Defiant Democrats are embracing it Weekend “No Kings” ralliesCondemned GOP attacks on anti-Trump protests as an attack on free speech and urged voters to take to the streets.
“Coming to express dissent against an out-of-control administration is the American equivalent of motherhood, baseball and apple pie,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Friday.
The pushback comes in response to Republican leaders, who have spent much of the past week trying to brand the planned protests as “hate-America” demonstrations backed by left-wing extremists in a bid to undermine the country’s democratic traditions.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) told reporters in Washington this week, “We’re calling it a ‘Hate America’ rally that will be on Saturday. Let’s see who attends.” “I bet you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see antifa types, I bet you’ll see Marxists on full display — people who don’t want to stand up and defend the fundamental truths of this republic.”
Hardly a retreat, Democrats have countered those broad positions by insisting that a fundamental truth of the republic is the right to resist government, enshrined in the First Amendment. With that in mind, many people are not only supporting the No Kings demonstrations on Saturday, but they are also planning to join them.
Representative Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said, “I will be at a rally. I will have an American flag in my hand.” “It seems that Speaker Johnson and the House Republicans only believe that free speech only matters if you agree with their speech.”
The rallies are the latest point in a messaging battle between the two parties over the actions of President Trump, whose second term in the White House has been marked by aggressive efforts to dismantle the government and overhaul the way Washington works, even when those tactics disregard the intent of Congress.
Among his more controversial moves, Democrats accused Trump of using the office to advance his family’s business interests; He has sent troops to police American cities; And he pressured the Justice Department to arrest his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and, most recently, John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term.
The No Kings movement emerged to protest what Trump’s critics see as the country’s rapid slide toward authoritarianism. Several liberal groups have banded together to hold more than 2,500 rallies in all 50 states on Saturday to trumpet dissent.
Leading up to the rallies, Republican leaders have tried to seize the narrative by framing the demonstrations as a protest against the country rather than the president.
“These people are playing to the most radical, small and violent base in the country,” House Republican Whip, Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.), said in an interview with Fox Business Network this week.
“You’ll see them at the mall on Saturdays,” he said. “He doesn’t love this country.”
Democrats have responded with a tone of disbelief, noting that the nation was founded by rejecting a king and empowering citizens to choose their own leaders. In that light, he says, there is nothing more American than a “No Kings” rally.
“Just think about where we are, where millions of Americans are coming out to say, ‘We elect a president, we don’t have a king,’ and Republicans are like, ‘How un-American,'” said Democratic whip Rep. Katherine Clark (Mass.). “I mean, they have such a blatant disregard for how our system works, how our Constitution is put together.”
The rallies come at a time when relations at the Capitol are already tense due to the impasse over government spending and the partial shutdown that followed. The standoff entered its 18th day on Saturday with no resolution in sight and each side blaming the other for the standoff.
From the White House, Trump has only escalated those partisan tensions, using the shutdown to furlough federal workers — in lieu of traditional leave — and vowing to perhaps permanently slash some of Democrats’ most beloved programs.
“Democrats are being killed in the shutdown, because we’re shutting down programs that are Democrat programs that we oppose,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “And they’re never going to come back in many cases.”
White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt also went out of her way to anger Democrats ahead of the weekend protests. On Thursday he said the Democrats’ “core constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.”
“That’s what the Democratic Party is serving,” he said.
This stigma did not go unnoticed by Jeffries, who on Friday slammed Levitt, calling him “sick” and “out of control.”
Jeffries said, “I’m not sure whether he’s just neurotic, ignorant, a stone-cold liar or all of the above.”
The history of the conflict between Trump and the Democrats is as old as the president’s political career. But they escalated after Trump’s refusal to accept his election defeat in 2020, leading to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the building in an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the election results.
The violence soured relations between the parties and left Democrats indifferent to Republicans’ commitment to defending the Constitution and other founding institutions — a mistrust that grew when Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people involved in the attack on the first day of his second term.
Those old scars have resurfaced in the rhetoric ahead of the “No Kings” rallies, with Democrats trying to highlight the difference between the right to peaceful protest as defined by the First Amendment and the violence of January 6.
The first, Jeffries said, is “not disgusting.”
He added, “What happened on January 6 is disgusting. It was a hate-America rally, sponsored by Donald Trump and his sycophants, that incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol. This is what hatred looks like.”
“What you will see this weekend is what patriotism looks like.”
