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It seems quiet. If you just look around day to day in the United States, it would appear that life is moving along and the American people are tolerating the second presidency of Donald Trump.
There is no unrest in the streets of America’s cities and small towns. There is no violence. In fact, what we were told before the election could happen, that society would instantly disintegrate, hasn’t happened.
Many in the media who ran Biden off of the Democratic ticket and then bent the knee to Trump looked around at what must be disappointment.
The media, like Trump, were banking on chaos and fear to bring eyeballs back and revive their business after four years of struggle under Joe Biden.
Donald Trump needed chaos and fear to serve as a pretext for the consolidation of power within the executive branch. The media needed chaos and fear to get their audience back.
America looks serene on the surface, but there was a quiet seething and a growing pushback beneath the surface that the elites and Trump never saw coming.
The strength and power of the opposition to Trump and the type of governance he wishes to impose on the country rose up and made itself visible on No Kings Day.
The No Kings Day protest is reportedly the largest single-day protest in US history.
Data scientist G. Elliot Morris posted on X:
Based on hundreds of crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don’t have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6m people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels.
Morris calculated that there were just over 5,000 protests against Trump in 2017. In 2025, there have already been well over 15,000 protests against Trump.
It isn’t just Trump’s unpopularity fueling the protests, but the fact that protesting has changed.
One of my research specializations is popular protest and its impact on public policy.
Here I am discussing the protests on Substack Live:
The biggest change in protesting is that the model of protest has changed. In the past, the biggest protests would be held in a single location. For example, the civil rights march on Washington, the Million Man March, veterans’ protests, and national anti-war protests.