No Kings Protests Are Breaking Trump
They send a singular message to the president: We hate you. You know it. And he can’t escape that.
There’s a longstanding debate in politics whether it’s better to be feared than loved. In the viper’s nest known as the Trump administration, most of Dear Leader’s lackeys long to be feared — Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, just to name a few.
But for Trump, being feared has always been secondary to what he’s clearly always wanted from Americans. It’s what he craved from his cold, calculating parents. At his core, Donald Trump wants to be universally loved. It’s why he’s obsessed with awards, polls, Electoral College votes — while pathologically lying about his feats.
When he won reelection in 2024 — only a few short years after the insurrection and his full-on assault on our democracy — he saw it as the ultimate vindication. It was his Sally Field Oscar moment (widely paraphrased as, “You like me. You really like me!”)
In reality, Americans were scarred by COVID, irate with inflation, and sick of the status quo. And the election was still close.
Yet much of the corporate media read the results as a sweeping political realignment with MAGA ascendent, further fueling Trump’s megalomania as he sought to establish a personalist regime in the mold of his idols, Putin and Orbán.
He thought he could do whatever he wanted. The Constitution was his to shred. He could break the federal government, letting DOGE run wild and unleashing the longest government shutdown in history. He could neuter Congress, knowing GOP leaders would relinquish constitutional powers controlling the public purse and declaring war. He could tell the courts to shove it when he disagreed with rulings on his deportation agenda or trumped-up cases against his many, many political enemies.
The president decided he could violate the Epstein Files Transparency Act, slap Americans with boneheaded tariffs, and invade whatever country he just discovered how to locate on a map.
He didn’t just believe the public would go along with his agenda — he truly thought we would worship him for it. He imagined people would thank him with tears in their eyes and call him “sir,” just like in his cock-and-bull stories at his red-hat rallies.
It hasn’t happened. The American public isn’t playing along. Trump’s approval ratings are at a record low (although he is more popular than cockroaches).
The No Kings protests have functioned as a cruel reality check for our would-be ruler. Each rally has been the biggest in U.S. history, one right after the other.