October 20, 2025 - 10:45am
On Saturday, 2700 “No Kings” rallies were held across the United States. Early estimates put the total attendance at around seven million people.
This massive turnout speaks to widespread popular dissatisfaction with the second Trump administration. While the President won a plurality of the popular vote in the 2024 election, more recent polling has him underwater, in general and on issues such as the economy (-14.4), trade (-13.8), and inflation (-27.2).
Above and beyond all this general ani-Trump sentiment, though, the success of the “No Kings” rallies in bringing millions of ordinary Americans onto the streets is a good indication that the slogan itself is striking a chord. It’s not hard to see why.
In the nine months of his term so far, Trump has arrested and detained legal residents for writing op-eds or attending protests. He’s used flimsy pretexts to send troops to cities controlled by his political enemies over the protests of mayors and governors. He’s transferred suspected criminals without trial to what could be life sentences in a brutal Central American prison. In short, he’s acted very much like an absolute monarch rather than a public servant in a constitutional republic.
If anti-Trump forces coalesce around a message that begins and ends with “No Kings”, however, they’ll be making a serious wrong turn. The President’s particular flavour of demagoguery and authoritarianism didn’t come out of nowhere. There was space for it to grow because the pre-Trump status quo wasn’t working for vast numbers of Americans.
Trump told people who were economically struggling to blame immigrants and bad trade deals. That directed attention away from economic inequality and let ultra-wealthy oligarchs off the hook. When he ran in 2024, he blamed fentanyl overdoses on Mexico, promising bloody retribution against the drug cartels, instead of offering any solutions to the widespread social misery that led to the drug epidemic, particularly in the parts of the country most hollowed out by deindustrialisation. And both of Trump’s terms have been characterised by deregulation, union-busting, and tax cuts for rich people.
The problem is that Democrats haven’t countered fake populism with real populism. Hillary Clinton didn’t run on a platform of popular redistributive reforms like Medicare for All in 2016. Her counter to “Make America Great Again” was saying that “America is already great.” Kamala Harris could barely be bothered talking about economic issues. Instead, she constantly bragged about being supported by “everyone from Dick Cheney to Bernie Sanders”, suggesting that everything that the former Republican vice president and socialist senator disagreed about was secondary, and all that mattered was a defence of liberal democracy against Trumpist authoritarianism.
Yet a defence of procedural democracy rings hollow when Democrats haven’t been able to show that democracy can be used to improve the material conditions of ordinary people. If the message is “life won’t be any better, and you’ll feel as alienated and powerless as ever, but don’t worry, the country will still be about as democratic as it was in December 2024”, there’s no reason to be optimistic that this will be enough to counter authoritarianism in the long term.
A far better route would be to tie together a defence of civil liberties and democratic rights with a robust vision of expanded workers’ rights and social provision. This would involve relentlessly pointing out that there’s no reason it needs to be this hard for workers to organise labour unions and this easy for their employers to move around in search of lower wages. There’s no reason the United States needs to be, as Sanders so often says, “the only major country” that “doesn’t guarantee healthcare as a right”. The phalanx of billionaires who surrounded Trump at his inauguration in January can give up some of their wealth and power to deliver a better social contract for the working class.
No Kings? Certainly. But no oligarchs, either.
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