America As No-Longer-Democracy and Not-Yet-Dictatorship
Where does the country stand after the largest day of protest in U.S. history? Putting “No Kings” in perspective
By Thomas Zimmer, October 20, 2025
(Opens in a new window)Something significant happened on Saturday. The No Kings protests brought about six to seven million people out into the streets, united in opposition to Donald Trump, in thousands of demonstrations across the country. It was likely the largest day of protest (Opens in a new window) in U.S. history, surpassing even the first Women’s March of 2017.
The protests came after several weeks of the Trumpist government engaging in an all-out propaganda campaign to declare all dissent illegitimate and demonize all those on the “Left,” defined vaguely as anyone not on board with MAGA, as domestic terrorists or at least terrorism-adjacent. Yet when the day came, the authoritarian movement that controls the levers of state power and had preemptively declared the No Kings protests illegitimate and unacceptable did nothing.
Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana:
Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:
Let’s remember how shrill and deranged the campaign to demonize the No Kings protests, which the Trumpists called the “Hate America Rally,” was. Just a few examples: On October 10, Kansas senator Roger Marshall (Opens in a new window) declared: “This will be a Soros paid-for protest for his professional protesters. The agitators show up. We’ll have to get the National Guard out. Hopefully it will be peaceful. I doubt it.” Speaker Mike Johnson (Opens in a new window) chimed in the same day: “This Hate America rally that they have coming up for October 18? The antifa crowd, the pro-Hamas crowd, and the Marxists, they’re all gonna gather on the Mall. It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes.” And with that, everyone on the Right – Republican politicians, rightwing activists, the media machine – had received their marching orders. What followed was a barrage of these same themes and talking points. Majority whip Tom Emmer (Opens in a new window) (who, if you’ll recall, Trump didn’t want as Speaker in October 2023 because Emmer was considered too moderate – or, according to Trump, a “Globalist RINO” (Opens in a new window)) added: “Clearly, the Democrat Party of today is not your grandfather’s Democrat Party. They care about one thing and one thing only – appeasing the radical pro-terrorist wing of their party.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (Opens in a new window): “The Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” And, just for good measure, one more from Mike Johnson (Opens in a new window), on the day before the protests: “We refer to it by its more accurate description: The Hate America Rally. You’re gonna bring together the Marxists, the socialists, the antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat Party. That is the modern Democratic Party.”
What stands out about this demonization campaign is how unhinged it was. This isn’t just a bit of “mean” spin, just politicians doing politics. It is entirely untethered from reality. There’s no measure of restraint at all. No trace of any residual sense of commitment to something even remotely recognizable as a shared democratic political culture.
But not only did it completely fail to keep anyone from taking to the streets. When millions came out, the regime and its supporters just had to take it. The National Guard wasn’t deployed to dissolve the protests; there was no significant disruption by paramilitaries. We didn’t see Republican politicians addressing large crowds of pro-MAGA counter-protesters – because there were none; hardly a word from anyone of consequence on the Right. Instead we got Trump posting some AI-generated video (Opens in a new window) on social media depicting him piloting a fighter jet while wearing a crown, dumping feces on protesters from the air. Utterly pathetic.
So, had all this unhinged rhetoric from the Right just been empty posturing? Had they never really meant it? Or were they simply overwhelmed by the force of democratic dissent – a weak regime, incapable of backing up its threats with anything tangible? Was all the talk about authoritarianism therefore overblown and alarmist? Or is it, to take a very different side, naïve to assign so much significance to No Kings? Were the protests just an empty spectacle, facile and trite, something that allows mainstream liberals to feel good about themselves and normie Americans to rest easy while not actually changing a single thing about America’s predicament?
Let’s put the No Kings protests into perspective.
The Trumpists definitely meant it
When leading figures in MAGA world rage against “the Left,” there is always an element of posturing. Such are the incentives on the Right: If you want to get Trump’s attention, endear yourself with the rabid base, and be successful in the rightwing media landscape that monetizes fear, outrage, and anger, you must seek out a camera and find ever more aggressive ways to proudly declare how much you hate large swaths of the American population. It’s a perverse arms race with disastrous consequences for America’s political culture.
But when the leaders of the American Right talk about millions of their fellow citizens as the enemy within, they also mean it. Frankly, we’d be in a less dangerous situation if they were all just cynical opportunists. Does Mike Johnosn really believe the millions of people marching were all communists, socialists, and anarchists? To some extent, he’s just trying to attach a scary label to the protests that is intended to mark them as “Un-American.” But there is also a founding belief on the modern Right that all versions of “leftism” and liberalism are merely variants of the same fundamentally illegitimate political project of leveling hierarchies of race, gender, religion, or wealth. That is why they derided Martin Luther King Jr as a Communist, why segregationists in the 1950s protested the integration of schools in the South holding signs that read “Race Mixing is Communism.” (Opens in a new window) Similarly, as bizarre as it is for Karoline Leavitt to claim that “The Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals”: The idea that Democratic governance is fundamentally illegitimate because the Democratic coalition is made up of people who don’t qualify as “real Americans” and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to exercise meaningful political influence is dogma on the Right. And finally, protesting Donald Trump and “hating America” really are the same in the MAGA imagination: The Trumpist claim to unquestioned dominance is built on the idea that Trump embodies the nation. Because he channels the will of “the people,” dissent is disloyal, protest is tantamount to treason and must not be tolerated.
