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The headlines of the past weekend’s “No Kings” protests made the gatherings sound like the 2025 version of the 1969 Vietnam protest at the National Mall.
MSNBC: ‘No Kings’ isn’t just a slogan. It’s a call to save democracy before it’s too late.
NO KINGS IS NOT ‘WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE’ IN THE FOUNDERS’ REPUBLIC
New York Times: Republicans Know How Vulnerable Trump Is. The Attacks on No Kings Prove It.
Politico: ‘No Kings’ protests against Trump bring a street party vibe to cities nationwide
Gee, it’s as if the legacy media are taking a side here. Sarcasm aside, these protests, while large in scale, were attended by mostly older people who likely were also part of the Vietnam protests yearning for the past, but also something to feel morally superior about today.
In this case, the cause is “saving democracy.” Or something. And these folks could not be any more hypocritical.
Back in 2024, Democrats were also screeching about “saving democracy” from Donald Trump, only to oust a sitting president from the nomination and install Kamala Harris without one single vote from the public, Soviet-style. Democrats cheered the lawfare and weaponization of the justice system in an effort to take down Trump before the election. They also supported taking him off state ballots in places such as Maine and Colorado. And when Trump was banned from most social media, they argued that censorship of conservatives was necessary to save the republic.
This is also the same group that overwhelmingly supports stacking the Supreme Court with liberal justices, adding two states, D.C. and Puerto Rico, and abolishing the Electoral College, defying the Founding Fathers’ desire to strike a balance between large and small states. They believed in forcing people to take the COVID-19 vaccine — so much for “my body, my choice” — and masking children as young as 2 years old who were never at risk.
In other words, to “save democracy,” the most essential parts of the Constitution need to be blown up in the name of one-party rule. Makes total sense.
And here’s why these protests don’t mean anything in the end: No Kings will not convert almost any Trump supporters to the other side. In fact, almost all moderates will be pushed further away from the far-left wing of the party. They don’t like the prospect of a Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an antisemite and socialist, in New York. They don’t like the embrace of a murder-fantasizing maniac like Jay Jones, who is looking to become the next attorney general of Virginia, which Democrats refuse to call on to drop out of the race. And moderates certainly do not like calling Trump and his supporters fascists and Nazis.
This may explain why the party is not happy with its only commonsense senator, John Fetterman (D-PA).
“I grew up in a conservative part of Pennsylvania. And I grew up, I knew, and I loved people that voted for President Trump,” he recently noted. “But they are not fascists. They’re not Nazis. They’re not trying to destroy the Constitution and those things.”
One day after making this pragmatic comment, Axios reported that Democrats have turned Democrats on him over his softened approach to Trump and are courting candidates to primary him in his next Senate reelection effort in 2028.
The party has learned nothing after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, instead opting to continue the fascist/Nazi rhetoric, which has resulted in some protesters openly cheering Kirk’s death and even mocking it.
“Charlie Kirk is a piece of garbage,” one female protester told the Daily Signal in Washington on Saturday. “Hitler is dead. I’m glad Hitler’s dead. Evil people have no place in my world. He was a hateful human being. It was disgusting the things he said and did.”
And what was disgusting was that a Chicago elementary school teacher, Lucy Martinez, simulated Kirk getting shot in the neck in a video that has now been viewed millions of times.
“Let’s go to when [Trump] shoots himself in the bunker,” read another No Kings sign in reference to Hitler taking his own life as Allied troops were closing in on his bunker in Berlin at the end of World War II. “You gotta grab a gun, we gotta turn around the guns on this fascist system. These ICE agents gotta get shot and wiped out. The same machinery that’s on full display right there has to get wiped out,” shouted an unidentified speaker at a No Kings rally in Chicago.
And in Portland, one woman shared that she hoped to see “the obituary that we’re all waiting for tomorrow,” and confirmed to a reporter she was speaking about Trump.
So what were these protests really about? What was the goal? That’s about as clear as mud, because the whole theme of No Kings, as if we live in a country ruled by one, makes zero sense.
Trump was duly elected. In the Electoral College, it wasn’t even close over Kamala Harris (312-226). He won the popular vote as well. He can’t run for a third term. And if Trump were actually a king, protests would not be permitted.
We’re hearing that these protests will hurt Trump, but his numbers keep going up during a government shutdown that Democrats are responsible for. The RealClearPolitics average of polls has him at 45.4% approval, which is higher than Obama’s at this stage of his second term (43.7%) and George W. Bush’s (39.7%). Compare that with the Democratic Party, which stands at just 34.7% approval.
Popular podcaster host Joe Rogan, a former supporter of Bernie Sanders, summed up the makeup of the people who attended No Kings protests.
“All those people that are protesting on the streets, 99% of them are losers,” Rogan said. “The other ones work for the Fed. It’s FBI agents and losers, it’s all it is. The whole f***ing protest is FBI agents and losers.”
Trump echoed Rogan on Air Force One on Sunday night.
“I’m not a king. I work my ass off to make our country great. That’s all it is. I’m not a king at all,” Trump told reporters. “I looked at the people — they’re not representative of this country.”
No Kings held its first protest in June. Lots of hype, lots of analysis saying it was a turning point in the resistance against Trump. We’re hearing the same thing about the protests this past weekend.
But here we are, just a few days later, and they’re already forgotten. The Democratic Party still is a rudderless ship with no important issue they can rally around and explain why.
Resisting Trump probably felt good for No Kings attendees. Maybe they feel like they’re making a difference, just as they did in the ’60s when opposing Vietnam.
NO KINGS IS THE DUMBEST PROTEST IN THE TRUMP ERA
The difference now, of course, is that speaking out against a pointless war had teeth. “No Kings” simply has a silly slogan fueled by blind hatred for a duly elected president.
The Seinfeld of protests … a show about nothing.
