Two groups, one country and one fear
Two groups gathered on the northern side of Miami-Dade County's 275 acre Tropical Park, along SW 40th Street aka Bird Road. One group held what they called a "Signs of Fascism" protest. The other group was there in support of President Donald Trump.
By Philip Cardella 29 May 2026
I wrote the first draft of this piece on April 25, 2026 in the afternoon. If that date rings a bell its probably because it was the day of the White House Correspondents Dinner and the shooting that took place that evening. Yet, the piece provided challenges before even that shooting, with actually aligned with some of the content in here: MAGA enthusiasts were telling me that Donald Trump doesn't need to put his life on the line but he does it because he loves America so much--and later that night some asshole tried to kill the President.
The piece was way too long. I had some friends take a look at it and help edit it down, which they did wonderfully, and the thing is still too long! I'm grateful for their help and all the mistakes and confusion that remains is my own.
Before I get to the point. This Week in Florida's weekly recap is moving to a Tuesday morning posting window so I can keep the weekend activities fresher.
Tropical Park, Miami, Florida, April 25, 2026
Two groups, apparently opposed to each other, gathered on the northern side of Miami-Dade County's 275 acre Tropical Park, along SW 40th Street aka Bird Road. One group held what they called a "Signs of Fascism" protest. The other group was there in support of President Donald Trump. So far as I can tell, the pro-Trump group was called "Trump Save USAgain."
The Signs of Fascism Protest
The thing that may surprise the reader is that the that Signs of Fascism protest, while there was one sign, out of perhaps two dozen, that said, "Coral Gables Dems" there was no other mention on any of the signs of any political party or person. The group of about a dozen held signs and waved at least three American flags as cars zipped past.Put together by members of the Coral Gables Democratic Club, the Signs of Fascism Protest started 2025 when a club member saw a Signs of Fascism Protest in another city and thought Miami should do that too.
You can see in the photo below that what they chose to hold up in a pose for the camera did not include any explicit mention of any person or party.Yet, the eight or nine people that screamed "Trump! Trump! Trump!" or "Viva Trump!" as they drove past seemed to accurately deduce that the protest was against the Trump Administration despite no direct mention of the President or any part of his Administration.
While perhaps for every "Trump! Trump! Trump!" or middle finger directed at the protesters there were six cars happily tooting, with the Signs of Fascism protesters giving thumbs up, or saying "Thank you" if moving slowly enough. When cars stopped next to the protesters they would politely engage, whether the cars were for Trump or against him.
I interviewed a few of them, which you can find here, and there were some conspiracy theories the right tends to mock liberals over, such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff being "bag men" only being sent to the Middle East to make Trump money.Generally speaking, though, this group sees the Far Right in America as advancing an ideology that is consistent with the inter-war (WWI & WWII) fascisms that led the world to the bloodiest war in human history to date, and to a Holocaust that saw the murder of 20,000,000, This included a blatant effort to literally murder an entire segment of human beings, the Jewish people, who made up the largest portion of Holocaust victims, 6,000,000, including 1,000,000 Jewish people murdered at a single death camp, Auschwitz.
One person in the group wore a shirt comparing the Trump Administration's immigration policies to Auschwitz. I mentioned to the person that some Jewish people found the comparison offensive, to which the person replied, "So what?"I found it disappointing that this person was disinclined to understand why some allies might find that particular invocation of the fruits of fascism offensive.
That said, generally, the group was passionate and patient but determined to save our country from what they see as a real embracing of fascist ideology. The entire purpose of the protest was to help others understand this as well. Here's what one person told me was her reason for being out there.
“What I'd love to be able to do is just to be able to have people ask questions because we're so polarized. So, it doesn't help just to encourage that polarization. I think a lot of people just don't even understand what's going on because maybe they don't know the history of this country and which is about being educated in this country. A lot of people don't know the history. They don't really see what's going on because of the information they're getting. So if it's just a question that might be asked, maybe it's someone in the car with them that says, well, wait a minute, what about this? And if that opens up a dialogue, I think it's the only way we can truly move forward. We can't move forward by just changing the administration.”
