You might well think, based only on the news coverage of Tuesday’s elections, that opposition to Donald Trump and his agenda is a relatively recent thing, mostly a function of his decision to attack Iran eight months ago, which then led to increased fuel prices.
But no, it’s been around a bit longer than that.
Ever since the moment Trump won a second term in November 2024, very close to half of American voters have been angry and horrified.
Trump was a known quantity this time around. He had tried to steal an election! He was a pathological liar. He won on a campaign full of racism and lunacy – “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”
And then, once he was in office, it got worse than anyone could possibly have imagined.
He pardoned the insurrectionists. He surrounded himself with fawning courtiers. He started ransacking the government and destroying things that make this country great, like lifesaving foreign aid and science. The protests began.
Trump began to rule like a dictator, bullying his Congress into submission and ignoring the budget and laws they had passed. He unilaterally imposed crazy tariffs on foreign goods. He sent troops to LA. ICE occupied Chicago. The protests grew.
That spring, more than 200 progressive groups agreed on a name for a new anti-fascist grassroots movement. They called it No Kings. And on June 14, 2025, organizers estimated that more than five million people in over 2,000 cities and towns gathered under that banner, chanting “No Kings” and “This is what democracy looks like.” For the people who went, it was proof that they were not alone. There were many of them. A huge number, in fact.
Trump’s police-state tactics ramped up. ICE agents masked up. They brutalized protesters. There were marches against ICE in every major city.
On October 18, 2025, an estimated seven million people raised their voices in protest, in 2,700 cities and towns, for No Kings 2.
Trump razed the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom. Then ICE came to Minneapolis. Minnesotans resisted. Two of them – Renee Good and Alex Pretti – were shot dead by immigration agents. The whole community rose up. More and more Americans realized that it was now Trump against the people. There were even more protests.
On March 28, more than an estimated eight million people gathered in over 3,000 towns and cities for No Kings 3 to express their love of their country and their horror over what Trump was doing to it.
There were also “No Kings: Vote Early” events on October 17 in thousands of cities and towns, which organizers said made up the largest early vote activation in U.S. history,
You might think all this activity would be too much for the mainstream media to forget about. But you would be wrong.
What It’s All About
This is a story about elites, compared to ordinary citizens. When Trump took power, the elites bent the knee. The mega-billionaires and the leaders of major corporations, law firms, and universities schmoozed with him, gave him money, did what he told them to do.
The media elites became complicit in a more subtle way: They normalized him.
Trump is in no way a normal president. He is cruel and unhinged. He wantonly violates the Constitution, makes a mockery of the rule of law, speaks almost entirely in lies or nonsense.
But the news media treated him like a normal president, inasmuch as they treated what he said as simply “partisan”. They also treated people opposed to him as “partisan.” And they stayed out of it.
They used the same he said/she said story structure that worked OK when both sets of partisans operated on a shared set of facts – a shared reality.
They ran countless “Trump says…” headlines even when they knew that he lied all the time and changed his mind a lot. They refused to reach the most obvious conclusions – like that he was acting as an authoritarian, doing illegal things, treating immigrants inhumanely, being violently racist, and committing war crimes. They attributed these conclusions to “critics” and “Democrats” and said that Trump was “pushing the boundaries,” when he had obliterated the boundaries a long time ago. They used weasel words instead of the right ones.
Yes, I know I’m naïve, but until Trump I felt like the news media could largely be counted on to reflect and defend core American values like civil liberty and civil rights, free speech, a free press, truth in government, economic fairness, environmental protection, pluralism, inclusiveness, equal justice, a humane society.
But when Trump came to office, they gave all that up in order to avoid “the appearance of partisanship.” To maintain their “independence”.
They decided it was not their job to be alarmist, or to point out too energetically that the country was turning into a cruel police state.
They so normalized fascism for themselves that they decided it’s not an issue at all for anyone. (h/t @annecw.bsky.social)
Meanwhile, many if not most normal Americans were having a normal reaction to Trump’s behavior and actions: They were revolted, and angry, and scared.
Journalists covered their protests, minimally, when they had to. But did you ever see diner interviews with people who opposed Trump, or feature stories on them? Did you hear their voices regularly reflected in the coverage?
No, you didn’t. The media pretty much ignored their presence in the polity.
