In the past, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have responded with mockery to the “No Kings” events.
Last fall, they both posted AI memes to social media depicting Trump in a crown. Trump shared a mocked-up vision of himself flying a fighter jet emblazoned with “KING TRUMP” appearing to dump raw sewage on protesters. In Vance’s social media post, prominent Democrats knelt as supplicants in a royal court before Trump.
The president also called October’s mass protests a “joke” and described them as “very small, very ineffective.” The people who took part were “whacked out,” Trump said.
“When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One the day after.
When asked about today’s “No Kings” events, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said on Thursday, “The only people who care about these Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them.”
But organizers remain undeterred. “Each time we show up, we disrupt President Trump’s attempts to rule through repression and remind the country, and the world, that people power is our path to a truly free America,” the “No Kings” website says.
“It is not just some abstract protest. It is a movement that has seen numbers across racial lines and economic lines,” civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton said at a Thursday news conference. “We may not all agree on some issues, but we all agree that if we do not protect the right to vote and protect democracy, it doesn’t matter where we disagree, we will all be muted and ineffective.”
