On the streets, Americans gave Trump the biggest public rebuke of his second term
President Donald Trump's second term in the White House has been different from his first one — he's emboldened and has moved quicker and more aggressively on his agenda.
He's governing like he has a mandate after the 2024 election — and in some ways, that's true. Unlike in his 2016 victory, he won not only the Electoral College but the popular vote — becoming only the second Republican to do so since 1988 — and carried all seven battleground states by comfortable margins.
'The American people have given us a mandate, a mandate like few people thought possible,' Trump said after the election. Since then, there's been a sense of 'This is what America wanted' as Trump moved to strip legal protection from certain migrants, ignored due process and concentrated more power in his own hands.
But is this truly what America wants?
The 'No Kings' protests that happened in Florida and across the nation suggest that Trump's mandate only goes so far. Indeed, his popular-vote winning margin of 1.5% was the smallest by an elected president since Richard Nixon's in 1968, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California Santa Barbara.
According to protest organizers, an estimated 5 million people attended more than 2,000 demonstrations planned nationwide on Saturday, NPR reported. Thousands attended protests in Miami, Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale combined. Some might have expected larger crowds in Miami, given the large number of people affected by Trump's revocation of deportation protections for Venezuelans, Cubans and others. But Miami-Dade County also flipped from blue to red during last year's presidential election.
Regardless, this was so far the largest public display of discontent with the second Trump presidency — and it was a loud one, taking at least some attention away from the military parade he wanted for so long, which also took place on Saturday in Washington, D.C.
For a president who's obsessed with image and TV coverage, the footage and photos of people rebuking him as they flew American flags must not have sat well. The fact that the protests were largely peaceful also robbed him of an opportunity to instill fear and threaten to send Marines to Democratically-run cities to boost his 'law and order' credentials.
The protesters were not 'foreign invaders,' Antifa or extremists, as Trump and his allies would like the American people to believe. The demonstrators who spoke to the Herald Editorial Board in Fort Lauderdale were everyday people, some of whom said they felt they had no option but to take to the streets to protect democracy.
Some of them told the Editorial Board they believe the U.S. is already a dictatorship. It isn't, but Trump's undemocratic tendencies are undeniable. He's attacked judges who ruled against his administration, used his power to penalize law firms that did legal work he doesn't like and deported people without giving them due process. Meanwhile, he's trying to turn nonpartisan federal service into a politicized system where loyalty to him by federal workers would be rewarded over merit, the Washington Post reported Monday.
Protests certainly won't be enough to force Trump to change course, and it's still early to say whether they mean the Republican Party will underperform in next year's midterms.
But the millions of Americans wondering whether they are alone in their concern about America's undemocratic turn or Trump's cruelty toward migrants here, legally and illegally, don't need to wonder anymore. On Saturday, it was clear that there are many people who know this is not what America is about.
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