He wasn’t wrong. After winning in November 2024, Trump seemed invincible. He’d practically dumped Joe Biden in hospice and drained the fighting spirit out of the #Resistance, too; old opposition standbys like Katy Perry and Timothy Snyder decamped to Canada. The libidinal economy of opposition politics during Trump’s first term — when every outrage instantly produced a march, a slogan, a crying congresswoman, or a sassy slogan on a tight dress or a tote bag — had finally burned through its own glucose. In early 2025, Americans watched the Department of Government Efficiency cripple several federal agencies without making a noticeable dent in federal expenditures — but also without putting anyone in the streets. The anti-DEI blitz drew mostly faculty-lounge outrage. Democratic politicians went on soul-searching sabbaticals. The pussy hats were mothballed.

But no more. As Saturday’s “No Kings” protests proved, the period of resigned apathy is over. An estimated 8 million people marched in 3,300 events across the country, reportedly making it the largest single-day demonstration in US history. Nearly half of the events took place in Republican strongholds; Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had more than 100 scheduled protests, and one demonstration took place in lonely little Kotzebue, Alaska, which has about as many wind turbines as Democrats. There’s even a new, brightly hued protest hat: a red knit Melt the ICE cap, modeled, for better or worse, after those worn by Norwegians in the 1940s to protest the Nazi occupation.

Marches, of course, aren’t magic, and a few million people with signs aren’t automatically a durable political force, much less a revolution. And those who turned out for No Kings events were typically older, whiter, and more college-educated than the electorate. That’s a feature of the graying Resistance: Boomer and Gen-X libs are the key demographic (the Millennials who made Left populism feel hipster-cool a decade ago have tuned out, and the Gen-Zs are either disillusioned or voted for Trump). Still, the protests matter as a temperature check of America’s political mood and a preview of a coming Republican wipeout in November.

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In defence of Chalamet-ism

By Ryan Zickgraf

Trump only has himself to blame. In the year since the inaugural No Kings rally, he doubled down on his authoritarian antics and acted more like, well, a king. He has treated Congress and the courts less as coequal branches than as ceremonial bodies occasionally invited to applaud and rubber stamp his agenda. Instead of slowly backing away from the old neoliberal model of foreign policy, the so-called rules-based international order, he tried to blow it up entirely on his own authority. He launched what he called a strike against Venezuela and captured its president without notifying Congress in advance. He blew up civilian vessels in the Caribbean for alleged crimes that don’t carry the death penalty in the United States. He threatened half the countries in the Americas, and even rattled his saber toward Greenland. An invasion of Iran followed in February, another war of choice conducted without a declaration, without a vote, and without apparent interest in what anyone outside the Pentagon thought (he may not have solicited many opinions from inside the Pentagon, either).

Now he’s coming for the money supply. The Treasury Department announced that Trump’s signature would appear on all new paper currency, the first time a sitting president’s John Hancock had been placed on dollar bills since the practice began in 1861. In other words, the man who told reporters that “I’m not a king” had, in 14 months, annexed a performing arts center, renamed a gulf, stamped his face on the Department of Justice building and his signature on the currency, and launched two wars without asking anyone’s permission. Hail Caesar?

Yet judging by the signs, the speeches, and the people I spoke to at the No Kings rally in Harrisburg, Pa., what finally jolted the anti-Trump public out of its stupor was mass ICE mobilizations. At that same Quantico speech last fall, Trump boasted that he had signed an executive order creating “quick reaction forces” that could help quell civil disturbances in large cities, essentially a personal domestic strike force aimed at what he called “the enemy from within.” Seen in this light, Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis was less a specific border enforcement initiative than the opening act of something larger, an emerging framework in which federal military power flexed its muscles domestically, and American cities were recast as new theaters of operation. 

When ICE officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti — a mother of three and a Veterans Affairs nurse, respectively — the federal government’s response was to justify both shootings before any probe was complete, contradict its own account on video, and then refuse to share evidence with state investigators. Good and Pretti became martyrs, victims of the sort of jackbooted federal thuggery conservatives once liked to imagine happening to themselves.

There is a reason that this weekend’s rally in Minnesota’s capital city became the symbolic flagship of No Kings, with Bruce Springsteen performing “Streets of Minneapolis” to a crowd of at least 100,000. Operation Metro Surge had effectively made Minneapolis a laboratory for the “war from within” doctrine, and even many people who aren’t especially ideological can recognize when a government starts to feel tyrannical.

