Trump’s political opponents are flailing and it is falling to ‘the streets’ to provide any kind of pushback against him
As millions of Americans took to the country’s streets on Saturday to protest against President Donald Trump and the excesses of his government, the US leader went into full Marie Antoinette mode. Recalling the infamous Queen of France’s supposed indifference to her people, when Trump’s White House was asked for a comment about more than 2,600 separate protests and demonstrations that organisers claim mobilised seven million people, spokeswoman Abigail Jackson offered a two-syllable response: “Who cares?” she sniffed.
As demonstrators from coast to coast articulated the view that there must be “No Kings” in America, and insisted that the country’s somewhat beleaguered constitution was unambiguous on the issue, Trump eagerly moved to portray himself as a monarch.
On his Truth Social platform, he reposted an AI-created video that was distributed earlier on Saturday by Vice President JD Vance. It depicts Trump cloaked in royal regalia, and brandishing a sword as subjects kneel before him. He later posted another AI-generated video showing himself in a fighter jet, wearing a crown, pouring brown sludge onto protesters.
On Monday, the White House will assuredly tell reporters that the President was just exercising his sense of humour, as they did earlier this month when he posted racist, AI-created portrayals of political opponents including Democrat leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. But the notion that any American president would ever feel sufficiently emboldened to picture himself as a monarch is fresh evidence that the future of America’s democracy is very fragile in Trump’s hands.
On Capitol Hill, his top supporters insisted it was Trump’s critics who were the un-American ones. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, called the “No Kings” protests “the hate America rally”, with “Hamas supporters…Antifa types” and “Marxists on full display”. He characterised protesters as “people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this Republic”.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called for new laws that would allow anyone funding the “No Kings” movement to be prosecuted under anti-mafia racketeering statutes. “There’s considerable evidence that George Soros and his network is behind funding these rallies which may well turn into riots”, he insisted late last week on Fox News. But earlier this month, the conservative watchdog that first claimed to have unearthed evidence of the Hungarian financer’s involvement with “No Kings” conceded that Soros’s Open Society Foundations had done nothing to break any American law.
The demonstrators themselves argue that they are the defenders of America’s democratic experiment, and that is coming under unique attack at the hands of Trump. Several Democrats in Congress released a video on social media that urged military veterans to turn out on Saturday and voice opposition to the President’s threat to flood the streets of American cities with active duty military personnel. “We’ve seen this authoritarian playbook before in too many other countries”, said Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from New York who organised the effort. “Let’s do what we do best”, she said encouraging veterans to participate in the protests, “because America has no king.”
It is impossible to know exactly how many people mobilised across the country on Saturday. But The New York Times, having irritated protesters on Friday night by claiming that it would not attempt to count numbers and would instead focus on the demonstrators’ message instead, was engaged in the numbers game a mere 24 hours later. “In major metropolitan areas, like Washington DC the numbers were huge,” the newspaper reported. “A rally in Atlanta that drew thousands at one point covered three city blocks. A protest in San Francisco poured across five. One rally in Chicago stretched over 22,” the dispatch continued.
Whatever the numbers, the rallies revealed yet again that grassroots Americans who oppose Trump are essentially leaderless in their opposition to him. The “No Kings” movement has been organically organised by various progressive groups including “MoveOn.Org”, “Indivisible” and “50501”, each of them pledging to confront Trump’s authoritarianism, end his executive over-reach and defend the constitution.
But America has no Leader of the Opposition, and with Democrats in continuing disarray, protesters themselves have been warned by progressive luminaries including Senator Bernie Sanders that it will fall to “the streets” to provide any kind of effective pushback that aims to constrain Trump.
Spending his weekend at Mar-A-Lago in Florida, the President appeared supremely unconcerned by all of it. And willing to portray himself as the king of a country that thought it had put the monarchy behind it 249 years ago.
