Tallahassee students march against Trump

By Oliver Cheese and Justin Jordan

Tallahassee, FL – On January 14, students marched and rallied at Florida State University as part of a national upsurge to resist the right-wing agenda of President-elect Donald Trump. Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led the march across campus as the afternoon’s classes were ending, showing hundreds of onlookers that Trump’s election victory wouldn’t silence the student movement.

As the march transitioned into a rally, around 15 protesters were watched by a crowd of supporters, observers, and MAGA hecklers, as local organizers declared the need to resist the billionaire’s plans for tariffs, war and mass deportation.

“We have a rapist and a felon in office for the second time,” said SDS member Christopher Sharpe. “Well-known politicians have been spouting blood libel about immigrants and queer people to a cheering crowd. We do not have the luxury of not taking action when our tax dollars are paying for this.”

“The election of Donald Trump represents a failure of the system that is supposed to represent us,” declared Joelle Nuñez of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. “Capitalism, as represented by Donald Trump and the ruling class, cannot handle its contradictions. We believe this system must be smashed and uprooted!”

FSU and its president, Richard McCullough, have employed repressive measures against SDS, along with other progressive and identity-based student organizations due to pressure from the university’s strong Zionist lobby and from right-wing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

This was SDS’ first protest of 2025, which marks over a year since the organization was suspended from FSU for one minute of chanting at a meeting of the university’s board of trustees. Recently, the FSU administration unjustly chose to extend that suspension until January of 2026, charging the students with violating the terms of their suspension by meeting in a public outdoor area on campus. Obviously, this legal warfare is part of an effort to silence dissent on campus in the face of an ever-growing student movement.

Delilah Pierre from the Tallahassee Community Action Committee stated, “Florida State University and universities across the South have been attacking activists, expelling activists, deporting activists for saying nothing more than ‘stop the genocide of the Palestinian people.’ Currently, people feel hopeless, they feel despair, they feel afraid of being targeted for their political beliefs, of standing up for what they believe in. If you’re afraid of political repression, don’t worry, because we stand with you, we fight with you.”

Pierre continued, “It is shameful that this university tries to act as if they care about diversity – as if they care about trans people, queer people, Black people – when every time Ron Desantis attacks communities they just capitulate, they do whatever he says.”

Trump has criticized the Biden administration for somehow being too gentle in its notoriously brutal moves to crush the pro-Palestine encampments which sprang up across the country during 2024’s Student Intifada. Clearly, Trump intends to be even harsher on protesters than Biden, so organizers in Tallahassee and across the country will have to be more dedicated than ever to building the large, strong, and determined people’s movements which the American people will need to stand up to Trump’s reactionary agenda.

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