Instead, they interviewed Trump fans who were still Trump fans.
These journalists considered it a badge of honor that they covered Trump with deference and great calm – as opposed to acting like those crazy hippies who were always yelling about a police state and begging journalists to convey more of a sense of alarm, use stronger words, and, yes, “take sides” when one side was telling the truth and the other side was lying.
Many members of the media I’m sure had what I think of as the normal reaction to Trump –revulsion – but they stifled it. They dumbed themselves down, acting like they didn’t understand simple things.
So now consider the psychological effects of this. I believe that reality-based, reasonably intelligent journalists know, on some level, that those crazy hippies are right.
As a result, No Kings rallies feel like a reproach – a reminder of what they know they should be doing. So they cannot stand to think about them. They can’t keep the image of No Kings in their minds because passionate protesters are an indictment of their failure.
It wasn’t until Trump started a war with Iran for no reason and with no plan – and gas prices went up, adding to the inflationary pressure he had already created with his wacky tariffs – that the media started to pay attention to the discontent.
I think it’s because anger about gas prices didn’t feel partisan. And even some Trump voters were wavering.
Yes, more people are angry now – and some of them had been Trump fans. But there were already plenty.
Nothing Else Explains the Absence
I’m writing about this today, because it is the only explanation I can come up with for the nearly universal absence of any mention whatsoever of No Kings – or the resistance, or the mass movement against Trump, or pro-democracy protests, or whatever you want to call it – in any of the major news-media coverage of the rout of Trump’s party on Tuesday.
I couldn’t find a single one. Not in print or on TV. Neither could Claude. Not even in an opinion piece.
How could this possibly be? It is, literally, crazy.
The news articles all acknowledge it was an anti-Trump vote. But they don’t acknowledge most of the anti-Trump voters – and what they’ve been saying for the last two years.
There was scant little mention even of ICE, whose brutality and cruelty has turned neighbors all over the country into ferocious defenders of their fellow neighbors.
It’s telling that the exit polls for the news media were so focused on voters’ economic motives that they didn’t include any questions about authoritarianism or democracy, beyond one multiple-choice question where “the state of democracy” was offered as a possible answer.
“Which ONE of these six issues is the most important facing the country?” the exit poll asked. And 32% of voters said the state of democracy was their top concern – more than any other issue except the economy. If a third of voters considered democracy the most important issue facing America, a lot of others cared about it, too.
And in response to a somewhat relevant question – “Would you say Donald Trump has the mental capability to serve effectively as president?” – 56% said he did not.
That tells me that for a lot of people, Tuesday was about voting against a mad king.
So I’m calling bullshit.
It is past time that the news media acknowledge the protest movement – acknowledge that Trump’s ruthless and insane dictatorship has alienated a massive portion of the population. And they’re not newly mad because of Iran or gas prices (although the war was a classic mad-king decision.)
They’ve been mad for a long time because they care about each other and about democracy and truth and fair play and want a president who is not a pathological lying psychopath who seems increasingly not to grasp reality, is incompetent, and surrounds himself with cultish devotees in a tacky White House that is effectively a big gilded playroom for a very entitled and emotionally unbalance toddler.
No acknowledgement of “No Kings” after the country erupts in opposition to a mad king? Really?
And they – I’ll say it: we – were fucking right, too.
Maybe you should pay attention to us going forward.
Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, a major force within No Kings, anticipated the media response Tuesday night, when the first returns were still coming in.
“This was the No Kings election,” he wrote on Bluesky. “Do not let comfortable elites rewrite history. As elites collapsed, millions of Americans organized to stop a would-be king and his corrupt coterie of crooks, collaborators, and cowards. Together we made history. And we’re not done.”
Brian Stelter (ex-cnn) gave the game away a few years back when he basically said on Bluesky “‘Democrats angry with Trump’ isn’t news. If the GOP gets upset with him, then the press will cover it.”…Admitting it’s the GOP that sets the agenda for our press (this was his way of trying to defend CNN)
Exactly. The part of the story I’ve been waiting to see is all the organizing that went on during and between all those No Kings protests, where we recruited both supporters and candidates, raised funds for candidates, and generally tried to keep building the necessary infrastructure to create these results. These results didn’t “just happen.”