German Chancellor Angela Merkel will unveil a monument composed of part of the Berlin Wall on Thursday, while Trump will unveil a piece of one of the World Trade Center buildings that were destroyed on September 11, 2001, leading to the NATO alliance’s only declaration of Article 5, the mutual defense clause.
Donald Trump once labeled Brussels a “hellhole” while on the election campaign trail. On one side of Brussels at NATO headquarters, utmost care has been taken to make sure, as one ambassador put it, “nothing gets mucked up” in the few hours the US president is present. Meanwhile, in the heart of Brussels, thousands of people expended maximum effort to make sure his stay was filled with sights and sounds of opposition to his policies and beliefs.
The “Trump Not Welcome” movement was launched on the campus of Ghent University by a group of students who expected to be able to gather a few hundred of their classmates together to march “for peace and against military adventures, for the preservation of our planet and the environment, for the respect for human rights of all humans, for the struggle against sexism, racism and discrimination.”
But once it was on Facebook, organizer Bakou Mertens said, the event took on a life of its own. Suddenly he and his handful of friends were drawn into connecting some 70 NGOs on issues ranging from climate change to pension reform to women’s rights. Mertens says people who’ve never been socially engaged before contacted him to say Trump’s policies, plus fears European leaders are heading in similar directions, compelled them to march
By the time the march started on Wednesday evening, more than 20,000 people had signaled interest on Facebook. Official estimates ranged from 6,000 to 9,000 protesters. Among them, a huge range of issues and virtually every demographic were represented. Ten-year-old Inka Spannagle was with her mom and little brother wearing a “Stop Trump: Save the Planet” button. Asked why she felt the need to protest Trump, the youngster said bluntly: “He hates women and he wants to build a wall with Mexico.” Her 7-year-old brother added that he was afraid the US president “would do more bad stuff.” Their mother, Jits Gysen, said she wanted European politicians to see there was a groundswell of dissatisfaction with such politics and a need to change course from populist politicians.
Mertens said Trump is both a curse and a blessing for human rights activists. “He’s really doing bad stuff for example for women, for migrants, for gay people, for the environment, for social security and so on,” he told DW. But “in those bad situations, we have to use his divisive discourse and his controversial discourse to build a new discourse, a new society. It brings people together against his policies and it brings people together from all kinds of social movements. And that’s really interesting to see and we have to use that, and that’s what we’re doing here in Brussels.”
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