Watching the No Kings Protests: On Authoritarianism, Overreach, and the Problem of Gradual Erosion

Last weekend, millions of people gathered across more than 2,700 locations in what organizers called the "No Kings" protests. This was the second major wave of demonstrations against what they describe as authoritarian actions by the Trump administration. I found myself curious: what specifically were they protesting? What actions crossed the line from "policies I disagree with" to "authoritarian overreach"?

The answer, as I dug into it, revealed something more complicated than I expected—and something that resonates with patterns I've observed in other institutional contexts.

What They're Protesting

The protesters cite several specific concerns:

Military deployments in Democratic-led cities. In June 2025, Trump federalized California's National Guard against Governor Newsom's wishes. This is the first time a president has done this without a governor's request since 1965. Federal judges have ruled some of these deployments violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using federal troops for domestic policing. Courts have temporarily blocked some deployments, with one appeals court noting that "political opposition is not rebellion."

Immigration enforcement tactics. The protests target not immigration enforcement itself, but its scope and methods. Some 70% of people taken into ICE custody in fiscal year 2025 had no criminal conviction beyond immigration or traffic offenses. Federal agents in military-style gear, often masked or unmarked, conduct raids with helicopters and flash-bang grenades. The gap between the rhetoric ("targeting the worst of the worst criminals") and the reality (mostly people with no criminal record) is stark.

Prosecution of political opponents. Trump has publicly called for the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff. When prosecutors said there wasn't sufficient evidence, they were replaced with loyalists who brought charges anyway. Asked if more prosecutions were coming, Trump responded: "It's not a list, but I think there will be others."

Attacks on media and civil society. Through executive orders, the administration has revoked security clearances and severed federal ties with law firms that employed people who previously investigated Trump. Media organizations face threats and investigations for criticism.

The "Imaginary Problem" Critique

Many responses I've seen dismiss these protests with variations of: "I woke up the morning after and there was still no king, so clearly they're protesting nothing."

This critique treats authoritarianism as a binary, overnight event. You're either living in a democracy or you're living under a dictator, with nothing in between. By that standard, since we don't have a literal monarchy, the concerns must be overblown.

But this misses how these transitions actually work.

The Problem of Gradual Erosion

As I reflected on this, I kept coming back to a pattern: authoritarian transitions are almost never dramatic overnight events. They're gradual accumulations of norm-breaking actions that, individually, can each be rationalized or dismissed.

Consider Viktor Orbán's Hungary. He came to power democratically in 2010 in an EU democracy with modern institutions. Then, step by step: changed election rules, captured media outlets, packed courts with loyalists, redrew electoral districts, modified the constitution. Each individual action seemed defensible, often technically legal. But cumulatively, international observers now describe Hungary as "competitive authoritarianism" or "illiberal democracy." It happened in plain sight, and each step could be rationalized by supporters as necessary or exaggerated by critics.

The Boston Tea Party offers another lens. The colonists weren't protesting a dictator; they were protesting relatively modest taxation under what was, for its time, a fairly liberal constitutional monarchy. They understood that the principle mattered more than the immediate burden. They saw the trajectory.

But This Is Bigger Than One Administration

Here's where my own reflection gets more complicated, and more uncomfortable.

As I looked at what's being protested: militarized law enforcement, lack of accountability, executive overreach, mass incarceration, vague definitions of what constitutes "anti-American" sentiment that could suppress dissent, I realized these aren't new problems. They're longstanding structural issues that transcend any single administration.

Police militarization has been happening for decades across both parties. The 1033 program transferring military equipment to local police started in the 1990s and continues regardless of who's in office. Note that this is just one avenue police are using to acquire military technology.

Mass incarceration continued to expand from its trajectory starting around 1973, continued under the 1994 Crime Bill, and then through administrations of both parties since then. The U.S. has about 4% of the world's population but roughly 20% of its prisoners.

Federal budget cuts that devastate communities happen across party lines. I know this personally. My father was laid off from ATK (formerly Thiokol) due, at least in part, to NASA cuts during the Obama administration. The economic pain of policy decisions doesn't respect partisan boundaries. While I understand and generally laud less government spending, it's always more impactful when it affects you directly.

So the question becomes: are the No Kings protesters right that Trump represents a qualitative escalation of existing problems? Or are they just now noticing patterns that have been there all along?

I think the answer is probably both.

The Deeper Problem

The protesters are right to be concerned about the accumulation of actions that courts have ruled illegal, the public calls for prosecuting political opponents, the deployment of military force against civilian protesters. The pattern matters, even if we're not at "dictatorship" yet.

But they may be missing that the system itself has been drifting from its constitutional moorings for a very long time.

