It wasn’t just large, liberal cities but the heart of Trump country that formed the base of last Saturday’s “No Kings” protests. Together with his underwhelming military parade, they’re a warning of the softness of his support.

Trump’s win, though more emphatic than 2016, was anemic in the scope of history. He had failed to cross the 50 percent threshold, his battleground state victories were all secured by wafer-thin margins, and Republicans had actually won a bigger share of the popular vote in the 2022 midterms — an election widely viewed as a historic flop for the GOP.

But even though Trump had nothing close to the kind of mandate to embark on the radical, deeply unpopular program that followed, the widespread liberal demoralization his win produced did a lot of the work for him by preemptively neutering much left-leaning opposition to his actions.

The “No Kings” protests that took place over the weekend, motivated by broad unhappiness with Trump’s term so far, are a signal that this state of affairs has, nearly half a year in, decisively changed.

It wasn’t just the sheer size of the protests, though that was significant: at between two to six million people across more than two thousand cities, Saturday’s demonstrations were not just on par with the largest protests of Trump’s chaotic first term but may have been one of the biggest mass protests in American history.

Some of the numbers in major US cities were staggering: 80,000 in Philadelphia; as many as 75,000 in Chicago; 50,000 in New York, San Francisco, and in the much smaller Portland, where the march stretched for twelve city blocks; at least 70,000 in Seattle, one of the biggest protests in the city’s history; ten thousand or more in cities like Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Spokane. In contrast to recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, many of the protesters trended toward the older, more middle-of-the-road Democratic voter, with many saying it was their first protest in decades or in their whole lives, and the rallies overwhelmingly saw no property damage or police violence.

But the protests were arguably more significant for their depth. Thousands turned out in larger, more liberal cities in otherwise red states, like the at least four thousand who protested in Nashville; the ten thousand or more who attended protests in Austin, Dallas, and Houston; the three thousand in Fargo, North Dakota; the thousands more in Topeka, Boise, and Little Rock, or the nearly one thousand who turned out in Charleston, South Carolina.

The protests reached deep into Trump-voting country, and not just in massive, populous cities. Thousands turned out across thirty-five different Iowa municipalities, including several thousand in Cedar Rapids and seven thousand at the state capitol in Des Moines. In Nebraska, ten thousand came together in Omaha, which had seen 1,000 people gather a day earlier to protest recent ICE raids, while two thousand people filled up the main strip of Lincoln and hundreds more protested in rural cities like Hastings and North Platte. Both states had in February seen some of the earliest mass gatherings against Trump, when overflow crowds turned out in Omaha and Iowa City for Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in red states.

These scenes were replicated by many thousands more demonstrators in numerous Trump-voting states: across thirty cities in Missouri, dozens more cities in Texas, at least twenty-four communities across Alaska, more than a dozen in Kentucky and Indiana a piece, and more than seventy cities in Florida, an ever-reddening state that last year saw even traditionally more liberal metropoles like Miami-Dade County move markedly toward Trump. For some of these locations, Trump’s recent controversial actions, including siccing the military on US protesters, had clearly spurred more grassroots opposition: in Mobile, Alabama, for instance, the two thousand protesters who turned out were a major step up from the hundreds who taken to the city’s streets two months ago, during the first series of nationwide “No Kings” protests.

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