Since launching in early 2025, the anti-Trump protest at Van Ness and O\u2019Farrell has consistently drawn a crowd every Saturday at noon, and some nearby residents are apparently fed up with the noise, as the city has received hundreds of complaints this year.<\/p>\n
As SFist reported last year<\/a>, the weekly demonstrations began in February 2025 outside the Van Ness Tesla showroom<\/a>, as part of the nationwide \u201cTesla Takedown\u201d movement after President Donald Trump returned to office and Elon Musk took on an outsized role in the administration. The protests were later renamed \u201cTrump Regime Takedown,\u201d and are now organized by Indivisible SF and 50501, as the Chronicle reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n Turnout each week has reportedly fluctuated with national events, drawing around 200 protesters at the beginning, in early 2025. In January 2026, organizers say hundreds turned out after federal agents fatally shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, though a typical Saturday now draws around 50 to 80 protesters.<\/p>\n According to the Chronicle, nearby residents are fed up with the noise surrounding the protest, as the area around Van Ness and O’Farrell has logged hundreds of noise complaints this year compared to previous years. The increase briefly pushed the Western Addition, which includes the area between Japantown and Van Ness, into the city’s top three neighborhoods for noise complaints after reportedly being well below the top 10 last year.<\/p>\n Organizers say that while they’ve been confronted by nearby residents complaining about the noise, they’ve never been cited or asked to move. In one instance, the group was told by police to simply ignore a person who showed up to the protest and began barraging the department with complaints. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s on a Saturday, once a week, from 12 noon to 2. I don\u2019t really think that really is creating a problem,\u201d said protester Steve Harper, speaking to the Chronicle. \u201cIn our situation, how our country is right now, something needs to be done.\u201d <\/p>\n The city reportedly can’t determine how many people filed the complaints because the data is anonymized, but officials say repeat reports from a small number of users are common. Per the Chronicle, more than 20 of the complaints appear to include photos taken from the same nearby vantage point.<\/p>\n Additionally, complaints categorized as \u201cother excessive noise\u201d aren’t routed to an enforcement agency, meaning they’re logged but generally not investigated. <\/p>\n