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Over the past week or so, it seemed as if some Republican leaders were hoping that Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations – the marches and rallies hosted by a coalition of liberal groups across the country and worldwide – would turn violent. House speaker Mike Johnson called them “Hate America” rallies, a moniker that was quickly picked up by other Republicans, and described the No Kings protests as a crucible of potential riots, representing “all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people”. “You’re gonna bring together the Marxists, the socialists, the antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat party,” he said. Tom Emmer, a representative for Minnesota, described the rallies as a product of the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic party. And Roger Marshall, a senator from Kansas, fantasized that the protests would require action by the national guard. Others, such as attorney general Pam Bondi, mused about who might be paying the protesters to show up – an idea that seemed to dismiss the notion that anyone might oppose Donald Trump’s agenda for principled, rather than cynical, reasons.
At times they sounded almost wistful. Republicans, the president himself chief among them, have been fervently endeavoring to cast those who oppose their authoritarian consolidation of power as enemies – contemptible un-Americans who lack virtue, common values, or the protection of the law. In a world where it was once considered the height of inappropriate partisanship for Hillary Clinton to refer to a “basket of deplorables” among Trump voters or Barack Obama to mourn the conservatives who “cling to guns or religion”, it barely registered as news on Thursday when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News: “The Democrat party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
But no matter how fervently and how deeply the Trump regime appears to hate the American people, the No Kings protests that brought millions to the streets on Saturday suggests that the American people hate them even more. In the densely packed streets of cities from New York to Austin to Oakland to St Augustine, Florida, the massive protests took on a tone of jubilant contempt, with Trump and his various lackeys derided on signs and in effigies, with jokes that ranged from the high-minded to the vulgar. At a protest in San Francisco, I saw one man holding a sign that quoted Walt Whitman, walking near a woman making a vulgar reference to Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. A number of people donned inflatable character costumes – I saw a starfish, a teddy bear, two unicorns, a rooster and a pickle. They originated from Portland’s protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and national guard deployments as cheeky ways to mock the Trump administration’s claims that the city was “war-torn” and in need of armed invasion. If the anti-Trump resistance movements of his first administration were characterized by a kind of self-serious righteousness, those of the No Kings era have devolved into irreverence and humor. At times I was reminded of a peculiar feeling I have sometimes had, in the desperate hours after funerals or bad breakups, when I have been crying for so long that I find I’ve started laughing.
The No Kings protests have been criticized for their capaciousness and indefinite agenda, and it is true that the demonstrations are the product of several large liberal groups and bring together people whose politics and inclinations would not ordinately mix. At San Francisco’s protest, I saw the signature red rose of the democratic socialists, the Aztec eagle of the United Farm Workers, and a gold lamé sign held aloft by a largely unclothed man who declared himself a libertarian – in addition to a motley mix of men wearing the powdered wigs and tricorn hats of the founding fathers, women with white feathered sleeves and hoods posing as bald eagles, and a staggering number of people who wrapped themselves in the American flag.
The hodgepodge of symbolism might reflect the chaotic and disorganized nature of the anti-Trump coalition – which, containing as it does the majority of the US’s 340 million people, is rife with contradictions. This has long been a problem for the Democrats: the party fears that their tent is too big, their base is too far from swing voters, and the coalitions of Obama and Joe Biden are too fractured and fragile to ever be maintained. But Trump has perhaps created a new kind of glue that can hold together a different kind of political movement: something that vast swaths of the American people hate even more than they hate each other.
Amid the density of references and imagery, No Kings might also indicate a new political posture being born: a left-liberal popular front that mixes principle with irreverence. The aspiration of No Kings, in a way, is to abolish itself – to rebuild, perhaps a little sturdier and more honest this time, the kind of constitutional system in which law and persuasion replace Trump’s model of violence and domination. To put it another way: the people at the No Kings rallies all agree that they want to restore the kinds of liberal-democratic conditions that will enable them to disagree with one another.
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At any rate, the violence that the Trump regime seemed to long for did not materialize. In San Francisco, an organizer speaking into a megaphone urged attendees to ignore any pro-Trump agitators they might encounter, and to not engage with any federal agents. “If you see uniformed feds outside a building,” he warned the crowd, “it’s bait.” Before the marches, some seemed frightened of what might happen – whether Trump-aligned federal forces might crack down with mass arrests, or whether pro-Trump militias might instigate a fight. But the demonstrations seem to have been remarkably peaceful, even cheerful, avoiding provocations and meeting virtually no violence from Trump-aligned forces. In New York, an estimated 100,000 marchers participated in No Kings events across the five boroughs, and an official Twitter account associated with the New York police department reported that there had been no arrests of protesters.
Trump appeared disappointed. On Saturday evening, after the marches had largely disbanded and the millions who had turned out to oppose him went home, he took to Truth Social, his proprietary social media platform, to post an AI-generated video of himself. In the cartoon, Trump – wearing a crown – flies a fighter jet over the No Kings protests, and dumps feces on the protesting citizens. It was a peevish, petulant little display of contempt – the kind of behavior that you would punish in a child but which has become bog standard for the president of the United States. He evidently wanted Americans to know that he hates them. The feeling is mutual.
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Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
