by Roger Kimball
Trump’s decisive 2024 victory exposed the irony of the left’s “No Kings” protests—an anti-democracy tantrum against the most democratic act of all: an election.
On November 5, 2024, Donald Trump won the United States presidential election against Kamala Harris. It was a convincing win. Trump snagged victory in the Electoral College, where the contest is officially decided, 312 to 226. He needed only 270 to prevail. He also won the popular vote (a nice but unnecessary distinction), with 77,302,580 votes to 75,017,613, a margin of almost 2 million votes.
I mention these well-known facts to underscore the black comedy of the “No Kings” protests taking place across the country as I write. According to several sources, some 2500 separate protests are planned. Millions of people are expected to join in the fun. More than 200 left-wing groups, from the ACLU and Antifa to Indivisible, have helped organize the events. Prominent Democrats from Bernie Sanders to AOC to Gavin Newsom and Chuck Schumer are panting to attend and proclaim their virtue and denounce the duly elected president of the United States. Really, as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson observed, the “No Kings” rallies ought to be called “Hate America” rallies.
I live in deep-blue Fairfield County, Connecticut. In nearby Westport, terminally disgruntled middle-to-late-aged citizens, joined by clumps of unattractive GenZeers—Geezers and Zeers—regularly congregate on a certain bridge to protest for or against whatever the central committee has handed down as this week’s issue: climate change, fossil fuels, Brett Kavanaugh, Israel, etc. Whatever the announced issue is, they are there with their signs, their self-righteousness, their ire. I am pretty sure I recognized some old-timers today from their stints protesting against George W. Bush and the Iraq War. Naturally, the crowds were out in force today to disrupt traffic and inform the world that they abominate Donald Trump and all his works.
It was a large gathering. It was also depressingly pathetic. White boomers, mostly, indulging their fraught emotional fatuousness. “Look at us! Aren’t we special?” As one commentator observed, “Protests are meant to be the voices of the unheard. Yet these protests are the voices of those who never shut up.”
The ironies abound. The announced theme of this Soros-funded, Communist-Party-endorsed network of protests is “No Kings.” But Donald Trump is not a king. He is a democratically elected president. He obeys (and then appeals) every outrageous injunction issued by hubristic district court judges to stymie his agenda. But Trump is nonetheless excoriated by the media and professional leftists for acting in a tyrannical, king-like (they never say “regal”) way. Trump himself had fun with this absurdity. “I was very concerned that a king was trying to take my place,” he wrote, “but thanks to your tireless efforts, I am STILL YOUR PRESIDENT!” If Trump were really a king, as another commentator on X observed, the government would be open now. Trump would simply decree it.
The word “democracy” is ever on the lips of the “No Kings” ditto-heads. Lockstep capitulation to various anti-democratic initiatives is ever in their hearts. When it became obvious that Joe Biden was incapable of continuing his presidential campaign last summer, the Dems simply parachuted in Kamala Harris as their candidate. She had won no delegates. She went through no democratic process. The party elders simply anointed her. Was that not very autocratic, even monarchical, behavior?
Donald Trump was elected chiefly because he promised to do four things: (1) seal the Southern border; (2) remove the millions of illegal immigrants preying upon the country; (3) wage war upon the reign of woke ideology; (4) jump-start and Americanize the moribund economy. Nota bene: these are things he campaigned on. Things he was elected to do. This is what people voted for. And that is precisely what the “No Kings” mob is protesting.
Meanwhile, the “No Kings” automata were happy to acquiesce in Biden’s neo-totalitarian deep-state rule. Censorship was okay. The Covid shut-down was okay. The harassment and prosecution of one’s political enemies was just what the doctor ordered. The effort to destroy Trump was okay. It isn’t kings these people oppose; it is just the fact that their king lost his crown and their court was displaced.
Every time one of these embarrassing Greta-Thunberg-like outpourings occurs, I wonder why the left seems to have a monopoly on this species of outrage. Do such events advance their cause? Given the overwhelmingly sympathetic treatment they receive from the propaganda press, perhaps so. Should conservatives try to get in on the action?
To a large extent, as I noted in an essay for The New Criterion, such behavior seems to go against the grain of the conservative spirit. “By disposition,” I wrote, “conservatives are inclined to endorse precedent. But since the dominant culture is liberal, conservatives must make their peace with progressive policies or find themselves accused of abandoning the central conservative principle of supporting established precedent.”
This surreal situation was the result of an inexorable process of one-way ratcheting. Progressive ideology makes continuous inroads, gobbling up one institution and one consensus after the next. Any occasional pushback is weathered as a temporary squall, after which the work of expanding the progressive envelope proceeds apace. Last year’s extreme outlier becomes this year’s settled opinion. To oppose that is evidence not of conservative principle but of reactionary, even (as we have lately been told) insurrectionary, stubbornness.
In a soon-to-be-published essay called “It is Time for Peaceful Protest Rallies and Vigils,” Tom Klingenstein suggests that Trump-supporting conservatives should step out of their natural quietism in order to “wake up Republicans and get them, not to negotiate with the America-haters, but to propose solutions for crushing them.” There is, I believe, a good deal to be said for this argument. Thinking about the significance of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Klingenstein suggests that “Its lesson is not, as most Republicans think, that we need more civil debate; rather, that we need less of it. Kirk’s assassination affirms that civil discourse is only helpful up to a point. You cannot debate with people who want to criminalize debate or even kill you.”
Think about it. Conservatives are not as adept at protesting as leftists. But, as Klingenstein notes, for at least the next three and a half years, “we have a friendly administration in place and DEI is now playing defense. It is more vulnerable to attack than in the past.” There will always be room for debate. But when the other side endeavors “by any means necessary” to censor, criminalize, and curtail debate, there is also room for action.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/19/the-no-kings-protests-against-democracy-itself/
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