Third No Kings Protest in Washington DC, March 28 2026

 

Some media commentators state that Trump will not pay any attention to these protests because as a sitting duck president he has nothing to lose. This line of thinking is misleading. And we’ve seen this before. I remember the 1969 anti-Vietnam War March on Washington past the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue when President Nixon told the press that he wasn’t aware of it because he was watching a football game, which after all, was more important. Watergate demonstrated just how obsessed he was with the protests (the obsession is also depicted in Oliver Stone’s movie “Nixon”). The main danger now is that the protest movement gets absorbed into the campaigning for Democratic Party candidates in the midterms. Something similar happened with the Black Lives Matter protests leading into the Biden presidential campaign in 2020. The protest movement needs to be independent of, and on occasions critical of, the Democratic Party, if for no other reason because the Democratic Party establishment approximates the pro-war positions of the Republicans.