On Saturday, between 5 and 7 million people assembled on streets, sidewalks and town squares across the country — in “red” states and in “blue” — to protest against President Trump and his administration, in what may have been the largest single-day demonstration in American history. This came on the heels of a similar demonstration in June, which, despite its smaller size (approximately 2 to 5 million participants), was still one of the largest single days of protest ever recorded in this country.
Here is what Trump, whose job it is to represent the whole people of the United States, had to say about the day.
“It’s a joke,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I looked at the people. They are not representative of this country. And I looked at all the brand-new signs I guess paid for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. We’re checking it out. The demonstrations were very small. And the people were whacked out.”
That same day, the president posted to his Truth Social account an AI.-generated video in which he bombarded protesters with what appeared to be a flood of feces from a fighter aircraft he was flying while wearing a crown.
Trump’s calumny aside, it is useful to compare the president’s response in this moment to one of President Barack Obama’s early reactions to the much smaller Tea Party protests that took off during his first term in office.
“I think that America has a noble tradition of being helpfully sceptical about government,” he said in 2010 during a news conference a few weeks before the midterm elections:
And I think that’s a good thing. I think there’s also a noble tradition in the Republican and Democratic parties of saying that government should — should pay its way, that it shouldn’t get so big that we’re leaving debt to the next generation. All those things, I think, are healthy.
Obama then went on to ask the Tea Party movement to make specific demands — to say what they would have him do so that they could work, constructively, to find common ground.
Now, you can attribute this yawning distance between the two men to their respective temperaments, which we do not need to elaborate on any further than we already have. But even after you account for personality, Trump stands out. Recall that even President Richard Nixon, infamous for his endless resentment toward — and acid contempt for — his political opponents, met with student protesters of the Vietnam War at the Lincoln Memorial to try to understand their perspective, not as adversaries but as fellow Americans.
What we see in Trump is not just a difference of personality but one of political interpretation. Trump does not see himself leading the people of the United States, but his people — the denizens of MAGA America, defined by the colours on the 2024 presidential election map.
It would be one thing if this were just a preoccupation with the interests of his supporters. But Trump combines sectarian partisanship with genuine hatred for those Americans on the other side of the political divide. As he told the audience at a state-sanctioned memorial for Charlie Kirk last month, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”
What he wants, instead, is to dominate them: to subjugate them to his will. To that end, he has refashioned the most coercive parts of the federal government into instruments designed to force his opponents — or as he sees them, his enemies — to bend the knee. And it is this, as much as anything else, that inspired millions of Americans to define their opposition to Trump in terms of royal power and royal prerogatives.
To borrow language from one of the nation’s founding documents, Trump has “erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance”; he has “kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures”; he has “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power”; he has cut “off our Trade with all Parts of the World” and imposed “Taxes on us without our Consent.” He has transported us “beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences” and in deigning to spend tax dollars without congressional authorisation — to pay soldiers in the midst of a shutdown, in a move reminiscent of Stuart absolutism — he has “invested” himself “with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.”
The president’s opponents can see, quite clearly, that Trump wants authoritarian power so that he can crush their dissent. And Trump has been nothing but open about his desire to turn the federal state against blue America, punishing Democrats and Democratic voters for the crime of acting against him. “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy,” he said in remarks to the military’s top brass last month. “It’s a war from within.”
Hence the president’s use of the National Guard to occupy American cities and, as much as possible, to replace civil law with military order. Hence his use of federal law enforcement to harass and intimidate his political adversaries as well as universities and civil society organisations deemed liberal. Hence, his impoundment of funds meant for
One irony, here, is that in his zeal to punish Democrats for their opposition to his administration, Trump is harming millions of his own voters who live in states such as New York, Illinois and California. He seems unaware that there were more Trump voters in, for example, Los Angeles County than there were in the state of Oklahoma.
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