A few days before millions of his detractors held “No Kings” events in communities across the country, Donald Trump told reporters, “I hear very few people are going to be there, by the way.” From whom did the president “hear” this? He didn’t say.
Nevertheless, his allies quickly echoed the assertion. A day later, Republican Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania appeared on Newsmax and said of the “No Kings” protests, “They claim there is going to be hundreds of thousands of people. We shall see.”
We did, in fact, see. NBC News reported:
Crowds gathered Saturday in cities across the United States — and overseas — for No Kings rallies in protest of President Donald Trump’s administration and to call for the defense of First Amendment rights. Protesters from Los Angeles to New York — including in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas — flooded into streets chanting, marching and waving homemade signs, including some that proclaimed ‘We want all of the government to work’ and ‘Make America Good Again.’
According to organizers, roughly 7 million people participated in No Kings demonstrations, of which there were more than 2,700. It was, by any fair measure, one of the largest and most successful one-day domestic protests in modern American history.
The triumph was multifaceted, but it was driven in part by Republican themselves. A great many GOP officials spent the run-up to the events smearing the rallies, their organizers and even their attendees, slandering the protests as “hate America” rallies. If the goal was to discourage participation, the ugly Republican rhetoric backfired.
Ezra Levin, co-founder of the liberal grassroots movement Indivisible that has co-organized the No Kings rallies, told The Washington Post that RSVPs “skyrocketed” after GOP leaders launched a coordinated effort to smear the events.
But to fully appreciate the scope of Saturday’s progressive breakthrough and the severity of the rebuke Trump faced, consider the reaction from the rallies’ intended target.
On Saturday afternoon, The New York Times asked the White House for the president’s reaction to the demonstration. “Who cares?” a Trump spokesperson replied.
What quickly became apparent, however, was that the president cared quite a bit. NBC News also reported:








