I was looking through photos from the anti-Trump and anti-DOGE protests across the US over the weekend, and I couldn’t help but notice something: There sure was a lot of gray hair.
That struck me as different from what I remember about recent protests of the past — like Black Lives Matter and Israel/Gaza protests, where younger people seemed to be leading the charge.
I’m apparently not the only person who’s noticed. On r/50501, one of the Reddit forums for organizing the weekend’s protests, someone posted, “We really got to hand it to the boomers.”
“I saw three pretty large protests today around where I lived,” the person said. “Guess who showed up and gave the biggest display of support? Boomers.”
My colleague Lakshmi Varanasi flagged something similar recently, too. She reported on two “Tesla takedown” protests last month in Michigan:
I noticed that the crowds in Ann Arbor and Troy were primarily people over the age of 65, white, and retired from jobs that depended on public funding as teachers, professors at local universities, and social workers.
Business Insider reporters who checked out this past weekend’s protests from locations around the country also noticed a similar trend: “Many said they were most worried about the economy and their retirement investments, which have dwindled in tandem with Trump’s tariff announcements.”
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed something to this effect in the suburbs of New York City where I live — the small smatterings of protests in town squares over the last month or two seem to be largely made of women over 60. (This may have to do with the overall age demographics of the suburbs, so I didn’t read too much into it.)
Still, I have a few theories as to why so many boomers are showing up to protest.
The first is that baby boomers (who are generally 61 to 79 years old) are either at or near retirement age. They’re the most concerned with the fate of Social Security and their retirement portfolios. Those two things have been thrown into chaos. Elon Musk has referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme,” although he’s also said valid recipients could get more benefits once he’s done rooting out waste.
And the new tariffs have sent the stock market into a nosedive over the last week, which could hurt the retirement accounts of people who are actually retired. If prices on all kinds of stuff rise, that also hurts retirees on a fixed income. Keep in mind, lots of boomers love Temu.
But let’s be honest: A 65-year-old Trump voter who looked at their investment account in dismay on Friday wasn’t going to decide to show up to the anti-Trump protests on Saturday. Baby boomers, like any generation, aren’t a monolith. (Boomers voted equally for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the 2024 election.) And the people who attend a protest have probably held the same political orientation for decades. This isn’t a case where the last few weeks have radicalized and changed the minds of all boomers.
Yet I do think it’s possible that recent events activated some sleeper cells — older Democrats who had stayed home for the student Gaza demonstrations or the 2020 Black Lives Matter marches.
I asked Robert Cohen, professor of history and social studies at NYU whose work focuses on the history of protest movements, for his take on all of this. He warned against making any sweeping generalizations.
Cohen acknowledged that baby boomers who had lived through — or participated in — the protest movements of the ’60s and ’70s may, in fact, have a slightly different perspective and rationale for the anti-Trump protests today.
“What does ‘Make America Great Again’ mean? It means America minus the social changes of the ’60s,” Cohen said.
Consider some of the things boomers take pride in their generation pushing for: civil rights, women’s rights, environmental causes — they may feel an urgency to come to the rescue of those things being under threat.
A generation that attended concerts for Live Aid, the Concert for Bangladesh, and made a Christmas song with the lyrics “Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?” might have a different perspective about the implications of pulling USAID out of developing nations where part of its work was addressing global hunger.
People over 65 are the most reliable voting bloc, and that may be meaningful here.
“It’s really harder for [politicians] to dismiss them both because they vote more, but also because they’ve been around, and it’s not like some kind of a youthful exuberance,” Cohen said.
I should once again give a disclaimer that any sweeping generalization about generations is always going to come up short. (Trump himself is a boomer, after all.) And all of my evidence about the age demographic of demonstrators this weekend is purely anecdotal.
But if our image of a protester from the last few years was of a young person with blue hair, perhaps we need to update to a retiree in capri pants and a “world’s best grandma” shirt.
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