No Kings protest

18Oct2025

The No Kings protest, according to the Republican Party, and especially the President, was spectacularly successful! We showed that Trump was nowhere near as popular or as powerful or as successful as he pretends to be!
The editor of TPM thinks the name “No Kings” was a very smart move, harking back to the American Revolution and Civil War and Civil Rights eras. It’s “big tent” without accepting people and movements we can’t work with.

Blogger looks at the “3.5% rule” stating that if 3.5% of the population undertakes nonviolent resistance, that’s usually enough to overthrow the government. The No Kings protest got about 2.0% into the streets and we focused more on drawing a line in the sand than on making specific demands, but we’re definitely on the right track to frustrate Trump’s monarchist ambitions! Set of deep-think pieces on what it all means.
And yes, Speaker Johnson defended the AI video that Trump put out, that depicted him using a fighter jet to drop poop all over the American people. He said the video was “satire,” and that it effectively made Trump’s point, but “the GOP leader never quite got around to explaining what, exactly, that point was.”

And no, I have no idea what “tush push” means but agree with her first point. Update: Buddies have informed me that this is a football thing.


Have to say that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has run what was perhaps the most successful “influence operation” in world history. On the 13th of October, Trump was promising Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine. Would they have made a decisive military difference? Considering the long-range weapons that Ukraine has developed recently, the effect would have been more of a morale-booster than a military game-changer and it of course would have placed the US on the right side of history. But Putin called and right away, Trump changed his mind and started reciting Russian talking points. Russian newspeople/propagandists claim that Trump was merely playing Zelenskyy and Ukraine for suckers to begin with.

How’s the shutdown going? According to Trump’s latest statements, “We will not be extorted,” it doesn’t look like it will end anytime soon. Democrats are a bit ahead in the “blame game,” but Republicans are pressing hard to make it appear that Democrats are to blame. Premiums for the ACA/Obamacare don’t take effect until the year’s end, but health care consumers are being asked to sign up for plans now. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which regularly tracks health care
expenditures, costs have been rising steadily since 1970. When the ACA first took effect, premiums paid for expenditures. Now Democrats are claiming that the government subsidies added during the Covid pandemic are needed permanently to keep health care affordable. Do Republicans have any sort of answer to that? When the ACA was adopted in 2010, Republicans said they’d come up with a better and cheaper plan. There’s no evidence they have the vaguest clue how to do that. 

Video of both Philly and Hatboro.

Trinidad, Tobago and Colombia all claim that their fishermen have been mistaken for drug-running boats from Venezuela. NPR points out that Venezuela is an odd choice of targets as Mexico and Haiti are the countries where most illegal drugs really come from that Americans consume. As Trump is now “considering strikes on land targets in Venezuela,” it seems likely that drugs were always just the excuse for Trump to start a war with Venezuela. It should always be pointed out by the US media, of course, that even if a boat were to be carrying drugs, that firing upon watercraft when the two countries are not at war is a war crime. The US Naval Institute, being subordinate to the Commander in Chief, doesn’t want to come right out and say that Trump’s a criminal who’s blatantly committing war crimes, but the analysis leaves little doubt that that’s exactly what they’re saying. It’s disappointing that NPR and many other media outlets do not place this fact within the very first paragraph of any and all stories about military interdictions in the Caribbean under Trump.

Even though Trump would probably get a declaration of war against Venezuela or any other drug-smuggling country, he apparently considers a declaration to be too much trouble and prefers illegal killing. Again, this is drift towards authoritarianism.

And how much do we really know about what US forces are doing in the Caribbean? After all, the Pentagon just replaced most of its experienced reporters with right-wing influencers and conspiracy theorists.

Sigh! The White House “renovation” that began soon after the No Kings demonstration concluded. In its usual, normal, fashion, Trump tore down the entire East Wing (containing living quarters as opposed to offices) before submitting “construction plans to the National Capital Planning Commission, which oversees planning guidance for Washington, D.C.”

Also of note is that

The White House defended its complete demolition of the East Wing, despite initially telling the public that its structure would not be touched to build President Donald Trump‘s proposed ballroom.

And where’s Melania Trump? The First Lady has been notably quiet and absent.

Hatboro, PA

Just going by my impressions at the time, When VP Al Gore was running to replace President Clinton, I envisioned them as being in high school. Clinton was a hearty partier, Gore was a “square” (in 60s terminology), perfectly happy reading books on physics and economics. Gore’s VP nominee, I later saw as a “narc,” someone who would rat out other kids to the grown-ups in a heartbeat. Did Gore really need to have Joe Liebrman on his team to convince people that he wasn’t a partying kind of guy like Clinton was? I didn’t think that was at all necessary.
The point is that right-wingers used Lieberman’s anti-Democratic commentary to say “But even Joe Lieberman agrees…” so it was a lot more annoying to have Lieberman on our side than someone like Joe Manchin, who simply voted against Democratic priorities. Pennsylvania’s Senator Fetterman serves the same purpose for Republicans today that Lieberman did back then.

I have “buyers’ remorse” over Fetterman as I cheerfully voted for him when he ran for Senator in 2020. Is he still better than his Republican opponent at the time? Yeah, no question on that. But he’s moved much too far to the right wing to remain a Democrat in good standing. He’s adopted all the talking points of Republicans on the shutdown, not even acknowledging what Democrats are trying to do. He should look at what happened to Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two Democratic senators who also moved too far towards the right wing. Neither one could continue their career as they had burned their bridges with the Democratic Party.

Whaah?!?! “Department of Justice announced plans on Friday to send federal election monitors to California and New Jersey ahead of November’s election.” Of course, this is in response to Republican parties requesting such monitoring.

This is all about voter intimidation.

RLGardner.net