No Kings protests gave a needed morale boost to anti-Trump opposition
The demonstrations may have sent a warning to the president, but they also sent a potent message of solidarity to fellow marchers and other Americans
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
Attendance at the nationwide No Kings rallies on June 14 can’t be measured precisely, but experts estimate that somewhere between 4 million and 6 million people participated at more than 2,100 separate locations. This puts No Kings within the realm of the largest days of protest in U.S. history (for example, the 2017 Women’s March involved somewhere between 3.3 and 5.6 million attendees). Moreover, it arrives as the latest in a wave of demonstrations during Trump’s first five months in office that has dwarfed the number of demonstration in the same period of 2017 — around 15,000 this year, versus around 5,000 back then.
Much of the news coverage has, not incorrectly, focused on the demonstrations as a way for ordinary Americans to send a loud and clear message of disapproval to Donald Trump. Timed to coincide with his absurd military birthday parade in Washington, D.C., they provided an opportunity for opponents to make their own pro-democracy parades instead, while effectively boycotting a D.C. spectacle in which America’s army was conscripted as a prop to the glorification of a would-be king.
G. Elliot Morris, who put together the demonstration figures I noted above, suggests what is driving the protests and how they signal trouble ahead for Donald Trump:
Both the number of protests and their massive size are warnings for the Trump administration, which has routinely trampled the limits of public opinion during the president’s second term. On immigration, deportations, Medicaid/social spending, and democracy, the president has pushed policy much farther right than sanctioned by the U.S. public. The mobilized resistance across the country on Saturday is a real-world sign of backlash to his unpopular agenda.
Trump’s far-right moves way beyond what most of the public supports, and even beyond what many of his voters support, is indeed the story of the Trump administration. He’s swung so far right, in fact, that he’s entered the delirious territory of authoritarianism, with his policies packaged in lawlessness and delivered with increasing threats and violence. People are clearly reacting to this full-spectrum extremism.
The question of whether the protests portend trouble for Trump, though, is a critical open question. As I’ve written recently, the linkage between public opinion and governmental responsiveness is exactly what Trump is aiming to break, by threatening harm to both ordinary citizens and Democratic politicians who vocally oppose him, while also seeking more generally to demoralize them. He’s betting that seeming powerful will make him powerful, and his sick willingness to engage in lawlessness and violence gives him a chance to do so.
But ultimately, Trump’s ultimate success or failure in making himself the United States’s first dictator, and securing MAGA’s long-term dominance over the American majority, will certainly not depend on his actions alone. The American people can, and I believe will, stop him, and sooner rather than later; the challenge is for the public and elected officials to develop concrete strategies to do so. And on this front, the protests last weekend served a vitally important purpose that has largely been under-discussed: not simply to “send a message” that Trump might or might not hear, but to send a message to each other, to other sympathetic citizens who did not march, and to those who are unsettled by what they see Trump doing but aren’t sure if there’s any point in opposing him.
In this respect, the demonstrations were a morale-building exercise for a pro-democracy opposition that worries Trump cannot be stopped, that the Democrats are not up to the task, and that there is no clear path forward. This was all the more critical given how pervasive a sense of fatalism and powerlessness has seemed to be. In my personal sphere, I have talked to very few people who haven’t adopted a basic posture of “we’re totally fucked” — perhaps a natural response to a perception of looming catastrophe, but not the attitude needed to head off that catastrophe in the first place.
The marchers signaled that, whatever their internal barometers of “we’re fuckedness,” they will not be hobbled by their fears. While the day of mass demonstrations and small protests was not the solution to all our problems, it was absolutely a step in the right direction. To see hundreds or thousands of mostly strangers gather for a common purpose, with high spirits despite the grave cause, sharing camaraderie and creativity, was invaluable. We might not yet have the numbers necessary to make Trump and MAGA tremble, but we all saw on Saturday that we are certainly within striking distance. After five months of ceaseless obscenity and insult to our country, those who attended received direct confirmation that they are not alone in their outrage.
There was yet another target of the marches’ message that has been a bit less underplayed, but which I will also call out here — the Democratic Party, whose elected officials have hardly been united in full opposition to Trump and MAGA’s increasing authoritarianism. If loyalty to the Constitution, love of democracy, and hatred of tyranny won’t move some Democrats, then perhaps displays of outrage from their constituents will finally persuade them to fear the judgment of the ballot box, if not the judgment of history.
Those who marched and demonstrated should be proud of the counterpoint they provided to Trump’s militarized birthday parade, and the faith they showed in each other. As Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele wrote, “Trump’s ostentatious appearance as commander in chief of an army brought to Washington for his enjoyment (on his birthday, no less) was designed to generate the impression that he is already in full control” — but the demonstrations revealed Trump’s pretensions of dominance for the fictions they are. On No Kings day, millions of Americans reminded themselves and each other that they have not yet lost control of this nation, and that there is still time to chart a course back from the brink, together.