Nothing frightens a king more than his people — with good reason.
A people’s revolution broke through the last bricks of the Berlin Wall. Street protests toppled communism in Czechoslovakia. The people booted a king before America was a country.
On No Kings Day last Saturday, millions of protesting Americans made clear they will not tolerate a new one.
All over the country, an estimated 5 to 7 million people enthusiastically stood up to Donald Trump. For a president who obsesses over crowd sizes, he had to be afraid.
We heard it in the hysterical talking points from House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Trump proxies, how the protesters hate America. They are terrorists, anarchists and Marxists, possibly dangerous, and definitely paid by nefarious Jewish globalists like George Soros.
Others expressed confusion; Trump couldn’t be a king because he was democratically elected.
Demolishing democracy
No Kings is not about the 2024 election. It’s what Trump has done after the election, because so much of it is shredding the Constitution he took an oath to protect. His contempt for it undergirds everything from lawless immigration raids to freeing George Santos.
Trump is far too insulated by his sycophants to realize that this movement is not simply an extension of frustration from his first term.
A strong statement by 7 million patriotic Americans is a good start, but 70 million would be better.
People may be angered over his policies, but the demolition of democracy is what motivated millions to act. And he has not yet figured out that he no longer owns the libs with juvenile images like the AI-generated video he posted on social media, depicting him flying a jet over protesters and dropping feces on them, all while wearing a crown.
The libs were not outraged. They were with independents and some Republicans, exercising their right to peaceful assembly. They competed for the best signs. They wore inflatable costumes and poked fun at the pompous. They carried a massive copy of the Constitution along Pennsylvania Avenue.
They flexed their political muscle. They are getting stronger.
Peaceful and professional
According to the Harvard/University of Pennsylvania Crowd Counting Consortium, April’s Hands Off protests drew between 919,000 and 1.5 million people.
June’s No Kings Day protests drew between 2 and 4.8 million people. Saturday may have drawn between 5 and 7 million, though reliable estimates could take weeks.
That’s partly because there were so many people in so many places. The 2,500 protest locations were spread across America, from midtown Manhattan to rural Iowa to Homer, Alaska.
Protests aren’t just growing. The number of protests is accelerating. Since Jan. 22, there have been more than twice as many street protests than after Trump’s first inauguration eight years ago, the Consortium found.
Trump derided the No Kings turnout as “very small, very ineffective” and called protesters “whacked out.” He ignores them at his political peril.
The Tea Party’s protests and raucous town halls were scorned by incumbent Democrats and even some Republicans in 2009. Late night comedians laughed at their colonial America costumes. A year later, Tea Party candidates scored victories across the country. Barack Obama’s 47% approval rating was too weak to fend off the surge.
Broken promises
Trump’s approval is even weaker, an average 43% before the recent government shutdown.
The president’s poor polling may not stem from his reckless authoritarian choices. It might reflect his failure to make good on campaign promises: Immediately ending the war in Ukraine, slashing grocery costs, protecting Medicaid.
There’s another campaign promise he hasn’t kept: Trump said he sought to be a dictator just on “Day One” and no more.
Trump wasn’t a dictator on Inauguration Day, and despite his embrace of Project 2025’s authoritarian playbook, he’s not a dictator now — not yet anyway.
If he hadn’t jetted off to the political cocoon of Mar-a-Lago on No Kings Day, he could have looked out the White House window and seen that the American people intend to keep it that way.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.