Before you keep reading, can I bother you for a minute?
This is a free post I am making available to everyone. If you want to keep reading on a free subscription, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort engaging with my work! Please share it widely to help me reach new readers.
And if you can, please consider becoming a paid member: As a member, you will gain access to additional benefits – including additional essays, as I start alternating between free posts, like this one here, and pieces reserved for paid members.
Most importantly, Democracy Americana is a publication solely funded by readers and my main source of income as an independent writer. I rely on your support and generosity to make this work possible. And I am very grateful.
America as no-longer-democracy and not-yet-dictatorship
If the Trumpists really meant it, but still didn’t dare to do anything about these protests, what does that say about the state of American politics and the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism? We are likely in for another round of grand proclamations: No Kings as definitive proof that the Trumpists are failing to consolidate authoritarian power! The democratic forces have turned the tide!
Let’s be a little more cautious and remember what’s happened since the first No Kings protests in June – not quite as big as the second round, but still around five million people on what is now the third-largest day of protests in recent U.S. history. And on Trump’s birthday, nonetheless, making his lame attempt at celebrating with a military parade in the nation’s capital look utterly pathetic in comparison.
But I find it really difficult to argue that we are in a less dangerous place now than four months ago. On the contrary, the Tumpists have since escalated the militarization of the political conflict. In several cities, people now live in a police state, confronted with rampant state terror carried out by masked agents accountable solely to Trump. The regime is also currently ramping up its assault on the modern state, using the shutdown as a pretext. And the “leftwing domestic terrorism” chimera remains immensely dangerous. The Trumpists have been laying the pseudo-legal groundwork for a drastic crackdown. On September 22, Trump signed an executive order (Opens in a new window) designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” This is rather bizarre on several levels. To start with, Antifa is not actually an organization, but a small movement with a decentralized structure consisting of loosely affiliated groups. There also exists no legal authority to designate groups as “domestic terrorist organizations.” But arguing the facts is really beside the point entirely: The Trumpists want to use “Antifa” as a master signifier for everything and everyone who dares to dissent – a “leftist” bogeyman that can be invoked to whip up the rightwing base. There is no broad “Antifa” threat – but there is now an “Antifa” Executive Order that is supposed to function as a flexible instrument to go after the “enemy within.”
Just three days later, on September 25, Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (Opens in a new window) (NSPM-7) on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” – which is intended to serve in exactly the same way. It is a breathtakingly authoritarian document. And it might just be the most dangerous step the regime has taken so far. The memo instructs the entire machinery of the federal government to employ an incredibly expansive definition of “domestic terrorism” to go after any organization or individual associated with “the Left.” It opens the door for virtually anyone in the United States – certainly anyone who is critical of Trump – to be harassed by the state as a domestic terrorist. It employs a definition of “domestic terrorism” that is entirely directed against the bizarre phantasma of “the Left” as it exists in the feverish mind of someone like Stephen Miller – even going so far as to explicitly declare all “activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism’” as likely to be terroristic. Meanwhile, the memo widens the definition so much – including “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder” – that it becomes difficult to identify what act of resistance or disobedience the state couldn’t persecute as “domestic terrorism.”
Will they actually follow through on any of this? We don’t know. But let’s assume they will try. On October 7, Missouri senator Eric Schmitt flat-out declared (Opens in a new window): “We need a cleansing here. Let’s just be truthful about what’s happening. This left-wing political violence is not a both sides thing. It’s not.” The next day, secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem professed (Opens in a new window) her desire to “route them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society.” She was referring to “Antifa,” which “is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA, as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just as dangerous.” Attorney general Pam Bondi (Opens in a new window) added: “Just like we did with cartels, we are going to take the same approach, President Trump, with antifa – destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We are going to take them apart.”
Any form of dissent is now Antifa, and Antifa is like a foreign terrorist organization… It is not hard to see where this could be going, where the Trumpists want this to go. At the same time, the gulf between these authoritarian aspirations and violent desires on the one hand and the realities of a complex political system coupled with a population that predominantly rejects Trumpist dictatorship remains vast. I’ll repeat my contention that binary categories of Trump “winning vs losing” – or the regime being “weak vs strong” – are not particularly helpful right now. They tend to reproduce mood swings more than they help generate plausible analysis. Every Trumpian embarrassment is destined to cause a new round of “Trump is weak, he is losing” pieces; every authoritarian escalation is accompanied by a chorus of “Democracy is dead, Trump won” post-mortems. Better to grapple with the murkiness of this moment: A staunchly authoritarian movement is in power, but they haven’t been able to install a consolidated autocracy yet.