The Founders, or at least some of them, envisioned citizen legislators who would serve briefly then return to private life. Instead, we have career politicians who spend decades accumulating power and wealth. Before 1913, the federal government couldn't directly tax income (outside of a temporary Civil War measure). This was a fundamental change in the citizen-state relationship that most of us now take for granted.

You have to know to explicitly invoke your Fifth Amendment right for it to protect you; in some cases your silence can be used against you unless you speak the magic words. Presidents increasingly govern through executive decree rather than legislation, bypassing the democratic process entirely. And the media, which should serve as a check on government overreach, is largely perceived as complicit—either cheerleading for one side or normalizing violations through careful both-sides framing.

The system the protesters want to protect seems, to me, to already be fundamentally compromised.

The Constitutional Convention Paradox

This raises an uncomfortable question: what would meaningful reform look like?

A constitutional convention relies on legislators to hold themselves accountable. But they're the ones who benefit from the current system. Turkeys don't vote for Thanksgiving.

Trump himself ran, particularly during his first term, on "draining the swamp." That message resonated because people recognized the corruption. But then he appointed industry insiders, filled his administration with establishment figures, used executive power as aggressively as, if not more than, his predecessors, and is now prosecuting political opponents. Which is arguably more "swamp-like" than what came before.

This is the pattern with populist movements: they correctly identify systemic problems and generate genuine grassroots energy, but then get captured by the existing power structure or replicate its worst features.

Mass movements require broad consensus on what's broken, sustained commitment, resistance to capture, and a viable alternative. We have none of these. Roughly half the country thinks the system needs radical reform in one direction, the other half in a completely opposite direction.

History's Uncomfortable Pattern

When I look at history, most major systemic changes came through violence. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, and anti-colonial movements. Working within broken systems rarely produces fundamental change.

But the alternatives are terrifying.

The first American Civil War killed roughly 2% of the entire population. Applied to today's 330 million, that would be over 6 million deaths. Note that this was with comparatively primitive weapons. A modern civil war would be vastly worse: automatic weapons, no clear geographic divisions (urban vs. rural cuts through every state), vulnerable infrastructure, potential nuclear weapons concerns, global economic collapse.

This creates a genuinely tragic situation in the classical sense:

• The system appears deeply compromised by its own founding principles
• Working within the system hasn't fixed it and likely can't
• But violent revolution would be catastrophically destructive
• And there's no consensus on what should replace the current system anyway

There seem to be few if any good options, only terrible ones and slightly-less-terrible ones.

Sitting With the Discomfort

I don't have an answer to this dilemma. I'm genuinely wrestling with it.

At the foundation of what I think is worth preserving: "We the people." Power flows upward from citizens, not downward from government. This means people have not just a right but a responsibility to speak truth to power.

I think separation of powers was a good idea, but the checks and balances have eroded and need restoration. The Branches must actually want to limit each other again.

I think individual speech is foundational to liberty, and corporate influence shouldn't be afforded the same latitude. Citizens speaking truth to power is fundamentally different from corporations or billionaires drowning out voices with money.

I think military and police serve different functions and must remain distinct. The military fights wars against foreign enemies; police keep peace among citizens. When police have military equipment and mindset, they treat citizens as enemy combatants.

These aren't radical departures. They're returns to first principles that have been gradually abandoned.

But the mechanism for restoration? That's what I can't see clearly.

What I'm Watching For

The dismissive responses to these protests: "there's still no king, so clearly it's nothing" miss the point. But so do responses that treat Trump as uniquely threatening while ignoring the structural problems that made his approach possible and that will outlast him.

The most profound insights often come from simply paying attention to patterns. And the pattern I'm noticing is this: we may be in a moment where the contradictions in our system are becoming unsustainable, where the gap between founding principles and observable reality is too wide to ignore.

I don't know what comes next. I know that accepting the corrupt system feels impossible. I know that catastrophic violence feels unconscionable. I know that some middle path feels necessary but unclear.

What I'm watching for is whether enough people can hold this complexity, can acknowledge that the system itself may be the problem while also recognizing that the solutions aren't obvious or easy. Can we be honest about how deep the rot goes without defaulting to simplistic answers or tribal allegiances?

The alternative where half the country sees authoritarian overreach while the other half sees nothing but partisan hysteria, where we can't even agree on what the problems are much less how to solve them, that path leads somewhere dark regardless of who is currently in power or wins the next election.

I'm watching. I'm thinking. I'm wrestling with questions I can't answer. And I suspect I'm not alone in that.

What are you noticing? Are these protests addressing real erosions of democratic norms, or are they missing the deeper structural problems? Is there a path between "accept the broken system" and "catastrophic change"? I don't have answers, but I'm genuinely curious what others are seeing.