The numbers tell their own story. No Kings, for all its messy ideological sprawl and boomer-heavy demographics, had 8 million souls marching outside, with an overarching sense that people who had been sitting on their hands for months had finally been jolted out of the house. There’s also some data showing that the people showing up aren’t just venting for a single day. One analysis of DC marchers showed that town-hall attendance rose to 38%, up from 31% prior to their participation in the protests, and that four-fifths had boycotted or deliberately purchased products for political reasons, up 16 points in 14 months. 

Compare all this to the Right’s attempts to muster a crowd. At the Conservative Political Action Committee gabfest, held the same weekend, a few hundred sat in a convention hall in Texas. The usual blowhards tried their best to spin the new Iran war as an expression of “America First” foreign policy, rather than a sudden and dramatic reversal of its core promise. Trump skipped it, and judging from online footage, the conference less resembled MAGA’s victory lap than a convention of Republicans nervously assuring one another that the king was still wearing his clothes.

The deeper irony is that Trump is now the one stripping off his own garments. He benefited, at least for a while, from a country too demoralized to oppose him with the theatrical intensity of the first term. That lull created the illusion of a blank check for enacting MAGA’s policies, no matter how extreme, and let Republicans imagine that the public had finally adjusted to him, that Americans had accepted a more openly punitive politics as the new normal. But that was before the bodies started dropping on the sidewalks of Minneapolis and missiles started flying in Iran.

It turns out the best organizer the American Left has had in years is Donald Trump in a crown he couldn’t stop himself from trying on.

Russians had plenty of reasons to protest, yet very few of them did. This was not because of repression; as flawed and corrupt as he was, Yeltsin was no authoritarian. You were free to mock and deride the head of state, and many did. The issue was that hardly anyone saw the point of protesting as they were too busy struggling to survive. Half a decade into Russia’s experiment with democracy, the state had effectively disintegrated. Thieves and “violent entrepreneurs” rushed in to take advantage of the chaos, and most people accepted there was nothing they could do about it.

Yet one group of Russians refused to accept this national humiliation: the elderly. It was common in those days to see pensioners demonstrating, especially if you worked in central Moscow. I regularly passed by groups of communist babushkas standing in front of the statue of Marshal Zhukov just off Red Square (men were a less common sight; I attributed this to the drastic decline in male life expectancy). In their shawls and overcoats, these old women looked just like the ones you saw lighting candles in churches, except they read Lenin instead of the Bible and held aloft banners featuring the hammer and sickle instead of icons.

At the time, this struck me as a strange and exotic spectacle. My own grandparents, born during the First World War and raised in “Red Clydeside”, the epicenter of radical Scottish leftism, were not political at all. Whether they had been in their youth I did not know. The only activist pensioner I knew of was an old lady from the village of Lumphinnans, who had dictated a memoir of her life as a communist activist; my mother had typed it up for her. We regarded her as “a character”.

In Russia, the radicalism of the old was just as futile, but much more depressing. The Communist Party was led by a mediocrity called Gennady Zyuganov, who had inherited leadership of the proletariat when everybody with talent quit to get rich. In 1996, he ran against Yeltsin for the presidency, who at the time had a 6% approval rating. Zyuganov came within a whisker of winning the first round, but then Yeltsin staged a remarkable comeback, supported by state- and oligarch-controlled media, which blacked out all coverage of the communists. Yet this did not bring out the masses in revolt, only the elderly, and the regime knew it could ignore them. It saw the sea of gray hair and knew that the frail opposition had no place in the future being built.

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American politics will be born again

By Daniel Kalder

And so, powerless as they were, the pensioners performed ritual acts. Banners were waved, speeches were given, rallies attended, and holidays celebrated (I remember picking up a flyer for an event commemorating Stalin’s birthday at my local cinema). These protesters had spent their entire lives under communism and endured war and hardship — but they also remembered moments of triumph, like the Red Army raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, or Yuri Gagarin beating the Americans in the space race. Now they were being told that their sacrifices were in vain and all that meant nothing. I did not blame them for taking to the streets. To do nothing, to say nothing, would be to admit defeat and acquiesce to their own humiliation.

