The "No Kings" crowd might be helping Donald Trump.
“Everything Is Television,” lamented prominent progressive news media editor Derek Thompson on October 10, 2025.
“It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming,” Thompson pointed out.
He’s right. But who could have predicted that the modern obsession with fame, influence, and social media popularity would have such an outsize impact on political life in the U.S.?
Protestors can’t just demonstrate anymore; they need handmaiden costumes, silly matching pink hats, and plenty of pop culture references.
Of course, all this can wind up, in retrospect, being a bit, well…cringe.
Progressives don’t like recalling the bad old pink hatted days of 2017. Handmaidens have been begged — begged — by more serious Democrats to skip the costumes. They are right, in a way. Absurd costumes, nudity, edge-lord rhetoric — it all gives the GOP and conservative media outlets endless fodder in the meme war.
It’s endlessly effective fodder for the meme war, too — which Republicans happen to be winning.
“No Kings: The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum,” former-progressive Sasha Stone posted to her popular Substack this week. “Do you have any idea how crazy you are?”
“Protests are meant to be the voices of the unheard. Yet these protests are the voices of those who never shut up,” quipped Stone. “Not for one minute, not for ten years, and all of us have had to endure them like being trapped inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory with hundreds of thousands of Veruca Salts.”
“Whose fault was it that Joe Biden, behaving like a king, elbowed out any challengers even though he was in serious decline?” she asked. “Whose fault was it that the Democrats and the media said nothing?”
“Protests signal to the public that the Democrats are helpless, that they have no ability to win elections or to compromise or have any kind of rational conversations about anything, much less any plan to lead America anywhere,” voiced Stone. “Their messaging for ten years now is all or nothing. Give us what we want or we’ll throw a fit.”
And while progressive media outlets and the likes of Rachel Maddow celebrated the protests as the Greatest of All Time and (naturally) the Beginning of the End For Donald Trump, not everyone is holding their breath.
After all, MSNBC has been predicting Trump’s political demise for well-nigh on a decade now. Like the doomsday prophets of yesterday, when their predictions fail they simply make up new ones.
Meanwhile, more honest mainstream media outlets are forced to admit, even while hyping the protests, that they did little good.
If any.
“It was the largest protest in US history,” declared Paul du Quenoy for The Telegraph on October 21, 2025. “It was also embarrassingly irrelevant.”
“For all the participants’ bile and determination, the event unfolded as a vulgar, cranky carnival of disgruntled old people holding signs with saucy slogans, dressing up in bizarre costumes, and carrying the occasional American flag upside down, a traditional indication of distress,” he pointed out miserably.
The Democratic Party is under enormous pressure to do something, anything, about Donald Trump. And yet, there is little elected Democrats can do at the moment to thwart Trump’s agenda.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)