This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
This Is What Democracy Looks Like!
No Kings Day, An Event to Remember
How strange. I've been going to demonstrations for a long, long while now. I began once upon a distant time in opposition to the nightmarish all-American war in Vietnam. And almost 60 years later, that war, in some sense, has come home. Hence, the other day, I found myself at the "No Kings" demonstration in New York City, one of more than 2,000 (yes, 2,000!) across this country of ours at which millions -- yes, again, literally millions! -- of Americans reportedly turned out. These days, in New York where I live, such demonstrations are often launched from Bryant Park, right behind the classic 42nd Street library on Fifth Avenue, and the marchers normally walk down Fifth for perhaps 20 blocks. The last time I went to a demonstration there, I didn't walk myself but stood and watched all the marchers with their signs go past me, and it took perhaps 35 minutes or so for them to slowly, slowly do so. That time, which was then typical of such demonstrations, most of the protesters were, like me, also old and White.
No more. The other day at that No Kings march in New York, I wove my way ever so slowly through the crowd to Fifth Avenue and 40th Street just after the march had begun and started watching the demonstrators, packed into literally every square inch of that wide avenue, ever so slowly crawl by me. That crowd ranged from babies in strollers to old people like me, and looked like it represented a distinct cross-section of everybody in America, whether by race or age. How many of us were there? Who knows? CBS News simply and vaguely said "tens of thousands," while the local Fox News station, which obviously had no interest in playing up such demonstrations, still claimed that "tens of thousands of people marched in New York City and the Tri-State area." If I had to guess, I would say that at least a couple of hundred thousand people crept down Fifth Avenue that day (and on that figure the British Guardian agrees, suggesting "over 200,000" in New York and "millions" nationally).
After all, when I finally left, almost two hours later, exhausted from just standing there taking notes in an ongoing drizzle, the last of the crowd hadn't even made it from 40th Street onto a still utterly packed Fifth Avenue (as it had been from the moment I arrived), with that parade of anti-Trump protestors still just creeping along. To depart, in fact, I had to literally weave my way through a still-impressive crowd of No Kings demonstrators with a typical array of signs still waiting to join the march. In short, that demonstration, just one of thousands across the country, was beyond huge! And signs? I watched what must all too literally have been thousands of homemade signs go by me, while listening to endless periodic chants from the crowd.
It was, I have to say, quite something, even for someone like me who has seen so many protests in my lifetime and, in its size, it seemed to offer a genuine sense of how deeply disturbed so many Americans are by a president, or do I indeed mean a "king," who wants to be able to do anything he madly desires without opposition from anyone. And that included having his own military parade in Washington on that very day, his birthday (though it evidently turned out to be a distinctly underwhelming affair that many spectators evidently left early).
"No Kings, No Tyrants, No Fascists, No Dictators, Dump Trump"
Let me just start -- even days after the event occurred -- by saying how striking I think it is that increasingly significant numbers of Americans are visibly ever more deeply disturbed by the man who did indeed get only 49.7% of the popular vote in 2024 and, according to CBS News, won the presidency thanks to a "mere 0.15% of voters nationwide" who proved the difference between victory and defeat. Not that you would know it from his ever more disturbing excesses, including that mega-military birthday parade (for both the 250-year-old U.S. Army and the now-79-year-old Donald Trump) with tanks, artillery vehicles, and paratroopers at the cost of at least $25-$45 million taxpayer dollars (at a time when he's slashing benefits for military veterans) slated to begin in Washington not long after the "No Kings" demonstration I attended ended.
I must admit I found it moving that so many of us wanted to express ourselves in person and through signs and chants. And New York wasn't faintly alone in responding, among other things, to the criminal way Donald Trump dealt with the first of the recent demonstrations against his rule in Los Angeles. There were, after all, an estimated 2,100 or more No Kings protests across this country that day, in red states and blue ones, red cities and blue ones.
Let me, in that context, give you a little sense of what I saw in an up-close-and-personal fashion. And remember this took place on the street in my hometown, about which, in 2016, Donald Trump, while campaigning for president in Sioux Center, Iowa, had indeed said: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible." Well, fortunately, no shots were fired that afternoon in New York, though, of course, they were indeed fired that very day in truly shocking targeted political assassinations in Minnesota, killing Melissa Hortman, a state legislator, and her husband, and wounding state Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife.
Oh, and as is a typical New York thing to do, I took the subway from my neighborhood to the stop nearest the protest site. And the subway car I entered turned out to be full of other protestors heading for 42nd street as well, including a woman giving out little American flags, and a couple of people with homemade signs, one of which said: "Stop bullying and lying to & stealing from the American people"; a second said, "impeach Humpty Trumpty"; and a third, "No kings, no tyrants, no fascists, no dictators, dump Trump." And mind you, that was just a single subway car.
And simply walking the few blocks from the subway stop to the area where the demonstration was to take place, I found myself almost instantly on ever more crowded streets surrounded by people carrying homemade signs and already starting to scribble them down in the little notebook I was carrying with me (along with an umbrella on that distinctly drizzly day). As I was heading there, I even passed a woman who had decorated her umbrella with the words "No Dick" Tator, No Fascists," and a man with a sign that had an image of George Washington and the words "Democracy, yes, Kleptocracy, no."
"Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus"
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
