No Kings protests highlight crucial fight to delegitimize MAGA authoritarianism
As the president and his allies dismiss a pro-democracy majority as extremist, they highlight the GOP's outlandish dream of a one-party nation
This past weekend’s No Kings rallies, attended by an estimated 5 to 6 million participants, highlighted not only massive public resistance to the Trump administration, but a crucial axis of struggle between the MAGA GOP and its opponents. In a way far different than most previous conflicts in U.S. politics, Donald Trump and his opponents are fighting not only over the substance of specific policies and actions, but also over the political legitimacy of the other side.
The “No Kings” terminology captures a broad understanding among a mix of Democrats, independents, and disaffected Republicans that the Trump administration is behaving in an essentially anti-constitutional fashion. Not only are his policies and actions noxious to their values, but are also seen to fall outside what is acceptable within our political system — most glaringly, his efforts to behave as a de facto dictator unbound by the rule of law. The perception that the threat he poses crosses multiple issues — the economy, public health, human rights — ties back to Donald Trump’s fundamental antipathy to democracy and the constitutional order. The threat he poses on these specific fronts is so profound not just because his policies are terrible, but also because they are so often advanced by means contemptuous of democratic values, the consent of the governed, and whether or not he actually has the legal power to do so.
In this respect, the organizers and attendees of the protests are very much in front of the Democratic leadership in perceiving and articulating the true nature of Trump’s threat: it is an existential one, with the outcome of our present political conflict being whether or not we continue to have a democratic system (imperfect but — and this is crucial — still perfectible) that is responsive to popular opinion and protective of our basic rights. In taking to the streets in mass demonstrations, they are doing another thing that Democratic leaders and elected officials have thus far done only in grossly insufficient numbers: actually act like this is a fight for our political lives, and perhaps our literal lives as well. They do this not just by marching, but by marching behind a message that Donald Trump is trying to be a king, not a president: that his politics, and his presidency, are not to be considered legitimate by the American people.
From the Republican side, the days leading up to the protests saw countervailing, inflammatory rhetoric that sought above all else to paint the demonstrations, those involved in them, and the Democratic Party (which was not directly involved in their organization) as fundamentally illegitimate. Jamelle Bouie had a good round-up in a recent column:
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming said of a planned No Kings protest that it would be a “big ‘I hate America’ rally” of “far-left activist groups.” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana also called No Kings a “hate America rally.” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that he expected to see “Hamas supporters,” “antifa types” and “Marxists” on “full display.” People, he said without a touch of irony, “who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.” And all of this is of a piece with the recent declaration by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.
And in the days since the actual rallies — which, for the record, were both massive and peaceful — Republicans have simply continued to repeat these very same talking points (augmented by lies about how sparsely attended they were), no matter how much their canned slander defies reality. For instance, House Speaker Johnson remarked that the protestors sent a message that was “completely the opposite of what America was founded upon.”
But this GOP strategy around the No Kings demonstrations is a more focused version of a far longer-term effort to portray all opposition to Trump as lacking legitimacy, and as constituting only the frothing of violent, extremist elements. Since at least the latter part of the first Trump administration, it has been Republican orthodoxy that Democrats only win elections through the illegal voting of millions of undocumented immigrants; that any Democratic victory (most prominently, Joe Biden’s 2020 win) can only be due to cheating.
Under Trump II, the president and the GOP have accelerated their scheme to portray any opposition to Trump as minimal and radical, with a continued focus on delegitimizing the Democratic Party. Stephen Miller, a key advisor to Trump, has described the Democratic Party as “domestic extremists,” while the administration and GOP more generally have engaged in manifold abuses of state levers (corrupt attacks on Democrat funding sources, fake investigations of prominent Democratic politicians, schemes to gerrymander and subvert the 2026 and 2028 elections) to permanently lock the party out of federal power. But the rhetorical anchor of such efforts has been that the Democrats are simply illegitimate in the first place.
Donald Trump’s quest for dictatorial control, and the GOP’s accompanying efforts to transform the U.S. into a land of competitive authoritarianism in which the electoral scale is massively tilted in favor of Republicans, are helped along by claiming that Americans support the president and his party in overwhelming numbers. In other words, Trump and the GOP understand that to legitimize their autocratic actions, they must cover them in a veneer of democratic popularity. But because this popularity is wholly fictitious, they must simultaneously paint all democratic opposition as itself illegitimate. In this way, they seek to establish legitimacy through a sort of parlor trick, by suggesting the illegitimacy of their opponents as much as by claiming their own legitimacy.
