Cathy Schettler dressed like a clown for the “No Kings 2.0” rally Saturday at Leisure World in Silver Spring.

But her message was dead serious.

“All my neighbors are out of work and the government is shut down,” Schettler said, blaming President Donald Trump. “He’s cutting everything. We need to cut him.”

Schettler, 73, was one of hundreds of thousands across the nation who joined rallies to protest the Trump administration. Of the more than 2,600 events, about 20 took place in Montgomery County, home to thousands of federal workers, and now — after rounds of layoffs since Trump took office — thousands of unemployed former federal workers.

Hundreds of people turned out at Leisure World with Schettler. About 350 showed up in Germantown Square Urban Park. Rallygoers gathered in Olney, Potomac, Takoma Park, Poolesville, Bethesda and elsewhere in the county to express outrage over Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigrants, attacks on his political rivals and slashing of federal programs.

Senators at NIH

Several hundred scientists and their supporters showed up outside the main entrance to the National Institutes of Health where speakers, including U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks, decried Trump as an authoritarian.

“We fought an American Revolution to get rid of King George and we’re not going back,” Van Hollen said.

Alsobrooks told the story of Sarah Daisey Alsobrooks, her grandmother, who worked as a housekeeper and taught herself to type without benefit of a typewriter so she could pass a civil service exam and become a federal worker.

“I am here today because I am Sarah’s legacy,” Alsobrooks said. “She was so proud to work in the federal government.”

Later in the rally, Mollie Manier, an evolutionary geneticist from Silver Spring who works at NIH, led the crowd in an oath to defend the Constitution: “Against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” she said, drawing out the last two words.

Sara Teichholtz, 38, who was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer that develops in the bile ducts, told the crowd that NIH doctors and scientists saved her life, and that she fears massive cuts to the agency would cost others theirs.

“I don’t want you to be sorry for me, I want you to be angry with me,” she said.

A protest of its own

At the Germantown protest, crowds gathered at every corner of the four-way intersection between Middlebrook and Germantown roads. Many waved American flags, broke out into chants of “hey hey ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” and cheered as passing cars honked in support.

Montgomery County Council Vice President Will Jawando told the gathering that “we the people decide how we’re governed.”

Brenda Hazel, 75, said she had to come to the protest to help her granddaughter and grandson fight for rights she thought had already been secured.

She added that she was grateful that her parents were not alive to see the federal government today. “It would have been too hard for them,” she said.

Co-organizer Dara Adams said people in Germantown have often had to go to Gaithersburg to join protests. But the area is growing, she said, so it’s “high time we had our own.”

Organizers of Saturday’s events, including labor unions and civil rights groups, held the first No Kings Day in June, when there were 600 fewer events across the nation.

This fall, in the weeks before the protests, House Speaker Michael Johnson and other prominent Republicans compared those who planned to attend No Kings Day to terrorists.

“It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people,” Johnson said last week on Fox News.

The protests across the country seemed to proceed peacefully. No violence was reported in Montgomery County, according to police. Hundreds of people from the county also boarded Washington Metro’s Red Line toward one of the No Kings Day “anchor” protests, on the National Mall. In some Metro cars, the anti-Trump chants began well before the train crossed into Washington, D.C.

At every Montgomery County rally there seemed to be at least a few people in costume: the clown in Silver Spring, two dinosaurs at NIH and an inflatable eagle in Germantown Square Urban Park.

“What’s a protest without a little frivolity?” said Stacey Edwards, who helped zip Spencer Edwards, her son, into the eagle suit before heading over to the Germantown protest.

Some kept it simple.

Several Silver Spring protesters wore crowns they got at a nearby Burger King. “Nope,” one of them wrote on hers.