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.