No Kings is silly. But I love it.
The No Kings 3 protest on Saturday drew an estimated 9 million protesters at more than 3,300 events in all 50 states for what was the largest single-day nationwide demonstration in American history. There were people dressed up as Revolutionary War soldiers, Handmaids, posters depicting Trump as a Nazi, depicting him as a pig, depicting him with a penis for a face and the words “Small DICKtator Energy,” Ukrainian flags, trans flags, Mark Twain’s proposed flag for American-controlled Philippines, a guy on stilts with his face painted orange and a “TRAITOR” sign around his neck. It was all so absurdly stupid. And I absolutely loved it.
The movement, which began with earlier No Kings demonstrations in June and October 2025, recently gained momentum in response to ICE operations — notably the killings of Renée Good, Keith Porter, and Alex Pretti — as well as the Iran war. The flagship rally took place in Minneapolis–St. Paul, ground zero for those ICE shootings, where Bruce Springsteen sang and Bernie Sanders, Joan Baez, and Jane Fonda made appearances. It was a party as much as a protest. But what distinguished this round from its predecessors was its geographic penetration into conservative America. Organizers reported two-thirds of RSVPs came from outside major urban centers, including conservative-leaning states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah, as well as swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.
Putting aside the silly ways many protesters chose to get their point across, or failing to do so, the whole thing also felt kind of pointless to me. Was this movement really going to translate into durable political power manifested through voter registration, candidate recruitment, and sustained institutional pressure? Or was it going to dissipate into the episodic catharsis of our drinking-from-a-firehose weekly news cycle? You know, exactly like its two predecessors did.
A dark day in America
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woma…
That said, sure, No Kings is constitutionally sound in the abstract. America fought a revolution to reject the power of kings, and at the lowest level of resolution, this protest is a rejection of monarchy. But another low-res characterization, just as fair, is that this is simply an anti-Trump protest. Most importantly, the coalition deploying it is riddled with a selective authoritarianism that undermines any moral seriousness it can ever hope to claim. Many of its loudest voices have spent decades offering apologetics, or at minimum studied silence, for regimes that make Trump’s executive overreach look more constitutionally scrupulous than Madison. The Bolivarian catastrophe in Venezuela — where Maduro presided over a hell of his own making until America ripped him out of his reality — drew no mass protests against his regime. Nor measured considerations about how to maintain international law when international law failed to stop Maduro in the first place, but would stand in the way of removing him. But we did see calls of support for Maduro. Just as they cheered for Hamas after October 7, for Cuba more recently, and even Iran.
Iran hangs gay citizens from cranes and guns down its own protesters, yet segments of this movement treat opposition to Tehran as inherently imperialist rather than pro-human. The reflex to frame every American assertion of power as uniquely evil, colonial, or white supremacist while treating genocidal anti-American psychopaths as complex figures deserving nuance is, shall we say, not a coherent philosophy of liberty. It’s an aesthetic. And to be clear, the aesthetic is “America bad.” And let’s also be clear: Trump is not a king. He’s a norm-breaking populist president operating within, and stress-testing, a constitutional system that still has courts, legislatures, a free press, and 9 million people in the streets on a single day proving that the system works. Calling him a king while lionizing actual dictators is not brave, it’s just stupid, and it hands Trump’s defenders the easiest rebuttal in politics: these people don’t actually oppose tyranny — they just oppose you.
And yet, I recently met a young man in his 20s who’d been a protester in Hong Kong during the worst of it. Running from police, dodging tear gas, watching his city’s freedoms get crushed in front of his eyes. I had covered those kids, in Hong Kong and in Seoul, and they were my heroes. These were young people who put their bodies on the line for democratic ideals. It was inspiring to hear his stories. But it also reminds one of the true face of tyranny. Xi Jinping is a tyrant. Kim Jong-un is a tyrant. Putin, Maduro, Khamenei, Akhundzada. But Trump is not a tyrant because he is not an absolute ruler. He is not a king of any kind. Or a dictator. Or a Nazi. Or even the worst U.S. president (that dishonor probably goes to Buchanan or Harding).
Then on Saturday, an old friend from Chengdu visited. We hadn’t seen each other in eight years, and it was heartwarming to catch up. We talked about his work, his efforts to transfer from a student to a work visa. I asked him whether he ever worries about possibly being deported in the current climate. He said, “No, what can I do about it?” But then he acknowledged that things are so wild now, so unpredictable, that no matter how sure he felt, and however certainly he knew he had followed all the rules, there was a little fear that could creep in, if he let it. We had a few drinks. We talked about Chinese politics, and I expressed my admiration for China’s tiered electoral system, its “meritocratic democracy,” even if it was so corrupt and submissive to a dictator’s will that it meant nothing in the end. But the idea seemed nice. My friend laughed. I explained that things can be so perfect on paper, but if you don’t have the culture for it, it won’t really work because the laws of society emanate from the values and norms of the people, not the other way around. Then we talked about the No Kings protests and both agreed that these lovable weirdos were not going to affect anything. “If they think they are,” I said, “they’re a bunch of fools.”
Then we walked through the No Kings protest on the National Mall. My friend stopped and looked around, marveling. “You can just do this,” he said. I was beaming. “This is it,” I said, “this is the thing itself.” He told me police would be all over this if it were China, and I nodded, already well aware. I had seen it myself. I told him I could walk over to a group of nearby officers we spotted and chat them up, and they would probably be very friendly. I told him I could stand right in front of those officers and shout, “Trump is a bastard who doesn’t deserve to live!” And what would happen, he asked. Probably nothing, I said. Then I added, “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I explained that this is the reason you can never convince Americans that the Chinese way is better. He gave me a look and said, “But I thought you told me these people are fools.” But they were also a symbol of peaceful protest, even if in places like Portland and Los Angeles, shit got real. “I don’t agree with all of it,” I said. “Or most of it. In ways, they are fools. But they’re fools for democracy. And those are my kind of fools.”
The whole thing to me seems like a desparate cry for catharsis for Democrats. The Biden administration was a debacle on so many levels, perhaps the biggest single failure in US political history, that ended back to where it started, perhaps a worse place
The activities and displays I say were mostly benign, some ranging into offensive (re Barron Trump), antiSemitic (comparing ICE detention centers to Auschwitz and Buchenwald), but not a meaningful political message to be found. Just lamponing and hatred. Also, remarkably white and bimodal boomers and Gen Z.
2 ‘no Kings’ protests in a nation without a king sandwiched around another protest in favor of an actual King who kills tens of thousands of protesters is peak Woke . 🍿