Long Live ‘No Kings’
Saturday’s protests showed that a resistance can be large and organized. But can it be sustained?
“Members of Congress say they’re happy military troops are getting paid during the shutdown,” Politico reports, “but not necessarily that President Donald Trump is claiming vast power over the federal spending process to do it.”
Yeah, we can see what they mean. The president announcing that the military is now paid not by act of Congress but at his personal discretion seems like the sort of thing that could be abused. You know, someday. Happy Monday.
O Frabjous Day!
by William Kristol
You might think that I’m too old and too experienced—dare one say, too jaundiced—to have been moved by the “No Kings” protests. To be honest, I rather doubted I’d really be moved by them.
But moved I was. And as we milled around in the party atmosphere in “downtown” McLean—with inflatable characters prancing and witty signs waving and drivers’ horns honking—I thought of these lines from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” in Through the Looking Glass:
“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
Carroll apparently invented the portmanteau “frabjous” as a combination of “fabulous” and “joyous.” The mood in McLean—and apparently pretty much everywhere else on Saturday—was certainly joyous. And it was fabulous that some seven million people assembled peacefully and patriotically to protest Donald Trump and reaffirm their allegiance to the American idea.
That idea was nowhere better stated than by Thomas Paine in Common Sense: “For as in absolute governments the King is Law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
That was the idea that animated “No Kings.” On Saturday, the American people assembled lawfully on behalf of the rule of law. On Saturday, the American people demonstrated their commitment to keeping this a free country. Mike Johnson and all his fellow pro-Kings propagandists hoped for violence, extremism, and evidence of hate for America. But instead they saw peace, patriotism, and loyalty to America.
It was a frabjous day.
It was also an appropriately sober one. Those with whom I spoke on Saturday know there’s a long struggle ahead against the sustained attack on our freedom by those in charge. They understand that defeating this assault won’t be easy. So Saturday featured an unusual and impressive combination of joy and sobriety.
It all seems to have made Donald Trump very unhappy. I won’t dwell on the bizarre AI-generated video with a crown-wearing Trump flying over and dumping excrement on Americans. Nor will I speculate, as a friend suggested to me, whether this was a “textbook example of disinhibition—a key symptom of dementia” on Trump’s part.
But I will note that Trump does seem bothered by the obvious success of No Kings Day. His response was to lash out and double down on authoritarianism. In a Sunday morning interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump asserted, “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. And that’s unquestioned power.” And late that afternoon, in a press gaggle on Air Force One, after claiming the No Kings protests were “very small, very ineffective,” he returned to his favorite thought: “I’m allowed as you know as president [to use] the Insurrection Act. Everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that and there are no more court cases, there is no more anything. We’re trying to do it in a nicer manner, but we can always use the Insurrection Act.”
It would indeed be a dangerous escalation if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act. But as Andy Craig, a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies and a writer for the Unpopulist, points out:
The Insurrection Act does nothing except you can then use soldiers as cops. They can enforce laws, but they’re the same old laws. It doesn’t suspend the Constitution. No martial law, no closing courts, no removing state officials, none of that. . . . It means you can use the military to enforce federal laws, but the laws themselves remain the same.
Further expansion of the use of the military within the United States would of course be a bad thing. But the Insurrection Act doesn’t do away with the Constitution and the laws. It won’t accomplish what Trump’s fevered fantasy imagines.
We’ve gone pretty far through the looking glass in Donald Trump’s America. But Saturday gave me increased hope that the Constitution and the law will hold. It helped me look forward to a time when Trump shuffles off the scene and Trumpism has been decisively defeated. That will be a truly frabjous day.
A Shot in the Arm
by Andrew Egger
So “No Kings” 2 has come and gone. It was a joyous—er, frabjous—day, as Bill notes. It was a peaceful day, with millions of people in the streets and no significant outbreaks of violence. It was a patriotic day, giving the lie to ridiculous MAGA rhetoric about crowds chock-full of America-hating terrorists.
But it was still only one day.
The marchers have gone home, and Donald Trump remains a president hell-bent on maximizing his own personal power, delivering retribution against his enemies, and bestowing gifts upon his supporters (congrats, George Santos!).
Even amid the joy of the marches, the grim sense of how much we’ve already lost was hard to miss on Saturday. Popping in on smaller protests across northern Virginia, I talked to multiple federal workers who were nervous about appearing on camera, fearing they’d be fired if it got out that they’d come. Ten months—that’s how long it’s taken Donald Trump to rewrite the rulebook to make American citizens fear state retribution for First Amendment–protected political expression.
And yet, there they were, protesting anyway.
Some people have scoffed at such courage as empty posturing. One ordinarily smart GOP strategist I know tweeted yesterday that “the problem with these protests from an action standpoint is that they don’t have an ‘ask’ beyond ‘we would like a democrat to be president instead.’ They are not marching for any legislation (see civil rights protests) or the end of a war (see vietnam, iraq, etc).”
This is nonsense. The “No Kings” protests had one specific and concrete aim: breaking the mirage of Donald Trump’s supposed mass popular mandate. As Trump has launched his all-out war on our structures and institutions, as well as on the checks and balances of our government, he has argued he is justified in doing so because he alone, as the winner of the last presidential election, is the vessel of the popular will. Constraints on anything he might happen to want to do, he says again and again, aren’t constraints on him—they’re intolerable constraints on what the American people elected him to do.
