Welcome, Antifascists!
by Osita Nwanevu
The president’s combination birthday celebration, army anniversary, and Flag Day parade on Saturday was, perhaps predictably, a total bust. Forty-five million dollars might buy you time and tanks from the US Army, but it cannot, it turns out, buy you grandeur. And as bemusing as it was to see old troop carriers inch slowly past as an Army karaoke band dutifully churned through covers of “Jump” and “Barracuda”—a fittingly geriatric display for an old man who wants the country to join him in his senescence—the whole debacle was far less interesting and significant than the protests that preceded it: Saturday also marked “No Kings Day,” with 2,000 anti-Trump demonstrations organized by the group Indivisible and other partners in towns large and small across the country—including in Los Angeles, where mayor Karen Bass estimated that 30,000 protesters joined in on the week of civil disobedience against Trump’s deportation regime.
But No Kings skipped Washington itself. “Real power isn’t staged in Washington,” organizers explained on their website. “It rises up everywhere else. Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity, we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: people coming together in communities across the country to reject strongman politics and corruption.” They certainly managed that—even though, inevitably, people turned out to protest in D.C. anyway.
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