When asked what she wants for the future of Florida she said this:
“That we can get a balanced legislature. I don't want it just to turn Democrat, you know, again, it doesn't work to have the seesaw, but to really get enough Democrats in there that we can have a dialogue within the legislature, but definitely a Democratic governor. And, uh, that will change a lot of the policies that Miami-Dade can actually implement depending on what they can pull back.”
What seems to animate this group is a fear of the country being torn apart as much as a fear of fascism, which by definition destroys its enemies They were out there because they see an existential fight for their country and for the planet.
After an hour and a half the small group packed up and left.
Philip Cardella
The Trump Save USAgain Protest
Starting sometime in 2022 I noticed a group of Trump supporters gathering along Bird Road when I was taking my kid to choir practice on Saturday mornings. At first they were at the Chevron Station at SW 40th Street and SW 87th Ave. They soon moved to the area in front of the Westchester Cultural Arts Center in Tropical Park.
There the pro-Trump group gathered every Saturday with signs bemoaning the downfall of American civilization under the Biden Administration and the destruction of America, which they listed in the number of months since President Joe Biden was sworn into office. At the time, I kicked myself for not asking them what they were thinking and this, in part, was part of the genesis of this newsletter. How do people in South Florida really think? I wanted to share this with my family and friends scattered across the country.
Too often, the national narrative about Trump voters and supporters is about people sitting in a diner on a dusty rural.Though the perspectives of those individuals are valid, hyper focusing on people in relatively stereotypical settings in isolated places feeds into the narrative that areas are RED or BLUE, rather than complex, sometimes incredibly so.
In this case, the "we talked to Trump supporters in a diner in Ohio" type of journalism supported the myth that rural voters and urban voters are these homogenous things that can be easily characterized as red or blue.When I saw the pro-Trump group out on Bird Road during the Biden Administration here we had dozens of urban voters who came out every week to loudly and proudly support Donald Trump.
On Saturday, the first thing that surprised me about the Trump Save USAgain group–other than their presence (I hadn't seen them since early 2025)–was the question the gentleman putting up the Trump Save USAgain sign asked me when I first approached him.
"What is fascism?" he asked me, so far as I could tell, sincerely.While the group led by Democrats were waving signs, all of which read at the bottom "This is fascism" or "Es Fascismo," the guy putting up the Trump Save USAgain sign, presumably a member of the Democrats' target audience, didn't know what fascism was.
At first I thought he was being ironic, or facetious, but after talking to him for almost ten minutes I don't think he was.
I've studied fascism, as long time readers know, and my last degree was in history. This gentleman told me his degree was in engineering and I'd guess him to be retired, given his age. So he was educated, though not in the humanities and perhaps his general education courses have slipped his mind over time.
When I told him that the most common example of fascists were the Nazis, he went on for some time about how the Nazis were "National Socialists" and that they were nationalists who favored Germany and they weresocialists(his emphasis), which he indicated were bad. He asked me if the people in the Signs of Fascism protest even knew what socialism was. I indicated that I thought so but that perhaps he should ask them next time.
He went on about various conspiracy theories that liberals tend to mock Trump supporters for, including that Biden wasn't really president, Biden's dementia was too bad, but Trump was brilliant, having "aced" his "IQ" test getting a 100 "or something like that."
Referring to the assassination attempt on then candidate Donald Trump in 2024 (I wrote this draft the Saturday afternoon, hours before gunfire broke out at the WHPCD), the man stated that Trump was doing all of this for the love of country and he didn't need the money (unprompted mind you- I really didn't ask him any leading questions). In some ways, some of the stuff he said was outlandish enough that I wish I had been allowed to record him.
The other gentleman I talked to, who did let me record him, was far more interesting (none of them wanted me photographing them in a way their faces could be recognized).He too was very polite and had an air of the person in charge of the protest, if that could be attributed to anyone there, as everyone there seemed to suggest it was impromptu. He was eloquent and fluent in Spanish and English and I, honestly, enjoyed talking to him a great deal.He seemed genuinely fearful that if the Democrats take the House and the Senate in 2026 it will mean devastation of America and the end of the United States.
