No Kings rally: What did it achieve?

The No Kings protest — Donald Trump is “far from as popular as he says he is.”

(Image credit: Reuters)

Even for a jaded old political warrior like me, said William Kristol in The Bulwark, last weekend’s nationwide “No Kings” protests were deeply moving. In what was likely the largest single protest in the nation’s history, some 7 million people “assembled peacefully and patriotically” in major cities and rural towns like Macon, Ga., and Plano, Texas, “to protest Donald Trump and reaffirm their allegiance to the American idea.” The rallies had an inspiring mood of both “joy and sobriety,” and were an emphatic rejection of Trump’s assault on the rule of law and the Constitution. Republicans had ludicrously predicted that No Kings would be violent gatherings of antifa radicals who “hate America,” but the rally’s “obvious success” triggered Trump. He posted a childish video of a jet emblazoned with “KING TRUMP” dumping torrents of excrement on the protesters. In interviews, he ominously warned that he could invoke the Insurrection Act in response to large protests—an indication he finds dissent intolerable.

Trump has good reason to be threatened by No Kings, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. His growing authoritarian control of the nation depends heavily on the perception that he’s “the authentic tribune of the people.” The images of millions of outraged Americans filling the streets present “a direct rebuke” to that narrative, revealing he’s “far from as popular as he says he is.” To diminish the protests, Republicans also tried laughing them off as “middle-aged-women coded,” said Quinta Jurecic in The Atlantic. All those “wine moms” and gray-haired people with punny anti-Trump signs reminding America of our democratic ideals, the Right claimed, were earnest, uncool, “cringe”—in contrast to the cynical, macho MAGA ethos. But as idealistic as it was, the massive show of defiance struck an important blow against fatalism, and could help rally disheartened voters to organize to defeat Trump and his allies.

No Kings was a good start, said Ronald Brownstein in Bloomberg, but “to convey the urgency of the moment,” the loyal opposition needs “an edgier tool”: a general strike. Millions of workers across multiple sectors of the economy could withdraw their labor for days. General strikes can create attention, urgency, and solidarity, and were effectively used to defeat autocracy in Poland and Brazil. Discussion of this strategy among Trump’s opponents “is intensifying—as a supplement, not a substitute, to mass public protest.”