Donald Trump’s 2024 victory didn’t just usher in political change, but a cultural one. The fact that Trump won both the popular vote and every battleground state meant, for many (Trump himself foremost among them), that the country had eagerly accepted his worldview as their own, was fully on board with his political program, and that any resistance was futile. Media outlets, businesses, and other institutions quickly folded or bent the knee to the incoming administration, which, upon taking office, didn’t meet anything approaching the kind of widespread pushback and energized, large-scale protest that had hounded Trump in his first term.
This was all based on perception. In reality, Trump’s win, though more emphatic than 2016’s, was anemic in the scope of history. He had failed to cross the 50 percent threshold, his battleground state victories were all secured by wafer-thin margins, and Republicans had actually won a bigger share of the popular vote in the 2022 midterms — an election widely viewed as a historic flop for the GOP.
But even though Trump had nothing close to the kind of mandate to embark on the radical, deeply unpopular program that followed, the widespread liberal demoralization his win produced did a lot of his work for him, by preemptively neutering much left-leaning opposition to his actions.
The “No Kings” protests that took place over the weekend, motivated by broad unhappiness with Trump’s term so far, are a signal that this state of affairs has, nearly half a year in, firmly changed.
It wasn’t just the sheer size of the protests, though that was significant: at between two to six million people across more than two thousand cities, Saturday’s demonstrations were not just on par with the largest protests of Trump’s chaotic first term but may have been one of the biggest mass protests in American history.
Some of the numbers in major US cities were staggering: 80,000 in Philadelphia; as many as…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
