No Kings and the dilemma of protesting Trump | Will Bunch Newsletter

Plus, the lie that Trump’s deportation is about ‘criminals’ implodes

by Will Bunch | Columnist

Published June 3, 2025, 1:32 p.m. ET

There was a horrific and deplorable act of antisemitic violence in America on Sunday when a man — apparently unable to purchase a gun because his status as an unauthorized immigrant — used Molotov cocktails to seriously injure a dozen people at a weekly vigil in Boulder, Colo. for Israel’s remaining hostages. Halfway around the world, there was a horrific and deplorable act of state-sponsored violence when, according to NBC News, Israeli forces opened fire on famine-ravaged Gazans at a food distribution site, killing as many as 31 people, Violence is immoral and accomplishes nothing, whether it comes from a lone terrorist or an authoritarian government. It’s imperative that world leaders — whoever the heck they are right now — don’t look away, and work tirelessly to end this mindless cycle of violence.

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Can mass protests stop U.S. autocracy without confrontation?

It might have been the largest one-day protest in American history when at least a million citizens and probably several million took to the streets on April 5 for a “Hands Off!” event that drew tens of thousands in cities like D.C. or Philadelphia and surprisingly robust gatherings in places you’ve probably never heard of, like Pittsboro, N.C., or Geneva, Ill.

Contrast those millions, singing songs and a-carrying signs, marching against the autocratic presidency of Donald Trump, with the most famous U.S. demonstrator of all-time: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King’s 1950s and ‘60s campaigns of nonviolent civil disobedience — boycotts, sit-ins, and unauthorized protest marches — played a critical role in taking down Jim Crow segregation in the American South.

Over the course of his epic yet all-too-short career, King was arrested or detained by cops some 29 times, sometimes spending fraught nights behind bars. That is also about 29 times more — except perhaps for incidents so unremarkable they didn’t make the news — than the number of arrests among the millions who’ve protested Trump at the mass rallies this year.

In about 11 days, organizers are expecting even larger crowds at a Saturday, June 14 event called No Kings — a protest meant to coincide with the abomination of Trump’s street-wrecking $45 million military parade that supposedly honors the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army but (surely a coincidence) falls on the president’s 79th birthday.

This week also marks the 36th anniversary of arguably the most iconic image in humankind’s struggle for freedom against tyranny: the moment a still-unknown protester called Tank Man stood his ground against a line of Chinese tanks after they’d crushed the protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. If you’ve been fantasizing that moment could be recreated at Trump’s June 14 extravaganza, you don’t know the state of U.S. protests in the mid-2020s.

In fact, the No Kings organizers say more than 1,000 rallies and events are teed up for June 14 — but none whatsoever in Washington, In fact, if you live in D.C., the strategists, including the leading Trump resistance group Indivisible, want you to come to a flagship protest here in Philadelphia, the city where renegades threw off the shackles of British monarchy in 1776.

The idea is to show off the great mass of Americans who oppose Trump and his policies, but not to give him a confrontation that the White House might use to its advantage, and also not to appear that demonstrators have any quarrel with the rank-and-file soldiers who’ll be marching that day.

“We want to create contrast, not conflict,” Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, told me in an email interview. “The story we want to tell is one of a corrupt con man throwing himself a party with our money, while Americans everywhere reject his theatrics and lean into our own communities and power.”

I posted my concerns about the strategy on Bluesky a couple of weeks ago, and the reaction was mixed. There’s certainly a legitimate concern that if tens of thousands showed up in Washington to protest Trump’s parade, that would make the president’s birthday look like the big deal he wants it to be.

Greenberg stressed to me that events like No Kings are important but also not the end game. “A mass march is a tactic within a strategy,” she explained. “It serves important purposes — it offers a clear on-ramp for action, creates a sense of shared community and identity, and shows the breadth and depth of the opposition, and creates a platform for our message. But it has to be paired with ongoing, local organizing everywhere to create pressure on the Trump regime and its enablers.”

Still, it’s a strategy that gets mixed results in today’s rugged media landscape. On the positive side, rallies and marches in more than 1,000 cities and towns will get local media coverage from downsized smaller news outlets that can’t send a journalist to D.C. On the other hand, the reality of many news people is that they crave conflict, which might explain why a large day of peaceful protests on April 19 didn’t get as much hoopla as the one two weeks earlier.

