Pop-up political protester: How one woman quit her job to hassle Trump nationwide

CHICAGO - There's a good chance you'd recognize Nadine Seiler.

Seiler, 59, has developed a knack for being at the right place at the right time to get photographed by the media as she protests former President Donald Trump and conservative policies like the Project 2025 plan to remake the federal government.

Multiple news photographers have captured Seiler's protests across the country since at least 2019, from Chicago to Milwaukee to Miami to outside the Virginia home of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

This isn't how she'd planned to spend her retirement savings after arriving in the United States from the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago nearly 40 years ago. But with her bright makeup and eye-catching signs, protest has become her calling. In Chicago, she's sleeping in a friend's van so she can keep costs down.

"I am crazy," Seiler said with a laugh. "Nobody who is totally sane would do this."

On Sunday she waved a banner as protesters marched down Michigan Avenue, and then popped back up Tuesday in a "Stop Project 2025" headband at a pro-Palestinian march. She's also been interviewed by national media outlets for her work preserving Black Lives Matter displays.

In addition to opposing Trump, she's also recently protested the Gaza war and abortion restrictions. She takes pains to explain she's not some young radical or a dark-money-funded operative, just an older woman who wants to share her perspective.

Seiler arrived in the U.S. on a tourist visa as a young woman and overstayed. She cleared up her residency via a marriage that later ended. For years, she worked in people's houses, mostly cleaning and organizing. It gave her a lot of scheduling flexibility, and now she's largely put work on hold so she can travel the country protesting.

Seiler said she's frustrated and disappointed that Trump supporters are so willing to back and encourage his autocratic tendencies. She said she hopes her protests reach through the media attention to sway those voters, one by one.

"America goes around the world telling people to be democracies but you can't be doing that and at the same time be an authoritarian country yourself," she said as pro-Palestinian protesters marched and chanted nearby.

Yanna Krupnikov, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan, said Seiler falls into a group of people who feel personally obligated to share their perspective. Unlike most of us who are content to talk to friends and family, or maybe volunteer with a political campaign, a certain subset of the population is internally driven to protest.

"You have this feeling of you have to tell others, you have to warn others," Krupnikov said. "For people who are deeply involved, political expression feels really immediate, feels like something important they can do. Politics is so abstract and disconnected, so huge, that sometimes it feels like the only thing we can do is express ourselves and hope others hear it."

Seiler said that's exactly how she feels. Along the way, she's made friends with fellow protesters, including Guy Young, 70, whom she met protesting the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. When Young heard Seiler was planning to protest the DNC, he immediately offered her his van as a bedroom, parked on the street outside his house.

During the Democratic convention, Seiler protested during the day and then returned with Young to his neighborhood. In the morning, he brought her a pancake-wrapped sausage-on-a-stick.

"She's getting better room service than the Hilton," Young said with a laugh.

Seiler said traveling on a shoestring helps stretch her savings, which she's using to fund her protests. She said she heard that a FOX News commentator had wondered aloud how she could afford to keep popping up, and suggested maybe that Seiler was being paid with liberal dark money.

Seiler laughs at the idea.

"I'm so concerned that we are on the precipice of an autocratic society that I have decided to sacrifice my finances to bring this message out here," she said. "People keep saying I'm being paid with dark money. Well, I need to get them to pay me more!"

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why one woman quit work to travel and protest Trump full-time