Regrettably I missed any of the big and bigger “No Kings” demonstrations everywhere in Seattle on Saturday, owing to a conflicting family event in Port Angeles. But I was utterly astonished in downtown Port Angeles Saturday at noon to find and join three blocks of South Lincoln Street jammed with hundreds and hundreds of “No Kings” protesters, three and four deep in places on the sidewalks and crowding the lawn of the old Clallam County Courthouse.
In Washington, D.C., on Saturday it rained, or at least drizzled, on Donald Trump’s big birthday militarist hoopla. Haunted by small crowd humiliation, he surely will be blaming the rain on his parade for keeping his faithful at home. It would be a smarter recognition for him that on Saturday millions of fellow Americans went into the streets, parks, and plazas all across the country, in all kinds of weather. These protesters were giving their boisterous and collective thumbs down to six disastrous months of Trump’s authoritarian un-American presidency.
Donald Trump has probably never heard of Port Angeles. He likely couldn’t find it on a map. He is surely ignorant and uninterested in its hardscrabble hard-working history and character. He would not grasp that it is a world apart from Los Angeles, to which at first hearing he might conflate it. If someone told him it’s somewhere out there close by crazy-town Seattle, they could not more egregiously mislead him about what he would find if he actually learned about Port Angeles, a former timber town.
His courtiers (Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, JD Vance, Russell Vought, and Kristi Noem) would probably try to assuage his own personal dud of a Saturday by assuring him that the big protest turnout in little far-off Port Angeles only reflected a beautiful sunny day, nothing like his dank and dreary Saturday in Washington, D.C.
He and all the sycophants will miss or deny the most important lesson the entire country learned on Saturday. “No Kings” is a slogan with a resonance across America as deep as the foundation that the War of Independence from the tyranny of King George III permanently molded into American politics across the entire ideological spectrum: No Kings.
It is Trump the Authoritarian Would-Be King who is himself lifting up and uniting the opposition. The power of No Kings was illustrated on Port Angeles sidewalks by the innumerable handmade signs as much as by the joy in the faces of the people who made and held them. Patriotic signs, bitingly satiric plays on Trump slogans. Angry signs at Trump’s actions. Passionate signs for a dozen separate specific causes. Lots of flags fluttering in the breeze. The stance against American Kings brings everything and everyone together.
No-Kings demonstrators entirely occupied both sides of Lincoln Street Saturday in Port Angeles. Car after car driving past on the street was honking and waving, a manifestation equally as important as what was seen on the sidewalks themselves.
No one can be deluded into thinking our country is not caught in very deep and dangerous division. Yet in Port Angeles, of all places, it was very telling on Saturday that sunshine and blue sky and deeply-felt patriotism called forth and warmed what seemed like the anti-authoritarian crowds.
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