And so the GOP particularly needed to attack highly-visible mass protests to try to pervert public perceptions of their true nature, since the demonstrations themselves directly and effectively undermine claims that all opposition to Trump is radical, violent, and small in scale. It is no surprise that Republicans simply doubled down even after the protests demonstrated the vastness of the GOP’s lies about those opposed to Trump. While this continued propaganda effort demonstrates a pathological unity among right-wing media and politicos, it also illuminates how, and why, delegitimizing the opposition is central to the party’s quest for power. It is not just some perverse thing that Republicans are doing — they grasp that the illusion of popularity is central to their political survival, and that the reality of unpopularity must be suppressed at all costs.
But in a fight over which party, and which side, is actually legitimate versus illegitimate, the GOP is in a fundamentally weak, and ultimately indefensible, position. Congressional Republicans have embraced Trump’s spiraling lawlessness, while the far-right dominated Supreme Court has blessed it, so that complicity with authoritarian rule is now the GOP brand. Their main aim is not to adhere to the rule of law and democratic government, but to propagate the illusion of doing so while effectively gutting both, with the goal of delivering the United States into a Trump-dominated authoritarianism.
The GOP’s handling of the No Kings marches highlights this inherent weakness. As we noted above, with the mass marches demonstrating widespread, norm-core resistance to the president, Republicans have simply continued claiming that the marches were small and populated by radicals. But while this rhetoric might be credible to the MAGA base, such blatant lies run an increasing risk not only of alienating other Americans, but of drawing attention to the GOP’s own radicalism: after all, what sort of crazed party expends so much time and energy telling demonstrable, insane falsehoods?
And there’s another layer to the GOP’s manic demonization campaign that also works against the party. The GOP claims that it is the true, sole party of democracy, yet bases this on the incredible assertion that Trump is so popular that literally no one but Marxists, criminals, and ballot-casting “illegals” would oppose him. The political science term for such a farsical lie is “bonkerstown,” and the GOP appears to own the deed to this crazy place. Perhaps not at an entirely conscious level, Americans understand that it’s pretty odd for a supposedly democratic party to claim that it’s actually the only party you’re allowed to vote for in the United States.
Likewise, parallel attempts to dismiss out of hand the concerns of the No Kings protestors, and anti-Trump Americans more generally, demonstrate the GOP’s refusal to recognize Trump’s clear abuses of power, and the risks this refusal carries for the party. Seeking to belittle the protests, some Republicans have asked how Trump could possibly be a king in light of his being elected last year — a sleight of hand that ignores his grotesque lawlessness since assuming office, and his pretensions to even more unaccountable power. Americans are asked to swallow the lawlessness hook, line, and sinker — to either join the MAGA borg, or be disparaged as anti-American for simply believing the evidence of their own eyes and ears. In effect, the GOP’s strategy of actively working to delegitimize opponents by lying about basic facts and concerns encourages Americans to see the Republican Party as the one divorced from the mainstream of U.S. politics.
With Trump accelerating his assault on the constitutional order on a daily basis, the pro-democracy majority needs to discredit his authoritarian designs while asserting that no form of government but constitutional democracy can be accepted within our borders. The No Kings protests demonstrated that millions grasp the nature of the threat, and that we must collectively refuse the wholesale evisceration of American democracy. The U.S. can have democracy, or it can have whatever ungodly flimflam Trump and MAGA are concocting in plain view of us all, but it cannot have both. To make their case, they can point to dozens of impeachment-level offenses in which the president has abused his power and betrayed his oath of office.
But alongside this, we can also see how the GOP’s claims that Trump’s unbound power is uniquely democratic, and that the pro-democracy majority constitutes an alien presence in American life, are deeply, even fatally flawed. The GOP response to the No Kings protests — histrionic, divisive, and obsessively insistent that dissent from Trumpism equals treason — shows that a fight to delegitimize MAGA isn’t just necessary, but increasingly winnable. Trump and his allies are already doing a decent job delegitimizing themselves; now we need a steady effort by motivated millions to finish the job.