Why No Kings matters
The No Kings protests did not change anything in any immediate, tangible way. Critics mostly in some corners on the Left therefore tend to discard them as purely symbolic – a tame gathering of normie America that won’t affect the status quo, an inadequate response to the moment. Such critique misreads the political conflict. Yes, No Kings was a highly symbolic affair. But that doesn’t relegate the protests to the status of an ephemeral blip. I believe they mattered for three main reasons.
First of all, the Trumpists’ key assertion is that they represent “real America,” “authentic America,” that the November election was a referendum that installed not just a president, but an elected sovereign whose authority transcends precedent, the law, and even the foundations of democratic self-government. All opposition is illegitimate, therefore. If you oppose Trump, you stand outside the boundaries of who gets to belong. These assertions are shared not just by the MAGA coalition. Unfortunately, they have also long influenced the response to the Trumpist assault from both the nominal opposition party and the major institutions of American life. This has been Trump’s superpower for a long time, and especially since the last election: So many of mainstream America’s leading voices and most influential elites have insisted on treating him like he really is the tribune of the people, a leader with a broad mandate to implement his agenda who must be given wide latitude as the will of the true people must not be impeded. Anything that helps to dispel such notions – like seven million people marching in the streets when we have never seen anything remotely close from MAGA America – matters.
Secondly, I believe a broad coalition – a popular front of sorts, if you will – is needed to defeat Trumpist authoritarianism. Since 2016, the attempts to build such an anti-MAGA coalition from across the political spectrum have come under the banner of “defending democracy.” Such efforts, while occasionally very successful, have been hampered by two things: “Democracy” is a rather abstract concept that, for many people, doesn’t necessarily have a lot of tangible meaning and therefore the call to “defend” it might not have the desired mobilizing effect. And there is also a fundamental disagreement at the heart of this coalition over what the purpose of “defending democracy” should actually be: Is this supposed to be a truly transformative project aiming to propel the nation forward towards the kind of egalitarian pluralism it has often promised, but never achieved? Or a purely restorative endeavor, designed to take us back to the pre-2016 status quo ante? I firmly believe a mere restoration would be madness, as it would recreate the conditions that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place. But the point is, this conflict is real, and it can be hard to reconcile these positions. This is where the protests can have an impact. In thousands of places, Americans came together with their neighbors in a communal effort that created a shared experience beyond strategic or ideological disagreement. I choose to believe this can sustain, re-energize, and perhaps even ignite for the first time a resilient democratic culture.
Finally, the No Kings protests were also part of a much-needed effort to, as cringe as that may sound, reclaim patriotism from the Right. Too long have rightwingers been allowed to drape their grievances and bigotries in the nation’s collective symbols, to call on the patriotic mythology of the nation in order to pretend that their desire to dominate is somehow an expression of the timeless essence of the nation. The American “Left,” very broadly defined, has struggled to contest this terrain. I very much count myself among those who are – rightfully, I believe! – wary of any political project that wraps itself in the flag, of anything that could, perhaps even unwittingly, help sanitize the nation’s history and legitimize the destructive forces of nationalism. But this reluctance, the tendency to abdicate and surrender the field of patriotism to the Right has allowed a bunch of ethno-nationalist extremists to present themselves as the guardians of the national mythos. This is where the slogan “No Kings,” in all its simplicity, is effective. It is a reference to a founding myth – but mobilized in defense of democratic self-government; not in service of perpetuating lazy, self-satisfied exceptionalist ideas but as an affirmation of democratic aspirations, even if America has certainly never fully lived up to them yet.
This is also where the “normie” character of the No Kings protests becomes an asset. Too long have rightwingers been allowed to present themselves as “real Americans” and deride everyone who dares to dissent as “abnormal.” But all (small-d) democrats in America must dispute and reject this claim of “real American” white Christian conservative “normalcy,” and with it the Right’s justification for minority rule. The point is to reclaim and redefine what counts as “normal” in America – to replace a repressive norm of white Christian patriarchal dominance with a promise that this should be a country where the expected norm is an acceptance of pluralism and diversity in all spheres of life. It is time for (small-d) democrats to assert their right to define the boundaries of normalcy – and their claim to be defending the nation’s true ideals against the reactionary assault. The chasm between the traditional Republican assertion of representing “normal” America and the assortment of extremists, fraudsters, and weirdos in positions of influence and power has become brutally stark. It is time to pounce. Will it work? I don’t know. But it is certainly better than preemptively conceding ground to the Right’s claims that they deserve disproportionate power as representatives of “real” America.