“One of the things you have to take a look at is that he doesn't need any of this at all. He can get his jet and go all over. He doesn't need to be shot… Thousand of people want to kill him. He just can enjoy life like any other human being. But instead he said, "No, I am going to fight for this country." And he risked his life. He doesn't have much of a life continually being investigated and the media going after him right or wrong, going after him no matter what. So I respect a man that is capable of doing that for this country.”
His reasoning appeared to come from two sources: his experience living through Castro's Revolution in Cuba and the teachings of right wing evangelicalism.I found the first, his experience during the Cuban Revolution, particularly compelling. He fled Cuba in 1961, two years into the Revolution, and was amongst the first wave of Cubans fleeing the dictatorship that was quickly aligning with the Soviet Union.What started as a rejection of American imperialism on the island quickly turned into a nightmare for Cubans who didn't sufficiently support the ideals of the Revolution, including "kangaroo courts" followed swiftly by executions.I can't imagine how terrifying that must have been for the people who lived through this, including this man, who was twenty in 1961.
In 1962, not long after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he enlisted in the US Army in the hopes of being deployed by the US military to retake Cuba from Castro. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Soviet Premier Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy secretly resolved the crisis, cutting Fidel Castro out of the process (enraging Castro), the United States declared it would leave the island alone, dashing the hopes for the Cuban refugees in the United States of liberating the island from Castro.
For years he watched from first Missouri, then Miami, as the island under Castro continued to struggle under Castro’s charismatic but often incompetent and violent dictatorship. Castro, in the name of socialism, nearly destroyed the Cuban economy and the backs of Cubans, when he tried to will the Cuban people to a record sugar crop in 1970, calling it the "Ten Million Ton Harvest."
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 vaporizing Cuba's most important trading partner, Cubans starved by the millions, with the average Cuban’s weight declining by 10 pounds over the decade.Castro himself would have said this was done in the name of socialism and the Communist Revolution attempting to create one world government. So, it makes sense this man is terrified of losing a second country he loves and calls home to socialism, because socialism has not been a net positive for his family in Cub. He tried to rescue his family during the Mariel Boatlift, by the way, an incident that led to Cuban soldiers pointing assault rifles at him in his broken down boat.
It is with that background that Evangelicalism (I asked him what sort of church he attends and he didn't let me finish the question before saying "evangelical") provided him with a lens for which to understand the world. Here's what he said to me:
One world government, yes. They (the socialists) have worked heavily on that. And they are not too far away from reaching their goal. And in due time, according to the Bible they will, in the Bible, say that in the end times the, what I, we assume is the antichrist, or we, the Bible say Antichrist will control every tribe, nation. And, and lingua. Lingua means people speak the same language. So, we think in due time this planet will be uh supposed to happen. But what can I tell you? He, but meanwhile, people that understand it, like I understand they have to do work part to fight and to try to avoid it.
As an aside, a "post evangelical" pastor came to my church, which consists of mostly ex-Catholics and people new to the faith, and talked to us about the Evangelical obsession with the Book of Revelation in the Bible. He was shocked to learn most of the people in my church hadn't spent much time thinking about the Book of Revelation, if they had read it at all, while many Evangelicals, particularly ones on the right, are obsessed with it.
To this man at the protest on Saturday, his series of traumatic life experiences, both personal and national, combine with the religious teachings held by millions of people in the United States, to inform him that he is, essentially, a soldier on the battlefield fighting for good versus an evil foretold in the holy scriptures themselves.
He loves America and is fighting for it in almost cosmic terms. He, and presumably most of the others, were out there because they see an existential fight for their country and for the planet.
Similarities and differences of the two groups
Let's go back to high school and do a good old fashioned compare and contrast. Take the gentleman that told me Trump didn't need money–that Trump was doing all of this for the love of country. This, of course, was quite the opposite of what at least one of the Signs of Fascism protesters suggested. A contrast, to say the least.
