The Memo: Trump betrays irritation after huge 'No Kings' protests

The organizers of Saturday’s “No Kings” protests succeeded in all their main aims: drawing huge crowds, keeping the events peaceful — and, apparently, getting under President Trump’s skin.

The latter point appears to be borne out by Trump’s reaction. Having noted in advance of the protests that he is not, in fact, a king, the president lurched to the other extreme afterward via a controversial meme he disseminated on social media on Saturday evening.

The AI-generated montage shows Trump wearing a crown in the cockpit of a fighter jet. The AI version of Trump sprays brown liquid — presumably excrement — onto the protesters on the streets below.

It was the latest startling proof of how the sensibility of online trolling has seeped into the Oval Office, even more so in Trump’s second term than it did during his first.

It was also one more reminder of how far the nation has traveled in less than two decades, when former President Obama talking about people “clinging to guns or religion” or Mitt Romney referencing “victims who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them” kicked off several news cycles of outrage.

Back then, the Obama and Romney remarks were widely criticized for showing supposed disdain for regular voters — even though both men argued they were making valid points, if unartfully.

Now, the president posts memes of himself bombarding with feces those citizens who oppose him.

In any event, Trump also disparaged the No Kings protests when he spoke to reporters on board Air Force One on Sunday evening.

“I think it’s a joke,” he complained. “I looked at the people. They’re not representative of this country.”

He also added, in reference to liberal mega-donor George Soros, “I guess it was paid for by Soros and other radical-left lunatics. It looks like it was.”

Organizers claimed a total of more than 7 million people turned out at more than 2,600 protests across the nation.

Conservatives online sought to push back against those numbers.

Whatever the specific tally, aerial footage of events in major cities such as New York, Boston, Washington and Chicago showed enormous crowds, while social media was awash in images of symbolically significant small-town protests in deep-red Republican states.

None of that means Trump’s presidency is about to be derailed. While the events might provide an opportunity for solidarity and perhaps future mobilization among Americans strongly opposed to Trump, one day of protests likely won’t move his approval ratings very much at all from their mediocre-but-stable state.

Conversely, however, the No Kings event was a striking rebuke to the claims from Trump and his MAGA allies that they, and they alone, represent the heart of America. It demonstrated genuine outrage on many Americans’ part at what they regard to be an accelerating dash toward authoritarianism by the current president.

It also seems implausible that many people outside of the MAGA base will believe Trump’s insinuation that the people attending, from the biggest cities to the smallest towns, were turning out because Soros was funding them.

His political opponents sought to use Trump’s own reactions to the events against him.

In response to the fighter pilot social media post, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) contended that “this is the kind of contempt that Trump and his fellow oligarchs have for ordinary Americans.”

Sanders, who addressed the No Kings crowd in the nation’s capital on Saturday, also took aim at Trump over his efforts to play down the size of the protests.

“7 million people came out for the largest demonstration day in our history,” Sanders wrote on the social platform X. “Americans are clear. They don’t want authoritarianism, oligarchy or a doubling in their insurance premiums.”

The seeming efficacy of the protests was apparent in another way, too. Republicans and the broader right-leaning media ecosystem seemed to struggle to find a clear line of counterattack.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) caused a stir in the days leading up to the protests when he contended in an interview with the Trump-friendly Real America’s Voice network that “They call it the ‘No Kings’ rally. We call it the ‘Hate America’ rally. We’re going to have all the Marxists collected, all the antifa people, you know, the [Black Lives Matter] remnants, the pro-Hamas wing of the Democrat Party. They’re going to be out here demonstrating, and screaming and wailing.”

Others in the GOP seemed to toggle between endorsing Johnson’s view that the rallies were an exercise in subversive militancy and characterizing them as old, enervated and embarrassing.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) shared one social media post, reportedly showing a Democratic state senator with a sign hoping that “cholesterol” would “do your job” — implicitly a reference to heart disease for Trump.

This, Cruz contended, showed that “hate and violence define today’s Dems.”

Yet Cruz also shared a mocking post of a small protest in Carrollton, Texas. The original poster had noted the protest was “almost exclusively old white people,” to which Cruz responded “boomers gotta boom…”

Reviewing the protests on Monday evening, Fox News’s “The Five” at one point showed a group of older Americans with the chyron, “No kings but many boomers at weekend protests.”

It’s very possible, of course, that the “No Kings” protests don’t lead anywhere in particular.

But, for the moment, at least, they seem to have rattled Trump and some of his allies.

The organizers couldn’t have hoped for much more.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.