I’ve written many times that it was an epic conflict between antiwar protesters and the cops — at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when I was 9 — that propelled me on a life path into journalism. It was the ultimate example of a popular notion then, that clashes which drew a brutal police response would “heighten the contradictions” of an unjust society. There’s something to this. America only passed a Voting Rights Act in 1965 after the clubbings of Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” were televised to a shocked nation.

The protests of 2025 have not been like this. A Business Insider journalist who attended some rallies in Michigan said “they were primarily people over the age of 65, white, and retired from jobs that depended on public funding as teachers, professors at local universities, and social workers.” I’ve had the same experience attending Philly-area protests. The positive energy at these events is real, but can a vibe truly halt the march of authoritarianism?

Younger people who bring a more confrontational approach have protested injustice in recent years, including 2020’s George Floyd marches and 2024’s campus unrest over Gaza. But they mostly haven’t taken to the streets against Trump or authoritarianism, certainly not to the extent of boomers. The world that 66-year-olds like me see disappearing — the civil rights or environmental gains of the 1960s and ‘70s — isn’t the same world of student debt and astronomical rents that Gen Z is living in.

I reached out to longtime newsletter friend Dana R. Fisher, the American University sociologist who studies contemporary protest. She noted that getting permits to protest in D.C. under Trump have become a hassle, adding that the No Kings organizers are “highly committed to nonviolence and there is concern that there would be likely repression and potential escalation if they organized in D.C.”

There’s no doubt that Washington’s loss is Philadelphia’s gain as the centerpiece for No Kings, with a to-be-announced lineup of what Greenberg promised would include “faith leaders, veterans, civil rights leaders, regular people who’ve been directly impacted by the Trump administration, and a few surprise guests.” She has great expectations for the contrast-and-not-confront approach, saying: “The visuals of large, vibrant and joyful crowds are designed to be a direct contrast to the staid, dated, and repressive images that will come out of the Trump military parade and birthday party.”

I hope she’s right. There’s zero doubt that Greenberg, her husband and Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin, the members of Indivisible, and the other groups who’ve thrown themselves into Hands Off!, No Kings and other coast-to-coast protests have done a invaluable public service. They’ve shown the world that millions of Americans oppose Trump and will stand up for democracy.

But I can’t help thinking about what Frederick Douglass told an audience in upstate New York in 1857, when things still looked bleak for the anti-slavery movement in America.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” the formerly enslaved Douglass said. “It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Yo, do this!

In 1968, an anxious America embraced the cry, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” (even though he was right there, hawking Mr. Coffee). In 2025, the same might be asked of Edward R. Murrow, the erudite and hard-charging CBS newsman who epitomized what was good about American journalism during World War II and the decades immediately after. In an era of declining media trust, actor George Clooney has worked to keep his story alive by turning the tale of Murrow’s 1954 takedown of red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy into a movie he directed, 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck, which is now a Broadway play that Clooney stars in. CNN is broadcasting it on Saturday night at 7 p.m., hoping to create the kind of national living-room event that also harkens back to the glory days of television.
America might need a hero, but it’s a lot easier these days to find a villain — the kind epitomized by Silicon Valley blogger and guru Curtis Yarvin and his dark vision of a dictatorial America ruled by tech autocrats. Yarvin’s dark world view has heavily influenced the likes of billionaire Peter Thiel and Thiel’s acolyte JD Vance, who’s a cheeseburger-saturated heartbeat away from the U.S. presidency. Now comes an in-depth New Yorker profile of Yarvin, and it’s a must read for anyone who wants to understand what has gone horribly wrong in America.

