In Trump’s Milwaukee, protesting is the dog that (mostly) doesn’t bark

MILWAUKEE — Nadine Seiler, a 59-year-old self-described “agitator” from Waldorf, Md., traveled all the way here this week to protest the Republican National Convention, the right’s radical Project 2025 plan, and Donald Trump, whom she sees as “a demagogue.”

The good news for Seiler, who held aloft a giant sign and wore a homemade “Stop Project 2025” tiara, is that she didn’t have to compete for attention.

Outside a convention billed as the coronation of a Republican who wants to return to the White House with king-like powers, Seiler was one of just three anti-Trump demonstrators I could find during a midday search south of the expansive restrictive zone around the Fiserv Forum that is hosting the RNC.

Indeed, Zeidler Union Square, the oldest park in Milwaukee, which was designated as one of two sanctioned “protest zones” for the week, was completely devoid of activity, except for five other equally bored journalists and a gaggle of slightly befuddled volunteers in orange T-shirts.

A microphone and speaker were set up in the park’s central gazebo, but the only sound around lunchtime was the clip-clop of mounted police riding past on Clydesdale-type horses, just one small part of a massive force of thousands of cops, some brought in from out of state. At the other protest zone in Haymarket Square, staffers told me all but two of Monday’s booked speakers hadn’t even shown up.

Seiler and two other solo agitators, including a woman with a bullhorn loudly shrieking, “TRUMP IS A FASCIST,” in a tone clearly hoping to shatter some Milwaukee skyscraper windows, had relocated a block north where there was more foot traffic. I asked if she was disappointed in the turnout. “We are over 253 million adults in this country,” she said. “There is no reason why there should only be three of us here.”

As Trump arrived in this Democratic-run city with a history of progressivism to accept the GOP nomination for the third consecutive time, protests against the GOP have been the proverbial dog that did not bark — for the most part. There was a healthy turnout estimated at as many as 800 people who took part Monday in a March Against the RNC, after weeks of back and forth between organizers and convention security that kept the protesters far from the Fiserv Forum and any encounters with most of the delegates. The march was mostly peaceful, with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporting only one arrest, possibly of a man shown on video wearing a Chicago Bears jersey and taking signs from protesters.

As a veteran of modern political conventions, I didn’t expect a lot of protests. In 2016, I saw far more people on the left come to Philadelphia to protest the Democrats’ choice of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders than I witnessed at Cleveland’s RNC, even with the public alarm about Trump’s demagoguery. But even within the liberal dogma that rarely protests Republican events, with notable exceptions like 2017’s Women’s March, something is happening here in Milwaukee.

Or not happening.

Is the war between militarized policing — on the rise since the “SWAT” era of the 1970s and escalating after the 9/11 attacks — and the supposed right of dissent now all but over, with the cops winning? Is the growth of these isolated and all-but-useless “First Amendment zones” threatening to crush the actual First Amendment?

» READ MORE: The far-right’s Project 2025 also dodged a bullet, and they know it | Will Bunch

Are folks intimidated by the miles and miles of concrete barriers and a scene that resembles a Tour de France of bike cops, or are they just utterly discouraged by Trump and his rabid base of followers who — like in a bad horror flick — keep coming and coming despite indictments and impeachments and everything else?

Experts who compare Trump’s MAGA movement to authoritarians of the past say fascism succeeds when the mass of citizens gets too demoralized to fight back.

Have we really reached that point?

Indeed, a gaggle of burly white male Christian activists, wearing anti-LGBTQ T-shirts (including one about a specific sex act I won’t even try to slip by my editor), was so bored waiting at the Zeidler “protest zone” for any progressives to fight with that they scurried off to grab lunch at a nearby food court before I could interview them. “Maybe something will happen tonight,” I heard their leader fret. “We’ll play it by ear.”

Of course, the trees of protest — whether anti-Trump or anti-LGBTQ — arguably don’t make a sound when there is no one to hear it. The convention security zone has turned large swaths of normally vibrant downtown Milwaukee into a dead zone, with most restaurateurs reporting their business is below normal, and considerably so for some.

That wasn’t a deterrent for Maryland’s Seiler, who bills herself on Instagram as “Warrior Goddess for the Resistance.” She told me that her ultimate goal was for someone to snap her picture and publish it in a newspaper, in the hopes that someone would see it, google “Project 2025,” and learn about radical right-wing plans for a second Trump presidency.

Mission accomplished, Nadine.