Protestors sing together along State Street. (Staff photo: Corey Buchanan)

Many hundreds of protesters lined State Street between A Avenue and the Lake Theatre & Cafe Saturday, June 14 to express their concerns about presidential overreach and indignation over the policies of the Donald Trump Administration as part of “No Kings Day.” The protest was peaceful and those holding up signs were met with a cacophony of honks from drivers passing through.

The organization Unite4Demoracy had been protesting in Lake Oswego since March — with around 100 people attending typically — but attracted an especially large turnout Saturday. There were thousands of other protests across the country to counteract Trump’s military parade and organizer Steve Friedland estimated that 2,000 people attended the one in Lake Oswego.

Many attendees were local community members, including Mary Solares, who has been protesting for decades on issues ranging from the Vietnam War to women’s rights. She said that what is happening right now in America is different.

“He’s taking our democracy away from us,” she said.

Connie Owens Heilman, a Lake Oswego resident who was born in Germany, said that just about everything Trump does rubs her the wrong way and that immigrants should be embraced and only deported if they commit a serious crime. She was proud of her fellow Lake Oswego residents for making their voices heard.

“It’s wonderful. And it shows that we are not wrong in our views. It shows that this is the majority of people in Lake Oswego. We are standing up from our rights as we should and we need to dump Trump because he’s not a king and we’re not his pawns,” she said.

Lake Oswego resident and protest attendee Carrie Vanderwagen said she’s especially concerned about the rounding up of undocumented immigrants and the general erosion of the Constitution and  established order.

“I think it’s very telling that the suburbs have come to protest, people you can’t label as ‘crazy Portlanders’ or ‘fringe.’ It’s everyday citizens in Canby, Gresham, Tigard, Beaverton and Lake Oswego,” she said.

Longtime Lake Oswego resident Judy Davis brought her daughter Lara Davis from Seattle to the protest Saturday. They felt that protesting gave them hope and that pushing back against Trump was the right thing to do.

“It shows that voters are strongly against everything that is going wrong in Washington,” Judy said.

Lake Oswego City Councilor Massene Mboup was also there Saturday. A few days before the protest, he expressed to the Review his alarm about Trump’s penchant for using force against protesters while pardoning those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. He also said he felt that the country is backsliding from a representative democracy into a dictatorship.

“This country is going south and we have a president who thinks he is a king,” Mboup said. “I am standing up. When I became a city councilor, the officers who swore me in asked me to defend the Constitution and republic of the United States, and that’s what I am doing and I am calling on other citizens to do it.”