Ask me anything

Question: Thoughts on the NJ governor’s race? — Synonymous Bosch (@synonymousbosch.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer:I do have thoughts! The good news for New Jersey Democrats is that the race to replace term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy offers a remarkably diverse array of candidates from the good (Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, worthy heir to a civil-rights legacy who challenged the Trump administration over ICE detentions, and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, with a record of progressive policy wins and taking on party bosses), the bad (stay tuned), and the ugly (Wall Street tool and free-speech enemy Josh Gottheimer, and tired machine lackey Steve Sweeney). Unfortunately, polls are showing a big lead for a thoroughly uninspiring choice, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, yet another “national security Democrat” in the mode of her identical cousin, Michigan centrist Sen. Elissa Slotkin. Sherrill is an ex-fighter pilot who won’t rein in the military-industrial complex, is also bad on free speech after sponsoring the effort to ban TikTok, and looks aggressively anti-Trump now but was lackadaisical about the threat during his first term. But in the Year of the Low Information Voter (check out Andrew Cuomo in the NYC mayor’s race), Sherrill may be unstoppable.

What you’re saying about...

It turns out that avid readers of this newsletter are folks who a) care a lot about the media’s coverage of Joe Biden (record high response) but b) don’t have deep thoughts yet about AI in schools (record low response). “One way to handle AI might be to allow (or even require!) the students to use AI, but require them to document how they fact-checked the output,” David Director wrote. " Factual mistakes would cost heavily in grading, providing incentive to actually do the checking." Meanwhile, Armen Pandola said banning AI will never work. “Like any tool, AI can be useful or destructive,“ he wrote. ”Making it useful is up to us.”

📮 This week’s question: An essay in The Guardian this week — headlined “Have we passed peak Trump?” — argues that the courts and other checks and balances are restraining Trump’s dictatorial instincts. Really? Do you think America’s institutions are defeating dictatorship, or that the worst is yet to come? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Has Trump peaked?” in the subject line.

Backstory on Home Depot, 7-Eleven, and the truth of deportation

I’ve been pretty hard in this space on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, as well as the Department of Homeland Security and the masked goons who work for them. But I’m starting to realize that the bosses of these roving secret police are actually pretty naive. They really believed that the Trump regime wanted the DHS agents to focus intensely on deporting violent criminals — needles in the vast haystack of 11 million mostly hard-working, taxpaying immigrants in America. But we now know, thanks to a report in the conservative Washington Examiner, that Donald Trump’s comic-book villain point man on deportation, Stephen Miller, exploded when their lies were actually regurgitated back at them.

‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’ Trump’s deputy chief of staff erupted at about 50 higher-ups from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) at a D.C. get-together last week. The immigrants who congregate at places like a local Home Depot aren’t there to commit crimes, but to look for work — the backbreaking jobs that many native-born Americans won’t do. In fact, Miller — according to the report — seemed surprised that his audience believed Trump’s immigration czar Tom Homan when he insisted felons are the regime’s main target. “What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” Miller is said to have asked.

Sure, Trump told voters in his 2024 campaign that he wanted to get rid of murderers and rapists, yet he also promised — unrealistically, but still — to deport all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil, the vast majority who’ve followed the law or only committed traffic offenses since coming to America. You’ve already seen a lot of immigration horror stories since January, but now Trump, Miller and Homan want to nearly triple the number of migrants arrested to 3,000 a day, which would meet the president’s goal of deporting 1 million people this year. That means ICE agents at the Home Depot, the 7-Eleven, and other mundane locations. Thus, the arrival of masked marauders at immigrant courts across America, to arrest refugees who showed up as they were told. ICE raids like ones recently in Greater Boston aren’t finding many crooks but tons of “collaterals” — law-abiding immigrants who lack documentation.

An unfortunate Trump-voting rural Missouri woman named Vanessa Cowart went viral on social media over the weekend after expressing her dismay to the New York Times that her good friend from her church, a Hong Kong native named Carol Hui, is facing deportation after planting roots in the American heartland for 20 years. She said “no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves...This is Carol.” But Cowart and her neighbors did vote to deport moms, if they’d listened to what Trump was actually saying. That’s the dirty little secret of mass deportation: that for every rapist, there’s at least 100 Carols — and now the problem is going to get much, much worse.

What I wrote on this date in 2008

Two things of note have happened on the 3rd of June: Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and Barack Obama became the first African American to clinch a major-party presidential nomination. On June 3, 2008 (at 11:59 p.m.!), I marveled at the fact that Black people in the American South were still restricted from voting when Obama was born in 1961, and also highlighted the heroes who gave their lives to make Obama’s dream possible. Remember what that felt like when you read: “People died so tonight could happen.”