By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times
Before this Saturday’s enormous nationwide No Kings protests, Leah Greenberg, a founder of Indivisible, one of the groups behind the demonstrations, worried that too many people had lost faith in their collective ability to stop Donald Trump from remaking America in his tawdry autocratic image. Her group realized that they needed “to reverse the sense that Trump is inevitable, that he’s going to win,” she told me.
When Trump first took office in 2017, it seemed to much of the country a shocking fluke caused by the democratically dubious Electoral College, and his stunned opponents rose up in furious rejection. Trump’s inauguration weekend set the tone for the years to follow: Turnout at the event itself was underwhelming, while millions of impassioned people attended the Women’s March, at the time the biggest single-day protest in American history. The energy of the resistance was so strong it reached into Trump’s own administration, where several officials devoted themselves to trying to curb his worst excesses.
This time around, there’s less hope and more resignation. In the last election Trump won the popular vote, and most demographics shifted rightward. The resistance has seemed exhausted and demoralized, and leaders in business, law and academia have adjusted accordingly. “One of the dominant differences between 2017 and 2025 is the degree of elite collapse in particular,” Greenberg said. “People who have power in different institutions that have some role in upholding democracy overwhelmingly, from November on, have been operating to secure their own safety and position under the Trump administration.”
Tech barons lined up to kiss the ring at Trump’s swearing-in. In response to Trump’s flimsy lawsuits, media conglomerates offered millions in what seemed like protection money. Law firms and college presidents buckled.
Such acquiescence, Greenberg thought, was rational if people assumed that Trumpism would triumph. The No Kings protests, held on the same day that Trump was hosting a military parade in Washington, D.C., were meant to challenge that assumption. They succeeded, with Trump’s help.
There were protests in more than 2,100 cities and towns, from New York and Los Angeles to tiny hamlets in Alaska. Trump almost certainly helped juice attendance by sending the military into Los Angeles; as Greenberg told me, about 500 of the events were organized just in the last week. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris estimated that 4 million to 6 million people turned out, which would make No Kings the largest day of protest America has ever seen. Even if his figures are inflated, the day left little question that the resistance to Trump has been reawakened.
The crowds in big cities were, unsurprisingly, huge, but local news outlets also reported thousands of people protesting in places like Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and in The Villages, the famously conservative Florida retirement community.
But what really made No Kings feel like a potential turning point was the juxtaposition with Trump’s anemic parade in Washington, which fell on his birthday, though it was ostensibly held to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary. Videos showed tanks squeaking down the street in front of viewing stands that were more than half empty. The Wall Street Journal, no left-wing rag, described the crowd as “sparse” and “subdued.” A display that was meant to be bombastic and menacing instead looked pathetic.
The contrast between the protests and the parade reflects a larger political reality. Trump returned to office much stronger than he’d been in his first term, but Americans seem to be remembering why they disliked him. A Quinnipiac poll from last week had his approval rating at 38 percent. In a survey conducted last Tuesday by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School, only 37 percent of respondents approved of the president’s handling of immigration enforcement. Some politicians and pundits assumed that Trump would benefit from deploying soldiers to Los Angeles, imagining that voters would see him as tough and decisive. So far, there’s little evidence of that.
Now Trump seems determined to heighten the cruelty and chaos that are repelling so many Americans. In response to complaints from farmers and owners of hotels and restaurants, his administration ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to suspend many workplace raids. But to keep his mass deportation project alive — while punishing his political enemies — he’s ordered ICE to redouble its focus on big American cities, calling them, on his website Truth Social, the “core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State.” He’s seeking a nakedly political crackdown on urban America, designed to create more furious confrontations like those in Los Angeles.
Indeed, the more he feels his position weakening, the more he’s likely to lash out. This dynamic is terrible for the country, but it might also end up being bad for him. Trump will keep trying to tear this increasingly fragile and beleaguered nation apart. But as Saturday showed, if and when he does so, he may not end up with the biggest piece.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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