10/31/2025
“SURRENDER DONALD," members of ACT UP & Housing Works at Trump Tower, New York City. Photo © Lee Snider. On October 31, 1989, 36 years ago this week, over 100 members of ACT UP and Housing Works demonstrated at Trump Tower to draw attention to the growing crisis of homelessness among people with AIDS.
Donald Trump was targeted to dramatize the disparity between government policy which allowed Trump to pick up a whopping 6.2 million dollar tax abatement for the building, and the contrasting governmental inaction which allows an almost limitless supply of city owned property to remain vacant and unrenovated while the population of homeless people with AIDS continues to grow.”
As police violently corralled demonstrators outside, about 30 activists slipped inside Trump Tower’s “expansively gaudy atrium,” where “a weird game of cat and mouse” took place until, finally, “a shower of leaflets poured down through the ten-story atrium,” at which point security guards, “in mass confusion, cornered whomever they could nab.” via on IG.