Around a decade later, I moved to Texas and stopped thinking about elderly protesters. That is, until the second Trump administration got underway. The American variety first came onto my radar when Elon Musk’s DOGE laid siege to USAID, and congressional Democrats, some of whom were considerably older than the Soviet gerontocrats the Western media had once mocked, turned up at the head office to try to gain access. Out of power, these ancient politicians suddenly looked incredibly frail: I couldn’t help but notice their implausible wigs, their halting speech, the tremble in their voices as they attempted to lead a chant that quickly faltered. I saw how easy it was for a security guard to ignore them.

Since then, anti-Trump protests have been held across the nation, and, as many have observed, they are a lot grayer than they were the first time around. At first, I ignored the online snark about “boomer liberals”. But when I reported on a protest against redistricting at the Capitol in Austin in August, it was impossible to ignore the abundance of white hair, the tie-dye t-shirts and occasional wheelchairs. The energy levels were low. Like the wizened Democrats outside the USAID building, the protesters attempted to start up a chant, but it was hesitant and unenergetic and soon died down.

I hadn’t seen so many angry pensioners since Russia. But whereas the babushkas were performing rituals that dated back to the dawn of communism, these elderly Texans were following a script that was written during the heyday of their youth in the Sixties — those heady days of sex, drugs and protests against LBJ and Nixon. Their homemade signs bore profane messages like “GOP Guarding Old Pedophiles”, “Abort Greg Abbott”, and “Fuck ICE, Fuck Trump”.

The aesthetics of it all were very poor. When the rock band Country Joe and the Fish led the crowd in a chant of “FUCK” at Woodstock, it was about youth and sticking it to the man. More than five decades later, the same generation was still in rebellion mode, but the swearing had a crotchety, yelling-at-the-TV energy. When I stumbled upon a No Kings protest in a small town in the Texas Hill Country several weeks later, the atmosphere was more congenial. It ended in time for lunch, and some of the retiree protesters went to get barbecue. It was a nice day out, I suppose, but it wasn’t the future. Like the old communists in Russia, these pensioners had assumed the world they had built would last forever, but now they could feel it receding into history. And just as the regime in Moscow ignored OAP protesters, so Trump was not remotely threatened. He responded by posting an AI video of himself wearing a crown, flying a plane over a crowd and dumping shit on the protesters.

Where have the young people gone? It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t like a good protest: two years of marches against the war in Gaza demonstrated that. Nor is it true that they have lost faith in politics; the recent triumph of Zohran Mamdani in New York demonstrates that they are as easily gulled by charismatic charlatans as every generation that came before them. Perhaps it’s that, rather like the music of Country Joe and the Fish, the story that’s being told just doesn’t resonate in 2025. Trump as tyrant/Hitler/existential threat to democracy etc is a boring, rebooted narrative that didn’t work the first time around, and which doesn’t actually address any of their concerns. And so, as the second Trump administration proceeds, we can expect the median age of the protesters to creep steadily upwards.

On the one hand, I understand the desire to join together and express disapproval, even if it changes nothing — just as those babushkas in Moscow did. There’s something existential about it. But I also wonder whether the best way to spend your final years is in a fit of rage, shaking your fist at a man who will himself very soon exit the stage of history.

For me, the bleakest aspect of today’s geriatric protests is not the ease with which they are ignored, but rather that they reveal the impossibility of escaping from the corrosive effects of American politics. When I see videos of protesters piling unsteadily out of assisted-living facilities, handmade placards in hand, I don’t think “fight the power!” Instead, I imagine retirement homes across the country where the TV is permanently tuned to MSNBC and CNN, and the residents are in a permanent state of febrile rage and terror, fulminating about Trump all day.

Anything — knitting, bridge, chair yoga — would be better than that. I remember a story a friend in Moscow told me about his wife’s 95-year-old grandmother. She had lived through everything from Stalin’s terror to the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR. However, unlike the impoverished babushkas I saw on the street, she lived with her family, was well looked after, and enjoyed good health. She could have rested in those final years, satisfied that she had made it safely to the end, surrounded by her great-grandchildren. Instead, she watched the news obsessively and fretted about the future of Russia.

Given that she was not going to live to see any of the apocalyptic scenarios she was concerned about come to pass, my friend thought that she was upsetting herself needlessly. “Why are you so worried?”, he would ask. But she couldn’t help herself. And so she kept fretting until one day she suffered a fall, dying a week or two later. History rolled on regardless.

There’s a lesson in there, I think. I prefer the way my own grandparents spent their last years — watching game shows on TV, reading books, gardening on their allotment. Dylan Thomas was wrong: given the chance, you absolutely should go gentle into that good night.