Now that we’ve had a few days to absorb the impact of the overwhelmingly huge and overwhelmingly peaceful and overwhelmingly successful No Kings rallies, here comes the hard part.
Which is figuring out where to go from here, how to build on that success, knowing that rallies alone, no matter how bigly, can’t stop Donald Trump’s massive assault on democracy.
What to do next is always the hardest question. Just ask Trump, who can’t quite figure out how to respond to the demonstrations, other than to either lie about them or diminish them or, I don’t know, tear down part of the White House to build himself a gilded ballroom in the high Mar-a-Lago style.
It is no easy thing to get 7 million people to come together to do anything. But these are not ordinary times. These are times in which a president increasingly takes on the role of a dictator. And these are the times when the wannabe dictator will respond to the protests — maybe the largest in U.S. history — by, uh, dumping on peaceful marchers.
I’m sure you’ve seen the AI-generated video of Trump in a Top Gun-style fighter jet labeled King Trump, Trump wearing a crown as he takes off, Trump flying above New York City, Trump dropping the euphemism of your choice on the heads of his fellow Americans.
Call the sludge what you want, sewage or feces or poop. I prefer the s-word. I mean, can you imagine a more puerile, less dignified way to dismiss ordinary Americans making use of their First Amendment rights than to dump (expletive deleted) on them?
House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to defend the video by calling it “satire.” I know satire. That was not it. Maybe Johnson was searching for some other word — say, “shatire.”
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SUBSCRIBEOf course Johnson and others in the MAGA sycophancy had been saying for weeks that the No Kings rallies would be led by antifa, by Hamas, by radical left terrorists, by people who hate America.
White House press secretary Karoline “Your Mom” Leavitt expressed the MAGA view days before the rally, saying on Fox: “The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.”
What can they say now that the rallies were decidedly unradical, held by people who kept insisting they were the ones who loved America, many of them coming dressed as inflatable animals, many more of them carrying homemade signs clearly not manufactured by George Soros? By the way, my favorite sign was one carried by a grandmotherly type that said she was “grantifa.”
What can they say now, with 7 million in the streets, is that MAGA is not the only game in town. You didn’t need a protest to know that, though. Just look at Trump’s post-shutdown poll numbers, on the economy, on Ukraine, on Trump’s jackbooted thugs, on Trump himself.
I know what you do if you’re Trump — besides having cabinet members circulate drawings of Democratic leaders as No Kings princesses — you lie about the rallies and pretend they don’t matter. Trump, ever the crowd-size maven, said the rallies were “small” and “very ineffective.” He said the ordinary Americans marching were not “representative of the people of our country.”
I guess he thinks fraudster George Santos, whose sentence he just commuted, is more representative. Or maybe the January 6 rioters he pardoned, one of whom was just charged with threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
But that’s the thing. Even though the rallies were wildly successful, Trump is still here.
He’s still sending National Guard troops to what he calls “war-ravaged” Portland. He’s still sending masked agents to cities — particularly to “hellhole” Chicago — to round up citizens and non-citizens and especially Spanish speakers. He’s still blowing Venezuelan or Colombian boats out of the water. He’s still eviscerating “Democrat” institutions. He’s still threatening universities and, more specifically, academic freedom. He’s still acting as if money in the Treasury is his to use as he sees fit. He’s still planning to limit refugee admissions mostly to white Afrikaners.
He’s still very much … Trump.
What the rallies did prove — and not just to Trump, but also to ourselves — is that right-thinking Americans are no longer so demoralized that they won’t continue to speak up. Presumably, even the most timid Democratic leaders will have to follow. At least the Dems continue to hold ground on the shutdown, even as Trump fires federal workers for no better reason than that he can.
But for the rallies to matter in the long term, as the civil rights protests did, as the Vietnam War protests did, people need to build on them.
You don’t have to have 7 million at a time, although 10 million at the next No Kings event would be great. You have to mean it every day, and in some way do what you can to meet the crisis before us.
I think the Trump-dump video shows at least small signs of panic. I think Speaker Johnson saying, after the fact, that the protesters, unlike Trump, were calling for murdering their opponents shows at least a small degree of panic.
There are cracks in the wall. That’s when you stay on the offensive, even if Trump calls on the military and the IRS and masked thugs and JD Vance to quell dissent.
Of all the prescriptions I’ve seen so far, I think maybe Anne Applebaum’s in the Atlantic is the best. Applebaum is a writer/historian who has specialized in the postwar communist takeover of Eastern Europe and is now an avid anti-Trumper.
She writes this: “For years, Americans at protests have been chanting, ‘This is what America looks like.’ But the No Kings marches are actually what free speech looks like. Democracy looks different. Democracy requires organized politics, support for candidates, the creation of a broad coalition.”
She goes on to say that what protests like the No Kings marches can do is to inspire the necessary hard work. Vulnerable Republicans are already scared by the Medicaid cuts contained in Trump’s ugly, contemptible funding bill and by the soaring insurance premiums to come after limiting subsidies for those using Obamacare. I wasn’t convinced that was a winning argument for Dems, but it has been. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is breaking with Trump on the subsidies.
As for Trump’s threats to democracy, which I thought was the better argument, the overwhelming rallies forcefully made that point without Democratic help.
I mean, if you want to stop Trump, you have to stop him at the polls. The midterm elections next year are not just the “most important midterms of your lifetime.” They are critical. To stop Trump or at least slow him down, Democrats need a foothold in D.C. And their best chance to obtain a position of power is to win back the House next year. That’s why all the back-and-forth (but mostly back) gerrymandering is in play.
One of the tossup House districts is, of course, Colorado’s recently formed 8th Congressional District. It was designed by an independent committee to foster choice. The seat is now occupied by Republican Gabe Evans, who’s a solid MAGA vote — when, that is, House members, now on semi-permanent holiday, actually get the chance to cast a vote.
The choice, assuming voting is still allowed, as to who will win the 8th CD seat is, to put it mildly, critical.
It’s also yours.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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