The office of First Lady Melania Trump announced Thursday afternoon that the White House rescheduled the spring garden tours by one day due to planned protests on the National Mall.
“This decision has been made out of an abundance of caution and to ensure the safety of all within proximity to public demonstrations planned near the White House,” said the announcement, per DailyMail.com.
The first lady did not attend, but she did appear in Washington at a State Department awards ceremony.
A wave of “Hands Off!” rallies were organized in opposition to the policies of President Donald Trump and DOGE Director Elon Musk. The largest demonstration took place in Washington, D.C., where protesters gathered at the Sylvan Theater, located near the Washington Monument on the National Mall.
Last month, Democrats took heat for launching xenophobic attacks on both Melania and Musk.
On March 22, at an anti-DOGE protest in Los Angeles, Democrat California Rep. Maxine Waters made horrific comments about the first lady, insinuating that she was not a legal citizen.
“When he [Trump] talks about birthright, and he’s going to undo the fact that the Constitution allows those who are born here, even if the parents are undocumented, they have a right to stay in America. If he wants to start looking so closely to find those who were born here and their parents were undocumented, maybe he ought to first look at Melania,” she said, even though Melania came to the United States as an adult and was not “born here.”
“We don’t know whether or not her parents were documented. And maybe we better just take a look,” she said, overlooking the fact that Melania became a U.S. citizen in 2006.
Meanwhile, during a rally on February 4, Democrat Rep. Janelle Bynum of Oregon compared Musk and DOGE to the British burning the Capitol during the War of 1812.
“They always told us the British had come to storm the city. They always reminded us the British had come, and they burned everything down, and we could never let that happen again. They told us, and here we are, Trump and his billionaire boy band. They are not British this time. This one is South African. But they came back,” she said.
Some Democrats were even more vitriolic and direct with their xenophobic attacks on Musk, with New York Democrat Rep. Nydia Velázquez simply saying that Musk needs to “go back to South Africa.”
“It was interesting yesterday. I was watching a video of an interview of Elon Musk with someone where he said that the Italians should stay in Italy and the Chinese should stay in China. My question to Elon Musk is, what the hell are you doing here in America?” she said at a rally outside the HUD Department.
Texas Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett falsely insinuated in an interview on Inauguration Day that Musk supported apartheid in South Africa and hit him for not being born in the United States.
“[Musk] went from being the dork that was jumping around on stage to allegedly being this amazing genius that’s going to save this entire country, the country he wasn’t born in and a country that maybe he doesn’t agree with, the idea of a democratic republic, considering the fact that he may have been more so on the side of apartheid,” she said.
Musk has repeatedly denounced the former apartheid government of his country.
Virginia Democrat Rep. Gerry Connolly suggested in a February interview that because of his South African roots, Musk may be reverting to a fascist mindset.
“I think that’s a leftover from Elon Musk’s South African heritage, and maybe he’s falling too far back on the apartheid system of government that was a fascist form of government,” he said.
Tennessee Democrat Rep. Steve Cohen went so far as to accuse Musk’s parents of wanting to deny rights to black people.
“Why can’t you understand? The Ukranians [sic] are fighting for the same thing which his parents tried to deny black South Africans,” he claimed in a February X post.