I went to my second No Kings protest last Saturday.
Some observations:
The participants lined Eagle Road in Havertown for several blocks. Since we were an hour late to the proceedings, we–my wife Cindy was with me– drove through the people waving signs and urging us to beep our horn. The crowd skewed to the older side and was mostly white. I’ll give an amateur estimate of about 1,000 people. They definitely would have filled the bleachers at a high school football game.
I don’t know how to interpret the demographics of the crowd. It is certainly a good sign that so many Late Boomers, like Cindy and I, were there. We are supposedly a group that votes mostly for Trump, but I hope young people, 20-35, are getting the message that this presidency is not good for America. Or democracy.
Will Bunch, an Inquirer columnist, was at the same demonstration. He wrote: “Part of it has to be the Democrats — they’re not good at getting the young vote,“ [a 19-year-old protestor] said. The right is very good at appealing to a lot of the insecurities, especially in younger men.’
“This would seem to be the next mission for ‘No Kings’ going forward, to build a bigger network with groups such as Gen Z teens and 20-somethings or African Americans. Those groups also have major issues with the Trump presidency but feel them in different ways and express them in different venues than the ones like Facebook or MSNBC that are popular with the first wave of protesters.”
A few Trump supporters drove through the demonstration. One Taliban-style pick-up featured the oversized Trump flags. Another guy drove through, waving his MAGA hat. But the angry, fiftyish couple in a white Cadillac Escalade was most memorable, yelling F-bombs at people on both sides of the street, their faces marred by hatred.
Is it my imagination, or are Trump supporters always angry, all the time?
The most memorable sign, IMO, said “Silence is Compliance.” True. A T-shirt said simply “Antifa 1941-45” with a depiction of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.
And how about Trump’s response? An AI-generated video of King Donald dropping excrement on protestors.
So mature. So uniting.
The Q-View 