REHOBOTH BEACH, Delaware—Most Saturdays this summer, dozens of local retirees who wouldn’t look out of place at a MAGA rally have gathered along Coastal Highway to protest President Donald Trump.
They aren’t the sort of Democratic protesters jarring—or profane—enough to attract the attention of cable news producers and social media hot-take artists. There are no visible tattoos, no foreign flags, nobody clad in face masks or keffiyehs. The only banner they tend to wave is the American flag. Their signs—some professionally produced and some homemade—are kitschy, albeit sharp-edged. “Fight Truth Decay,” reads one designed to look like a Trump campaign placard. “Trump Lies & Steals From U.S.,” reads another that’s hand-scrawled.
“I’m out here because I feel like the people need to stand up and speak for democracy,” Sturges Dodge said in a brief interview with The Dispatch, while waving a homemade sign reading “For the people; by the people” to automobiles driving south on Delaware’s Highway 1, the mid-Atlantic state’s primary coastal artery.
What motivates Dodge to give up a weekend morning and protest the president?
“He’s pretty much, 100 percent, in this for himself,” she said. “He’s in it for money and he’s in it for power and he wants to take the country back to a time when rich white men were in charge and everybody else was disenfranchised.” Fellow protester Mark Tetley said he participated because, “Every day there’s something happening that takes away our democracy. Whether it’s trying to rewrite history, trying to rewrite labor statistics, cultural issues—you have to stand up.”
Some protesters were less alarmist.
Butch Bosin isn’t worried Trump will end American democracy, a widespread Democratic anxiety this term amid his serial attempts to stretch the constitutional limits of executive authority. But Bosin wants a check on the president’s near-unfettered power in Washington, D.C. He believes joining with others to raise his concerns publicly, via protest, is the best way to spark broad opposition to the White House and boost Democratic efforts to reclaim congressional majorities in the 2026 midterms.
“People need to wake up—and the way to make them wake up is to start local conversations, not separate echo chambers,” Bosin said. Doing that, he argued, requires “active listening, involving people on both sides, and trying to get them to focus on issues rather than ad hominem attacks on each other.”
The protest that Dodge, Tetley, and Bosin attended was actually one of two underway in the area on a Saturday morning in late August. Both were organized by Indivisible Southern Delaware, the local chapter of Indivisible, a Democratic-aligned group that has staged demonstrations across the U.S. The dual protests, which the groups had been conducting a few miles apart since March, were presumably designed to attract the attention of drivers and their passengers heading north and south.
“I think if you were to ask any of us—we do it for ourselves; because we have to feel like we’re doing something. We feel like we’re crashing and burning and instead of sitting at home in despair and constantly afraid of what’s going to happen next, we come out here and do something,” said Ilene Klein, an activist with Indivisible Southern Delaware.
Rehoboth Beach, population roughly 1,400, is just one among a cluster of small towns in southern Delaware that swell with tourists and beachgoers during the summer. But it’s perhaps the best known because former President Joe Biden has a beach house here and spent considerable time in town during his four years in office—and still does. Rehoboth Beach has a thriving LGBTQ community and voted Democratic by a wide margin in November 2024, befitting local voters’ liberal political leanings.
Still, it would be inaccurate to accuse the Rehoboth Beach protesters of preaching to the choir.
Their town sits in Sussex County, Delaware’s only red county out of three (Kent County is swing territory; New Castle County is blue). And the local beaches are popular with voters across the political spectrum who hail from neighboring states Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, plus Washington, D.C. Additionally, it’s not uncommon to see cars with Florida and New York license plates. This explains the responses from passers-by: a mix of approving horn-honks and negative retorts.
“You bastard,” shouted one. “You’re a p—y,” yelled another.
Weekly turnout at the Rehoboth Beach protests has averaged approximately 195 people combined at the two protest sites, Klein said. Demonstrators are most vocal in their opposition to Trump, but she says that’s not their sole motivation.
Klein explained that—like many grassroots Democrats across the country—some are upset with their party’s leaders in Congress, whom they believe are not doing everything possible to stymie Trump and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill. That the Democratic Party constitutes minorities in the House of Representatives and Senate, lacking almost any constitutional or governing power to block the president’s agenda, is apparently insufficient to convince them otherwise.
“I don’t feel like our Democratic leadership is stepping up enough,” Klein said.
