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“Protests against President Donald Trump have taken place in towns and cities across the US in a coordinated event titled ‘No Kings’. The demonstrations were held to counter a rare military parade hosted by Trump in Washington DC… The military parade on Saturday evening, also Trump's birthday, was timed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Army.” BBC
The left is critical of the parade and praises the protests.
“[In his first term] In a now-famous anecdote, Gen Paul Selva, who grew up in Portugal under its integralist regime, told Trump that such parades are ‘what dictators do’. James Mattis, his then-secretary of defense, reportedly revolted against the idea, saying he would ‘rather swallow acid’. Trump never got his parade…
“Until now. Having stuffed the military and defense department leadership exclusively with sycophants and incompetents, Trump is now surrounded exclusively by the kind of people he likes best: people who can’t see any reason not to give him whatever he wants. On Saturday, they gave him a military parade for his birthday, complete with tanks, missiles, airplanes overhead and parachutists…
“If Trump was expecting a display of pomp and pride that rivaled his own egotism, he may have been disappointed. The parade, as it turned out, was something of a disappointing affair. The uniformed soldiers marched irregularly, slightly off beat; the turnout was small and the crowd seemed defeated, low-energy, a bit wilted and unenthused after spending hours in DC’s brutal summer humidity. It rained.”
Moira Donegan, The Guardian
“NBC put out a poll finding that 64% of Americans disapproved of the use of government money for this parade. And that was 88% of Democrats, predictably, but also 72% of independents. And of those who approved, it was 65% of Republicans overall, but it was 75% of MAGA and 56% of Republicans. So there’s kind of like this $45 million showcase for the base…
“People who thought they were getting a Nuremberg rally were disappointed by what was more of a lackadaisical state fair parade… On the other hand, there were probably on the order of 5 million people who protested around the country at the No Kings rallies and maybe 50,000 who showed up for the parade in Washington. So that’s 100 to one attendance difference.”
The Editors, Washington Monthly
“In almost every city, protests were completely peaceful… The SF protest I attended was totally nonviolent — I didn’t even see a single police officer. No stores were looted, no windows smashed, no cars overturned, no bricks thrown…
“This was also the single most patriotic protest I’ve ever been to. Tons of people were carrying American flags… Many of the signs referenced the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, or the American Revolution of 1776… The patriotic defense of traditional liberal American values that I saw on display at the No Kings protest gave me more hope for our democracy than anything I’ve seen since I went to an Obama rally in 2008. It’s just a start, but it’s something.”
Noah Smith, Noahpinion
The right praises the parade and criticizes the protests.
The right praises the parade and criticizes the protests.
“The parade was a display of pride in our troops and their awesome weaponry, but importantly, it also stood as a warning to our adversaries at a time of global peril, amid the specter of war in Iran. ‘Time and again, America’s enemies have learned that if you threaten the American people, our soldiers are coming for you,’ the president said in a brief but stirring speech, which lauded the grit of America’s soldiers without mentioning Iran or any hostile nation by name. Nonetheless, the warning was clear…
“‘There was an army before there was a nation’ was the motto of the day, something worth remembering. Another way of putting it is that there would have been no nation without an army. ‘Peace through strength’ is not possible without the military… The irony of shouting ‘No Kings’ at a parade honoring the Army that freed America from a king seemed to be lost on [the protestors].”
Miranda Devine, New York Post
“They protested against the elected and term-limited President of the United States who is being stymied by unelected life-tenured judges because they and the American press corps catastrophize everything the left does not control and cannot see that the system is actually working, including those unelected judges slowing Trump down…
“If Trump were a king, a dictator, or an autocrat, these people would have been beaten in the streets. They were not. We live in a free nation of elected leaders and we have a constitution that gives people the right to protest. So God bless them for exercising their right and bless their hearts they’re too unstable and indoctrinated on catastrophizing everything that they cannot realize their very protest is proof we have no king.”
Erick-Woods Erickson, Substack
“Protesters stood on both sides of Broad, for about half a mile on each side, waving American flags and hundreds of handmade signs… More than one sign declared that ‘we fought a war’ to get rid of kings, and plenty cited 1776 or the Declaration of Independence…
“If you had fallen asleep in 2010 and woken up on Broad Street in 2025, your first impression would have been that you were at another anti-Obamacare rally… The similarities to the tea party aren’t accidental…
“‘The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party,’ the Democratic activists behind the group Indivisible wrote. ‘We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress… We believe that protecting our values and neighbors will require mounting a similar resistance to the Trump agenda.’ Those tactics include waving the U.S. flag rather than burning it.”
Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner
“As military parades go, the celebration in Washington, D.C. turned out to be an innocuous affair and not the triumph of fascist pageantry its loudest critics feared… But the event was expensive, expending tens of millions of dollars to celebrate the birthday of the Army (and the president) at a time when the federal government's profligate ways already have its finances in dire straits. It was also a somewhat odd spectacle for a republic built on foundations that included suspicion of a strong military…
“George Washington, the leader of the Continental Army during the Revolution and the first president elected under the Constitution, had strong doubts about the wisdom of maintaining a substantial standing military… ‘A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,’ [James] Madison warned at the federal constitutional convention in 1787… Big, powerful militaries have an unfortunate history of building their own bases of loyalty, exercising influence over policy decisions, and all-too-frequently displacing civilian political leaders to try their hands at governing—usually badly.”
J.D. Tuccille, Reason
