No difference after No Kings: The loyal opposition has been neither

The famous quote, “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” is widely attributed to Mark Twain, but it was actually written by his friend and collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner.

The Democratic Party has spent the better part of nine years warning Americans that Donald Trump represents an existential threat to constitutional democracy, but action speaks louder than words, and precious little has been done.

It turns out that complaining about Trump was the easy part.

Stopping him has proven considerably more difficult, in part because stopping him would require the party to do something other than raise money, hold press conferences, and organize events that are carefully designed not to actually inconvenience anyone with power.

Saturday’s No Kings Day of Nonviolent Action drew enormous crowds. Bruce Springsteen performed. Bernie Sanders spoke. Joan Baez sang. Photographs were taken. The images circulated on social media. Donations were solicited.

The next morning, Donald Trump woke up as president of the United States, with the same unchecked executive powers he had on Saturday, the same deportation apparatus running at full speed, and the same billionaire allies collecting gigantic tax considerations, and the same war grinding forward in Iran with new plans to put boots on the ground.

The protests were, in the clinical sense of the word, expressive. They were not effective.

This is not an argument against protest. It is an argument about what protest is for and whether the people organizing it have thought seriously about that question or are simply producing a political product for a Democratic base that has confused the feeling of resistance with its substance.

Consider where No Kings began.

The inaugural rallies took place on June 14, 2025 — Flag Day, and Donald Trump’s birthday, a date the administration had chosen for a military parade through Washington that critics described, with considerable accuracy, as the kind of display more commonly associated with governments that do not hold competitive elections.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans who wished to register their opposition to Trumpism chose that day to gather. They gathered in parks. They gathered in city centers. They gathered everywhere, it seemed, except along the parade route itself, where the tanks rolled and the aircraft flew and the president reviewed his military pageant without meaningful interruption.

The organizers had made a choice, whether consciously or by default, not to place bodies between the symbols of democratic governance and the man treating those symbols as personal property. They chose, in other words, not to be inconvenient.

That choice reflects something deeper and more troubling than tactical timidity.

It reflects a Democratic establishment that has internalized, at some level, a set of boundaries around what constitutes acceptable opposition — boundaries that the opposition itself has drawn, and that the people being opposed have noticed and are grateful for.

You may march. You may chant. You may donate. You may vote in elections whose integrity is under active assault. What you may not do, apparently, is disrupt. What you may not do is make the exercise of illegitimate power visibly, materially costly.

The results of this approach are now part of the public record. Trump’s second term has proceeded at a velocity that has consistently outpaced Democratic response. Immigration enforcement operations of legally dubious authority have arrested and detained people without warrants.

The administration has attacked university funding, gutted federal agencies, and in the case of Iran, commenced military action that has already killed more than 1,500 people and threatens to draw the region into a wider conflagration — a war that polls indicate a majority of Americans oppose.

Congressional Democrats have responded with statements, letters, and the occasional strongly worded floor speech. They have not stopped any of it.

Following the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by Trump’s Gestapo-like federal agents, Chuck Schumer rushed five appropriations bills through the Senate with Democratic support and made an impotent display of obstruction by holding up one for the Department of Homeland Security, which got enough money in the One Big Beautiful Bill to last three years.

Trump later signed an order to pay airport workers, which demonstrated how pointless it was, but even when Schumer shut down the federal government, his caucus capitulated after 40 days, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Iran war represents perhaps another glaring failure of the organized resistance, and the No Kings coalition’s treatment of it was instructive.

The Indivisible coalition’s own description of the protest’s aims mentioned foreign military spending primarily as a budgetary grievance — money being wasted — rather than as a moral catastrophe in its own right.

An administration whose own officials have essentially acknowledged that Israel’s interests were a principal motivation for the unprovoked conflict has managed to wage that war with the mainstream Democratic opposition declining to make it a central rallying point.

The reason is not mysterious.

The institutional Democratic Party and its donor network have their own complicated relationship with the policies that produced this war, and the No Kings coalition, whatever its energy, is not independent of that corrupt political establishment.

Meanwhile, the antiwar tradition that once gave American opposition movements their moral clarity has been methodically suppressed.

Students who organized against the Gaza genocide in 2024 were met by university administrations and law enforcement in ways that had a measurable chilling effect on subsequent organizing. Americans who objected to their tax dollars providing the means to kill tens of thousands of children were labeled ‘antisemitic,’ and such lawmakers as Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were outspent into oblivion.

The campus movement that briefly suggested the possibility of a genuine, principled challenge to American foreign policy consensus has been substantially quieted. What remains is a protest movement with enormous energy, genuine grassroots participation, and no coherent theory of how any of it translates into the cessation of any specific harm.

A movement without a central demand is a parade.

It may be a very large parade, with excellent music and genuine emotional power, but it leaves those in power with nothing they are required to do and nothing they stand to lose by doing nothing.

The history of successful movements in this country — movements that ended wars, secured rights, changed laws — is a history of people who understood that moral witness, while necessary, is not sufficient.

Moral witness must be accompanied by disruption, by leverage, by a willingness to impose costs on those who continue the behavior being protested. The Montgomery Bus Boycott worked because it cost the bus company money. The Vietnam-era movement worked, to the extent that it did, because it made the continuation of the war politically untenable for the people prosecuting it.

What, precisely, did the Trump administration stand to lose from Saturday’s events?

What specific policy was threatened? Which official faced a consequence?

These are not cynical questions. They are the only questions that matter, and the fact that they are difficult to answer tells you something important about the state of American opposition politics.

The Democratic Party, for its part, continues to operate as though the principal challenge it faces is messaging. The problem, its strategists suggest, is that voters do not sufficiently understand what is being done to them or who is responsible. This theory flatters the party’s consultants and absolves its leadership, but it is a lie.

Voters understand what is happening. They are living it. What they have not seen is a political institution willing to treat the situation with the urgency it has spent many years insisting the situation deserves.

The Democratic political establishment is funded by the same billionaires and corporations that finance the Republicans, and those donors do not want radical change. They want to keep making money by exploiting workers and polluting the planet with impunity.

A party that declares fascism at the podium and negotiates at the negotiating table is not a resistance. It is a token opposition that has been neither particularly loyal to its stated principles nor particularly effective in its opposition.

The crowds that gathered on Saturday deserved better than that. So does the country.