Don’t Lose Sight of the Oligarchy
Last weekend’s massive “No Kings” rallies proved Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity. But Trump should be opposed as a symptom of America’s vast warmongering, oligarchic elite, not a simply a grotesque anomaly.
Demonstrators take part in a protest against the Trump administration during the “No Kings” national rally in Downtown Los Angeles, California, on June 14, 2025. (Ringo Chiu / AFP via Getty Images)
The “No Kings” protests last weekend were a landmark in the burgeoning movement against the destructive and authoritarian second Trump administration. The scale of the rallies was remarkable. Estimates vary from two to six million protesters around the country. Many of the protesters were older and more politically moderate than the typical attendees at other rallies. Best of all, as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic observed, the protests “reached deep into Trump-voting country” rather than being restricted to “massive, populous cities.”
Trump himself tried to play it all off as a joke, saying that he didn’t “feel like a king” and that he had to “go through hell to get things approved.” But the ugly reality is that he has acted quite a bit like a king, often finding disturbing ways to try to bypass the need for approval from other branches of government.
Rather than “going through hell” to get Congress to pass his tariffs, for example, he has largely succeeded in imposing them unilaterally. America’s trade policies change day by day depending on the president’s personal whims and are justified on the grounds of the bizarre claim that any sort of trade imbalance constitutes an emergency requiring the use of “national security” powers.
And while his tariffs have been a chaotic and pointless mess, raising prices for working-class consumers and holding out little promise of actually reshoring any jobs (which more targeted and sanely implemented tariffs might), that’s downright innocent compared to many of Trump’s other grabs for personal power. He’s sent armed National Guard troops to back up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in brazen violation of the legal firewall between the military and domestic law enforcement. He’s had the Department of Homeland Security arrest, imprison, and threaten to deport legal permanent residents for engaging in constitutionally protected free speech in defense of the human rights of Palestinians. And he’s sent immigrants to life sentences in a gulag-like prison in El Salvador without a shred of due process.
And now he may be on the brink of getting the United States into a war in Iran, which has the potential to be far more destructive even than the Bush-era wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, he is doing so without even bothering to seek the kind of Congressional approval that George W. Bush sought in 2001 and 2002.
So there’s no (sanely) denying that the protesters’ central claim was correct. Trump has been behaving in wildly authoritarian ways, and it’s a very good thing that there was such a massive turnout for rallies designed to highlight this fact and mobilize the opposition.
Even so, the way that such opposition expresses itself matters. In the early months of the administration, the biggest displays of public outrage against Trump were Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies, the framing of which seamlessly combined pushback against Trumpist authoritarianism with a broader critique of economic inequality. These rallies, too, were often held in red states where they drew massive crowds. At the time, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) pushed back against the “Fighting Oligarchy” slogan on the grounds that ordinary Americans allegedly don’t know what the o-word means. Her proposed alternate slogan during this debate was . . . “No Kings.”
What’s in a Slogan?
As it happens, polls show that Sen. Slotkin was mistaken about the limits of the public’s vocabulary. And common sense should tell us that it would be no great conceptual leap to get people to understand what you mean when you apply a word the media has long used to describe dangerous, powerful, ultrarich people in Russia to dangerous, powerful, ultrarich people in this country. (Indeed, our oligarchs are far wealthier and far more powerful than their Russian counterparts.) As I suggested at the time, Slotkin’s framing was disingenuous:
The issue in dispute between her and Sanders and AOC goes deeper than semantics. Slotkin evidently wants to stick to what 19th-century radicals called the “political question” of democracy and authoritarianism, rather than broaching the “social question” of economic power and hierarchy.
There would be nothing wrong with combining the two slogans — “No Kings, No Oligarchy.” But if last weekend’s otherwise inspiring protests presage the replacement of the oligarchy framing with one narrowly focused on Trump’s personal power grabs, as disturbing as those are, that would be a very bad sign.
After all, the point of protests like these is less to achieve some short-term policy goal than to promote a general narrative about the state of the country and to begin to mobilize and energize a segment of the population around that message. And if the narrative the movement against Trump coalesces around sheds the economic messaging of “Fighting Oligarchy,” that would be a disaster not just on a substantive level but a strategic one.
Trumpism came into existence precisely because we live in a wildly unequal and increasingly economically precarious and unequal society, and this made the neoliberal centrism of the dominant wing of the Democratic Party increasingly unappealing. Trump was able to scapegoat immigrants (accused of stealing jobs or smuggling fentanyl) or foreign nations screwing over the United States in bad trade deals for problems actually caused by our own domestic oligarchs.
Democrats and liberals largely responded to the rise of Trump with an empty defense of procedural democracy per se without tying this defense to any real sense of how democracy can be used to improve the lives of ordinary people. Hence, we had years of relitigating every detail of the January 6 riots even as Democrats pretended to be powerless to even overrule the Senate parliamentarian to raise the national minimum wage. That strategy failed so catastrophically that now Trump is back in office.
Trump’s right-wing authoritarian demagoguery is a particularly dangerous symptom of a much deeper rot. Those early “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies had the virtue of identifying that rot, and putting forward an alternative message about the same underlying social problems that bred Trumpism in the first place.
It’s very good that so many people are outraged at the administration’s authoritarianism. The turnout at the rallies was inspiring, and I hope that we see much more of the same going forward. We can’t afford, though, to let Slotkinism prevail in framing the anti-Trump narrative. Our message needs to be clear. No Kings? Absolutely. But also No Oligarchy.