying to change any single policy decision. Instead, their focus is on Trump’s overall approach — and the direction he seems to be heading in.
Many are quick to draw comparisons to Nazi Germany.
“You don’t just wake up one day and you have an authoritarian, fascist state,” Fairlington resident Frona Adelson said. “Little things erode.”
She referenced the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the Trump administration deported and has refused to bring back from El Salvador despite a Supreme Court ruling. She called that kind of action “homegrown terrorism” — and questioned what it means for her own rights.
“It just breaks my soul to see what’s happening,” Adelson said. “So being out here is something active. Instead of being passive, it’s something that I can do to fight this.”
No plans of stopping
Midway through yesterday’s protest, a driver slowly passed by on S. Abingdon Street to shout at the protesters.
“Long live Stalin! Long live the USSR!” he shouted in apparent sarcasm.
Protesters say they get reactions like this about once a week. The more common insult is flicking them off while passing under the bridge, which usually prompts some loud whoops from Garvey.
This isn’t the first time Garvey has tried to fuel a social movement. In clashes with activists at County Board meetings, she would sometimes refer to her own background protesting the Vietnam War.
Garvey also protested the Iraq War. She recalled holding a banner and collecting signatures at the Capitol almost every weekend for three years during that conflict.
While those protests attracted many insults at first, Garvey said that support gradually grew.
“By the time I finished, people were joining us,” she said. “Nobody was yelling. Everybody was saying what we’re doing is right, because in three years, everybody realized that.”
Garvey hopes that her group in Fairlington will also grow. But even if it doesn’t, she said she already feels it is making a difference.
For instance, she recalled her group running into a supporter while riding the Metro to the D.C. “Hands Off” rally earlier this month.
“‘Oh, we love you! We talk about you every day!'” she recalled the person exclaiming.
Garvey wants the protests to provide a sense of hope and community for other Trump opponents who pass under the bridge. She also feels that they’re part of a larger movement that is building around the country.
“We need to make it too big to fail, too big for them to pick us off — and that is the brilliance of groups like Indivisible and 50501,” she said, referring to other protest groups organizing against Trump.
Garvey isn’t planning on stopping any time soon, either. She plans to be out on the bridge every day until at least this fall.
“I’ve always been kind of known for persistence, and that’s what’s important,” she said. “I need to show people, this isn’t a one-and-done demonstration. This isn’t what it is. We have got to stop this darkness from covering the earth.”
So for the time being, drivers should expect to find Garvey and her fellow protesters out on the S. Abingdon Street bridge every weekday, waving and cheering over the honks of workers driving home.
