It takes courage to make a stand for what you believe in. That’s especially true when you’re challenging a person or institution with a lot more power and a proven willingness to abuse it.
And that’s why I am so inspired by Americans who are showing up with courage and conviction to let President Trump know he is not our king — and we won’t let him get away with acting like one.
Organizers say that at least 5 million people turned out for more than 2,100 “No Kings” protests in all 50 states on June 14 and 15. We gathered in blue, purple and red states. We came together in cities, towns and rural communities. Some gatherings were just a handful of people. Some were huge crowds.
People turned out in massive numbers, even though Trump had just deployed the U.S. military against protesters, and governors in Virginia and Texas called out the National Guard in advance.
In Minnesota, thousands showed up, even after the brutal news that one of the state’s Democratic leaders and her husband had been assassinated by a gunman who at that time was still on the loose.
By the time the suspected killer was captured a day later, we knew that he had a target list of Democratic officials and Planned Parenthood locations in his car, along with a flyer about “No Kings” events.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s birthday present to himself, a military parade he’d been dreaming about for years, was an expensive flop that no amount of crowd-inflating lies from White House spokespeople could hide.
Trump himself was unusually restrained in his remarks to the sparse crowd. Maybe the public push-back on his self-indulgence, his ugly partisan remarks at West Point and Fort Bragg and his unpopular military deployment against Americans in Los Angeles had an impact. Maybe it kept his parade performance from being worse than it was.
We have seen that resistance can work. Trump can be stopped. When pro-democracy and pro-rule-of-law groups have taken Trump to court, judges have checked many of his illegal executive orders.
Trump himself has changed course when governing by impulse and social media doesn’t work out the way he expected, and when MAGA constituents start making noise about the ways he’s hurting them.
After dramatically ramping up detentions of peaceful, non-criminal immigrants led to widespread protests in Los Angeles, Trump was defiant, calling in the military and escalating the situation.
Then farmers, factory operators and restaurant owners objected that the terrorizing abductions of immigrants were interfering with their businesses, and Trump told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pause those workplace operations.
But that infuriated Trump’s most rabidly anti-immigrant supporters, so he reversed course yet again and tried to cover up his waffling by announcing even more aggressive attacks on immigrants in America’s largest cities. He made it clear that his policy was grounded in partisan politics, calling cities “the core of the Democratic Power Center.”
And he resorted once again to dehumanizing smears, charging that Democrats “are sick of mind, hate our country, and actually want to destroy our inner cities.”
That kind of rhetoric can lead to political violence, and it sends a “whatever it takes” signal to Trump’s base. Just like Trump’s pardoning of violent Jan. 6 insurrectionists signaled to his far-right supporters that if they commit violence on his behalf, he’ll have their back.
We all must, of course, remain alert to the risks of being targeted by the administration and its allies. Those risks are real. He has power at his disposal and unprincipled people around him willing to do his bidding.
Under an ego-obsessed leader like Trump, even our wins come with their own risks. He can be expected to respond to pro-democracy victories with other actions to show the world he’s still the strongman he imagines he sees in the mirror.
But Trump is not all-powerful. We can defeat him if we refuse to be intimidated.
In fact, law firms that caved into Trump’s threats are learning that preemptive compliance with tyranny comes at a cost. Clients and attorneys are leaving them to join or start firms with the courage to resist his dictatorial demands.
With more than three years left in Trump’s term, we will all face a series of decisions about whether, when and how to act. Those decisions will collectively determine whether we face a future of freedom or fascism.
We are far more likely to secure our freedom if we continue to be guided by core principles, as the organizers and participants of the “No Kings” weekend did in a vibrant, broad-based coalition: preparation, discipline, a vision of the future we’re fighting for and the courage to be there for each other and for our country.
Let’s keep it up!
Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.
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