No Kings Means No Kings. No Wonder Trump Hates It.

On Saturday, between 5 and 7 million people assembled on streets, sidewalks and town squares across the country — in “red” states and in “blue” — to protest against President Trump and his administration, in what may have been the largest single-day demonstration in American history. This came on the heels of a similar demonstration in June, which, despite its smaller size (approximately 2 to 5 million participants), was still one of the largest single days of protest ever recorded in this country.

Here is what Trump, whose job it is to represent the whole people of the United States, had to say about the day.

“It’s a joke,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I looked at the people. They are not representative of this country. And I looked at all the brand-new signs I guess paid for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. We’re checking it out. The demonstrations were very small. And the people were whacked out.”

That same day, the president posted to his Truth Social account an A.I.-generated video in which he bombarded protesters with what appeared to be a flood of feces from a fighter aircraft he was flying while wearing a crown.

No, I am not making this up. It’s true.

What isn’t true, on the other hand, is the president’s characterization of the protests. By all accounts, the protesters represented a cross-section of the broader public. The people themselves were peaceful, calm and disciplined.

Trump’s calumny aside, it is useful to compare the president’s response in this moment to one of President Barack Obama’s early reactions to the much smaller Tea Party protests that took off during his first term in office.

“I think that America has a noble tradition of being helpfully skeptical about government,” he said in 2010 during a news conference a few weeks before the midterm elections:

And I think that’s a good thing. I think there’s also a noble tradition in the Republican and Democratic parties of saying that government should — should pay its way, that it shouldn’t get so big that we’re leaving debt to the next generation. All those things, I think, are healthy.

Obama then went on to ask the Tea Party movement to make specific demands — to say what they would have him do so that they could work, constructively, to find common ground.

Now, you can attribute this yawning distance between the two men to their respective temperaments, which we do not need to elaborate on any further than we already have. But even after you account for personality, Trump stands out. Recall that even President Richard Nixon, infamous for his endless resentment toward — and acid contempt for — his political opponents, met with student protesters of the Vietnam War at the Lincoln Memorial to try to understand their perspective, not as adversaries but as fellow Americans.

What we see in Trump is not just a difference of personality but one of political interpretation. Trump does not see himself leading the people of the United States, but his people — the denizens of MAGA America, defined by the colors on the 2024 presidential election map.

It would be one thing if this were just a preoccupation with the interests of his supporters. But Trump combines sectarian partisanship with genuine hatred for those Americans on the other side of the political divide. As he told the audience at a state-sanctioned memorial for Charlie Kirk last month, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”

What he wants, instead, is to dominate them: to subjugate them to his will. To that end, he has refashioned the most coercive parts of the federal government into instruments designed to force his opponents — or as he sees them, his enemies — to bend the knee. And it is this, as much as anything else, that inspired millions of Americans to define their opposition to Trump in terms of royal power and royal prerogatives.

To return to the Saturday protests — and to put them in slightly different terms — roughly one in 50 Americans gathered under one slogan (“No Kings!”) to protest against the president’s authoritarian methods and monarchical aspirations. And while Trump’s allies may feign ignorance with regard to claims that he’s seeking arbitrary and unaccountable power — hiding behind an accusation of “Trump derangement syndrome” — it takes no time at all to write out a litany of offenses that threaten the republican foundations of American democracy.

To borrow language from one of the nation’s founding documents, Trump has “erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance”; he has “kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures”; he has “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power”; he has cut “off our Trade with all Parts of the World” and imposed “Taxes on us without our Consent.” He has transported us “beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences” and in deigning to spend tax dollars without congressional authorization — to pay soldiers in the midst of a shutdown, in a move reminiscent of Stuart absolutism — he has “invested” himself “with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.”

All this so that he might alter “fundamentally the Forms of our Governments,” and remake the United States in his image as a personalist autocracy.

The president’s opponents can see, quite clearly, that Trump wants authoritarian power so that he can crush their dissent. And Trump has been nothing but open about his desire to turn the federal state against blue America, punishing Democrats and Democratic voters for the crime of acting against him. “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy,” he said in remarks to the military’s top brass last month. “It’s a war from within.”

Hence the president’s use of the National Guard to occupy American cities and, as much as possible, to replace civil law with military order. Hence his use of federal law enforcement to harass and intimidate his political adversaries as well as universities and civil society organizations deemed liberal. Hence his impoundment of funds meant for Democratic-led states and his threats to defund Democratic-led cities like New York. And hence his promise to use the government shutdown to cut programs favored by Democrats.

“We’re only cutting Democrat programs, I hate to tell you, but we are cutting Democrat programs,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting early in the standoff. “We will be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly.”

One irony, here, is that in his zeal to punish Democrats for their opposition to his administration, Trump is harming millions of his own voters who live in states such as New York, Illinois and California. He seems unaware that there were more Trump voters in, for example, Los Angeles County than there were in the state of Oklahoma.

But this just gets to the basic folly of trying to govern for “your” people and force the rest of the public to submit to your will. Despite what might appear to be true in the maps we use to illustrate election results, it is not possible to divide the United States into “red” and “blue” teams. For as much as Americans are polarized around party affiliation, they do not actually exist in separate societies or civilizations. Wish as we might otherwise, we rise, and fall, together.

In which case the main effect of the president’s effort to dominate and punish his political enemies is to harm all Americans. And while some will soothe their material pain with the psychological wage of domination — of knowing that, whatever else happens, the libs were owned — most will simply suffer.

The proximate aim of the No Kings protests was to demonstrate — to the public as much as to politicians, business leaders and other prominent members of civil society — that the supposed “vibe shift” of the 2024 election was a mirage and that, far from being the avatar of some imagined authentic American, Trump is just a politician, and an unpopular one at that. But part of the power of mass protest is that even when orderly it is unpredictable; no one truly knows who is watching, who is changed, who is inspired.

In seizing the mantle of the country’s anti-royal heritage — that is, in seizing the rhetoric and imagery of the American Revolution and taking back the tea party from the Tea Partyers — Saturday’s protests may remind many more than those who waved a sign that we, as Americans, are honored participants in a shared project of self-government and that there is no election that could give any president the power to deprive us of our right to govern ourselves.

Trump needs division to fuel his autocratic plans and make his royal dream a reality. For this reason, he is working as hard as possible to divide this country against itself. But if we can take any sign from the public’s escalating response to this madness, it is that Trump just may, in the end, remind Americans of the vital power of acting together in solidarity with each other.