It’s a powerful argument, one designed to sap the fortitude of anyone who might oppose him. It’s a key part of why so many institutions have bent the knee in recent months without a fight. But it’s a lie. MAGA is an organized mass movement, but it is far from a majoritarian movement. An organized resistance, if it can get organized, could dwarf Trump’s cult in sheer size. MAGA put people in the streets around the country for its Stop the Steal rallies in 2020 and 2021; it even summoned enough firepower to sack the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. But it never put millions of people in motion. Trump’s naked greed for wealth and power, his cruelty, his obscenity, his stupidity, his childishness, his arrogance—all these have galvanized the opposition as never before in recent U.S. history. That’s what “No Kings” was about.
Of course, Trump, safely ensconced in his media and personnel bubble, won’t see mass opposition in the streets and decide it’d be prudent to slow down his authoritarian project for a bit, if for nothing else than to take the heat off. I’d be shocked if anyone around him has seen fit to give him any true information about the size and scope of the protest. Even if he got it, it isn’t in Trump’s nature to take constructive criticism. Libs in the streets shouting “no kings” just makes him drool for the scepter all the more.
His troops are in the streets. His immigration dragnets are scooping up citizens and migrants alike. He seems perfectly unconcerned about carrying on without congressional funding for anything in government—he’s just keeping the money spigots he cares most about turned on anyway. Every day he krazy-glues more bric-à-brac to the wall of the Oval Office and sticks another rhinestone in his crown.
We’re in this for the long haul, so buckle up. “No Kings” showed you aren’t resisting alone.
AROUND THE BULWARK
How Maine Became a Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party… Upstart Graham Platner disavows his shitposting past while Gov. Janet Mills’s establishment allies insist she’s not too old. In The Opposition, LAUREN EGAN reports on this midterm primary bellwether.
My Last Day as an Accomplice of the Republican Party… MILES BRUNER on why he is leaving the GOP and why he’s urging his former colleagues to do the same.
The Actual Human Beings Caught in the Shutdown Vise… In The Breakdown, JONATHAN COHN reports that there’s a reason so many people need help paying for their health insurance.
How to Fight Mob Boss Politics in America… On How to Fix it, JOHN AVLON talks with SEN. ANDY KIM about Trump’s “mob boss” politics, the rise of fear inside the GOP, and Kim’s plan to build an anti-corruption movement that takes on what he calls “the cowards and the crazies.”
The Dark Forces Conspiring Against Democracy… On Shield of the Republic, BILL GALSTON joins ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN to discuss his recent book, Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech. They also talk about why the dark passions seem to be so predominant in politics globally and the different schools of thought regarding democracy’s staying power.
Quick Hits
GAZA CEASEFIRE ON THE BRINK: When Israel and Hamas signed a stage-one ceasefire deal earlier this month, it was hard to begrudge Donald Trump’s desire to spike the football. But as we said at the time, ceasefire deals are fragile things, only lasting until one side starts firing again. On Sunday, the deal seemed on the brink of collapse after Israel accused Hamas of firing on IDF troops in Rafah, then halted the flow of aid into the Gaza strip and launched a barrage of airstrikes across the territory. Hamas officials, who denied any involvement in firing on IDF troops, estimated that at least 33 people were killed in the strikes. Israel said that two IDF soldiers were also killed Sunday.
After several hours of combat, Israel announced it would resume enforcing the ceasefire. Whether that’s the end of it remains to be seen.
THE ENEMY OF MY FRIEND: Think you know every grisly, outrageous fact about the White House’s shipping of Venezuelan migrants to an El Salvador gulag with zero due process? Think again. The Washington Post has new jaw-dropping details about what the White House was willing to give El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to get him to agree to take some migrants off their hands:
In the days before the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the president of that country demanded something for himself: the return of nine MS-13 gang leaders in U.S. custody.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13 phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation. But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.
To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders. . . .
At least three of the MS-13 leaders Bukele requested had divulged incriminating information about members of his government suspected of cutting deals with the gang, officials said. One of them—César López Larios, whom U.S. prosecutors charged last year with directing MS-13’s activities in the United States—was sent back to El Salvador two days after the Rubio-Bukele phone call. The others remain in the United States, waiting to learn whether they, too, will be handed over to the very government they were cooperating against.
WHAT’S A LITTLE SHRAPNEL AMONG FRIENDS? Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom clashed with the White House and Pentagon officials over a planned military celebration for the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. Scheduled for this weekend, the operation was to include “live-fire demonstrations” involving missiles launched from the sea over busy Interstate 5. Newsom ultimately ordered a stretch of the interstate closed during the demonstration, over the objections of military leaders who said there would be no risk to motorists.
Well, uh, seems like Newsom might have been on to something. The New York Times reports:
A 155-millimeter shell fired during a live-fire demonstration for the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton on Saturday prematurely detonated, dropping fragments of the shell on a California Highway Patrol vehicle and motorcycle that were part of Vice President JD Vance’s protective detail, according to a patrol report.
No officers were hurt in the mishap, which dropped shrapnel onto the vehicles parked on a ramp to a major freeway that had been ordered closed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Hey—at least we’re getting the premature-detonation kinks out now in our vanity-project demonstrations over California freeways. This is like throwing an interception in a preseason game, right?
Cheap Shots
If the No Kings turnout Saturday taught me anything, it is that we should not be scared of Trump.
He should be scared of us.
WE ARE THE MAJORITY.
We should act like it.
Time for a Contract with America, D-style, calling for universal health care, sensible limits on guns, ending Congressional stock trading, and reforms that plug Constitutional & legal holes Trump exploited.