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:
President Donald Trump on Saturday posted an AI-generated video depicting him in a fighter jet dropping what appears to be feces on U.S. protesters. … The video shows Trump dropping the apparent fecal matter on someone who looks like left-wing influencer Harry Sisson and other protesters gathered in an area that seems to be Times Square in New York City. The AI-generated video was, of course, disgusting and a timely reminder of the incumbent president’s juvenile and classless tastes, but it was part of a series of online postings, including another video featuring Trump in a crown. A day later, aboard Air Force One following his latest weekend of golfing in Florida, the Republican continued to whine about the “No Kings” events, characterizing the massive turnout as “very small,” despite reality. He went on to say that he and his team believe “radical left lunatics” were responsible for the demonstrations, adding, “We’re checking it out.” It’s difficult to know what to make of the offhand comment, but it suggested that the president and his operation are interested in some kind of federal investigation into protests organized and held by his critics. (He did not elaborate as to what, exactly, would be “checked out.”) The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie noted in his latest column, “Nationwide protests with millions of people are a direct rebuke to the president’s narrative. They send a signal to the most disconnected parts of the American public that the president is far from as popular as he says he is, and they send a clear warning to those institutions under pressure from the administration: Bend the knee and lose our business and support.” By all appearances, none of this was lost on Trump, whose over-the-top reaction to the “No Kings” events offered evidence of their success: They were intended to send a powerful message to an increasingly authoritarian figure, who appeared rattled by the national dispatch.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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