Yet both groups had American flags: the Signs of Fascism group had three, the Trump Save USAgain group had four.
The Signs of Fascism group had nothing that specifically mentioned Trump while the Trump Save USAgain group had few things (they had signs and flags with Trump's name on them) that did not have the word "Trump" on them.
I interviewed people from both groups that referred to unproven claims–conspiracy theories, really–about Trump: one group used them to bash Trump, the other to bolster him.
Most importantly, both groups seemed genuinely terrified about the future of the country, largely due to what they saw as moral failings of at least a large segment of Americans and particularly American leaders.
Yet, the common culture wars targets such as DEI, wokeism, and LGBTQIA+ rights didn't come up at all, so far as I recall. Really, what it came down to was one group was terrified of fascism, the other of socialism and communism.
Historically, this is almost the defining contrast of the twentieth century. Fascism arose out of a rejection of both liberal democracy (which includes capitalism) and communism–it was called a third way by Mussolini, the father of fascism.
In the aftermath of World War II, "the third way" went underground, but was not completely obliterated. The rise of the Soviet Union in the ashes of Europe and Asia terrified the liberal democracy championing Allies and they immediately turned to fighting their wartime ally, the Soviet Union. This was only made worse by the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949.
So, the liberal democracies turned to their one time foes, the fascists, to fight a common enemy. Yes, what I'm saying is the United States turned to actual Nazis to help fight communism immediately after World War II. The most commonly known example of this is Operation Paperclip, where 1600 German scientists and technicians and their families were repatriated to the United States, regardless of their actions during the Second World War.This was likely enabled in no small part because up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, there was a large, boisterous and (usually) unsubtle support of fascism, particularly the Nazi variety of it.
Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow goes into detail about the overt and covert efforts of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the United States up to Pearl Harbor.
University of South Florida history professor Kyle Burke's book, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunism internationalism and paramilitary warfare during the Cold War dives deeply into the space where the post World War II crusade against communism often intersected and even collaborated with illiberal, far right sometimes fascistic forces.
All of that is to say, that since before World War II a persistent internal fight in the United States has been between the capitalists, who have often aligned with actual fascists, and socialism/communism (and, I must say but won't go into, unionism–to capitalists the scariest word in "Soviet Union" may well have been "union," but, I digress), who have in their histories numerous atrocities, including mass murder and genocide.
On Saturday, it was manifested in two protests on the northern edge of Tropical Park. What is most striking to me is that each of the five people I spoke to at length (three from the Signs of Fascism protest and two from the Trump Save USAgain protest) seemed to genuinely see an existential threat not only to the country, but to the planet. People from both groups denounced hate and seemed to be upset by the division in the country.
Yet, while each group sees division as part of the problem, if not the main problem, they see the causes of the division in starkly different ways. One of the most important divisions was over definitions of words. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words shall never hurt me" is the old saying but it appears to be, well, wrong. Even in the alternative version where "names" replaces "words" is wrong here. "Socialists," and "socialism" are words that the two groups seem worlds apart on when defining and that chasm seems to be, at least in part, at the heart of the division.
The word "fascism," which carries a lot of weight and importance to the Signs of Fascism group, is another word that one might think carries power but given some of the people in Trump Save USAgain don't understand it at all and when provided with examples of it go into a nearly rote dismissal of it (the Nazi's were Nationalist Socialists), the tactic of having a "signs of fascism" protest to help educate people might not be as effective as some might think.
I'm certainly one who thought the "Signs of Fascism" tactic was brilliant. After Saturday, I think it might need revision.
I do not know what we can do to make these groups stand on the common ground they share; I don't even know how to get them to agree to basic definitions of words they themselves consider of paramount importance to their protests.
What I do know is it sure would be nice if they could try talking to each other.
A special note of thanks to the friends that helped me revise this (over the last month!), and, if you can believe, it, cut it down by a thousand words or more. All remaining mistakes are, of course, only my own.
