Trump is easy to dislike. He has a boorish style, an attitude toward the world that in a sweep tosses out the niceties of diplomacy and international law. “One way or the other, we are going to have Greenland”, he said in mid-January 2026; “I do believe I will have the honor of taking Cuba”, he said in March. Vulgarities like these have not been seen in public for a very long time, perhaps since before 1945, for in the period since then such imperial longings have been masked behind words such as ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’. Simply wanting territory for the sake of its resources is not done, far too much a throwback to the era of colonial rule – a return to the language of Belgium’s Leopold II (who said the Congo was a “magnificent African cake”) and of Britain’s Cecil Rhodes (who said, “I contend that we are the finest race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race”). Trump is a less graceful version of Leopold and Rhodes, certainly with less command over language and terms of reference. How easy it is to mock Trump!
In the United States, dislike of Trump is on the rise (with only a third of the population approving of his second term, down by 11 points since last April). The poll, conducted by the University of Massachusetts, found that the reasons for the dislike are several: inflation, stock market declines, government shutdowns, and of course, the war against Iran. But you do not need to just look at polls to grasp the reality of the dislike of Trump. It is there on the streets. On March 29, nine million people joined over three thousand five hundred discrete protests in every state of the United States as part of the No Kings rally. This is the third such rally, the first on June 14, 2025, which drew five million people, and the second on October 18, 2025, which drew between six and seven million people. The numbers at these regular protests are growing, and the demographics drawn to them are also expanding to include former Trump supporters.
Read more: The war on Iran is Washington’s most unpopular war in history among the US public
These protests, colorful and lively, were not isolated eruptions of outrage, but are the visible crest of a deeper current of dissent against a long trajectory of US militarism, now sharpened by Trump’s rhetoric and actions. Trump promised no more foreign wars and said that the money wasted on them would be put aside to assist the tangible problems faced by the working people of the United States. As with every other US president, Trump betrayed that promise and entangled the US in different forms of war on every continent. Inflation, a natural consequence of war, particularly a war that predictably resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, grips the United States perhaps not as much as other countries, but the grip tightens, nonetheless. A population that sees prices rise and the danger that US troops will be needed for a grinding war on Iranian soil is a people who lose interest in the bluster of their leaders. Accuracy becomes more important than braggadocio.
Give me liberty
The idea of No Kings reflects the rejection of monarchy that provided the vocabulary for the American Revolution of 1776. It is to this that these protests turn, seeking inspiration from the revolutionaries against King George III for their own cycle of protests. There are no muskets in the crowd, only signs that reflect the diversity of opinion. Some of the posters hearken back to the lost possibility of a President Kamala Harris (if she were president, they say, we would not have to protest but would be at brunch – an indicator of the bourgeois character of some of the disdain for Trump). Others are harder, more anti-war if not anti-imperialist. Between those who want to go to brunch and those who want to condemn US illegal wars lie a range of positions that are united by the exasperation at the ICE raids that resemble a domestic invasion and at the war on Iran that was an epic miscalculation on the part of Trump and his associates. When the crowd says No Kings, what they mean is no Trump, certainly, but also perhaps no imperial presidency and more democratic control: this could mean more Congressional authority over immigration policy and war-making or it could also mean that the people of the United States want a greater sense of democratic community and not the demoralizing powerlessness of imperialism.
The Palestinian flags and the signs against the ICE raids reflected the oscillation between the international and the national, but even here that difference is not so easy to sustain: the ICE raids came against those who looked like migrants, brown-skinned people who faced the wrath of Trump’s vigilante policy, while the genocide of the Palestinians was funded by the tax money of everyone in the crowd, a complicity that is hard to ignore. Not in my name was the cry a generation ago, but now that is too simplistic a slogan: for the absolute responsibility of all US taxpayers for the genocide and for the wars without end makes a verbal disavowal insufficient. More is necessary, such as these protests and the desire to build a new power base to uproot Trump to begin with, and perhaps the system, if that appears to be possible. Even a decade ago, these protests would have been insufficiently covered by the media, and images of them would not appear before the public. But the media landscape is now so fragmented and accelerated that information was disseminated rapidly through social media platforms, with photographs (including awe-inspiring drone photography) showing what had just happened. These platforms amplified the protests, allowing the images themselves to become part of the protest and the hashtags to generate and organize new forms of dissent.
The ICE raids, the genocide of the Palestinians, the war in Iran: all of these formed the reasons for dissent. But the speakers at the protests did not fixate on the present alone but drew a line from the immediacy of Trump to his forebears, to the illegal US wars in Iraq and Syria and to the horrendous destruction meted out to the people of Afghanistan and Libya. Trump’s wars cannot be understood in isolation because they are rooted in structures and ideologies that predate him by decades. Trump is a paradox: on the one hand, his bluntness and unpredictability have heightened fears and, in some cases, accelerated dangerous policies, but on the other hand, his style has also stripped away certain layers of rhetorical justification, making the exercise of power more visible and cruder. Where previous US administrations often cloaked interventions in the language of humanitarianism or democracy promotion, Trump has been more inclined to speak in terms of strength, dominance, and resource grabs. This shift, while alarming, contributes to a clearer understanding of what has always been at stake: a US hyper-imperialist attempt to dominate the world at all costs.
Welcome to the Party
A few hours after the protests, the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf tweeted, “Welcome to the party we started 47 years ago, No kings. This is the people of Iran, and we approve this message. #NoKings.” With the tweet, Ghalibaf had four pictures, two from the protests of that day in different US cities, and two from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The tweet, with a mixture of irony and invitation, carried a sharp historical charge. It reminded the people of the United States that Iran’s 1979 revolution was indeed against a king, the Shah of Iran, who had been placed on the Peacock Throne by Western imperialism in 1953 after a coup against the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. For twenty-six years, the Iranian people lived under the yoke of a brutal monarch, whose rule shaped the resistance against him. Iranians overthrew him, and then in the class struggle that followed, the Islamic Republic was born.
Ghalibaf is welcoming the US protesters to a new kind of republican revolt, to overthrow the despotism of elections that are bought and paid for by billionaires (the Epstein Class, as they are now called) and to found a proper democracy that eschews violence outside its borders and that builds the capacity of the people at home. The US war on Iran costs at minimum USD 12 billion a day, which is exactly the cost of funding the Child Tax Credit, a major tool to end child poverty: one day of this war would substantially end child poverty in the United States. Welcome to the party.
The party is not an event but a condition, a framework for spending a country’s resources on life and not on death. Militarism is a systematic choice that squashes domestic priorities and shapes what resources are available for domestic social programs. In this light, the No Kings protests (and Ghalibaf’s tweet) can be seen as part of a larger rethinking of political priorities. The demand is not only to end specific wars but to question the logic that makes war appear inevitable or necessary. This involves confronting deeply embedded assumptions about security, threat, and national interest –assumptions that have been cultivated over decades and reinforced through political discourse, media narratives, and institutional practices.
The epicentre of these protests is the United States, even as there were smaller demonstrations in other cities (a large one in the United Kingdom around the far right and the war). But the protests in the US are the main show, since Trump is the conductor of the Global North’s orchestra of terror. The No Kings protest was not just about a single figure but an expression of deeper unease with the trajectory of US power. Whether these protests will mark a turning point is uncertain. History offers examples of both transformative movements and moments of missed opportunity. What is clear is that the voices raised on March 29 are part of an ongoing conversation about power, responsibility, and the possibilities of collective action. In asserting No Kings, protesters are not only rejecting a particular style of leadership; they are affirming a vision of politics that is not reliant upon the naked violence of imperialism.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
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