‘No Kings’ protesters don’t ‘hate America” — they hate what Trump is doing to it
No one likes to be told that what they are doing is wrong or unpopular. This is especially true of politicians in a democracy. Yet without the freedom to criticize and point out flaws in government policy, democracy turns into a hollow shell. That means that political leaders must cultivate a “civic sensibility” in which they learn to accept, if not welcome, criticism.
Displaying that sensibility has never been one of President Trump’s strong suits. In fact, he seems to treat almost every criticism, no matter how tepid, as a thermonuclear attack or as a sign of disorder.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in his desire to quell protests against immigration policies in places like Los Angeles or Chicago. To justify such action, his administration has regularly exaggerated the threat that those protests pose to public safety or to federal facilities and personnel.
Typical was what the Solicitor General John Sauer told the Supreme Court in asking it to allow the administration to go forward with its plan to deploy the National Guard in Chicago. Sauer described what he called “prolonged, coordinated, violent resistance that threatens their lives and safety and systematically interferes with their ability to enforce federal law.”
Such claims have been vetted and found wanting by several federal courts. On Oct. 16, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit joined the chorus of voices saying that the president’s view of the world is fanciful at best. It offered a careful review of the findings made by the district court, and it provided an important lesson about the difference between protest and rebellion.
Before looking at what the court said, let me first say a few words about protest and its value in this country.
Political scientist Michael Lipsky describes protest as “political action oriented toward objection to one or more policies or conditions, characterized by showmanship or display of an unconventional nature, and undertaken to obtain rewards from political or economic systems while working within the system.”
“Working within the system,” protest is a way of giving voice to grievances. As Lipsky suggests, it can be targeted toward a particular policy or, as in the No Kings protests, toward a president and his administration more generally.
The fact that the MAGA crowd in Washington labelled those protests “Hate America” events says a lot about their attitude toward people who do not share their goals or the way they are pursuing them. And if that was not clear enough, on the day of the protests, Trump posted on Truth Social a video of him in a fighter jet, with “King Trump” painted on the side, showing him dropping what appears to be feces on protesters.
To detest protest is to detest democracy. People take to the streets to stop the government from doing things that are incompatible with their view of the nation’s values. Doing so signifies an extraordinary level of commitment to those values. I think a commentator on the No Kings protests got it right when he said, “The No Kings demonstrators are American patriots.”
The Seventh Circuit stood up for the right to protest when it reminded the president that “political opposition is not rebellion.” It went on, as if offering a civics lesson to the occupant of the Oval Office, to explain, “A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protesters advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the US government, (or) use civil disobedience as a form of protest.”
The court criticized the president for failing to recognize that a protest does not become a rebellion “merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest.” It explained that “The spirited, sustained, and occasionally violent actions of demonstrators in protest of the federal government’s immigration policies and actions, without more, do not give rise to a danger of rebellion against the government’s authority.”
Even if the Supreme Court overturns the appellate court’s decision barring Trump from deploying National Guard troops in Chicago, it can’t wipe away its words. The Seventh Circuit opinion warns Americans to be wary of the president’s claims about violence and rebellion.
The court points out the absurdity of those claims by noting that the same day Trump federalized the National Guard in response to what he called a “coordinated assault by violent groups intent on obstructing federal law enforcement activities,” only “a few dozen protesters demonstrated” at an ICE detention facility in a Chicago suburb.
Putting those two statements side by side shows how out of touch the president seems with reality.
Americans would be well advised to remember that the next time he treats protest as rebellion. We should also remember that it is the duty of political leaders in a democracy not to make a federal case out of moments when the people, whether in small or large groups, gather to criticize them.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
