Last Saturday, millions of protesters turned out across the country for the second “No Kings” march against Donald Trump. Trump, ever the statesman, responded with a Truth Social post that contained an AI-generated video of himself flying a plane with a king’s crown atop his head, dumping massive amounts of human feces on protesters.

At the same time that Trump was using AI to smear his critics, his supporters were spreading the claim that footage of the enormous rallies was actually fake news. They were wrong: the impressive rally footage was authentic. The turnout on Saturday was even larger than at the first No Kings rally, which wildly surpassed Trump’s sparsely attended military parade in June. While Trump’s biggest fans may have enjoyed his scatological retort and consoled themselves with the notion that massive crowds were a media fiction, the real-life streets were filled with Americans denouncing Trump as a would-be dictator.

In his newsletter Strength in Numbers, data journalist G. Elliott Morris consulted multiple diverse sources to estimate the size of Saturday’s crowds. Morris’s median estimate is five million participants, his upper-end estimate 6.5 million.

Either way, Morris concludes, “Saturday’s events are very likely the biggest single-day protest event since 1970, surpassing even the 2017 Women’s March demonstrations against Trump.”

Strength in Numbers also consulted data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project by the University of Connecticut and the Harvard Kennedy School, to compare protest activity in Trump’s second term to his first term. America has seen four times as many anti-Trump protests this time around.

The number of attendees per protest has also soared since Trump’s first term. Morris estimates that over 12 million Americans have protested against Trump since he took office earlier this year. One standout city for No Kings turnout on Saturday was Washington, DC, where Trump declared a state of public emergency and deployed National Guard troops in August.

Trump has spent his second term demonizing and antagonizing vast swaths of the population, from federal workers to immigrants to journalists to antiwar activists to transgender people to residents of whole cities and states to the entire Democratic electorate. He has openly declared hatred for his opponents on multiple occasions and ruminated darkly on “the enemy within.”

Trump despises large numbers of Americans and increasingly indulges every spiteful impulse toward them. If these protest numbers are any indication, there’s only so much provocation of the public you can get away with before the public strikes back.

Here in Southern California, I saw something at Saturday’s No Kings protest that surprised and heartened me. A large percentage of protesters sported red, white, and blue, sloganeered in defense of American democracy, and even dressed up as the Statue of Liberty. Excluding July 4, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many American flags post-9/11 at an event that didn’t celebrate violence and domination.

Prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, derided Saturday’s protests as “hate America rallies.” Anyone with open eyes saw precisely the opposite. It is Trump and the GOP who describe American citizens as adversaries, portray our cities as war zones and hellholes, and depict the nation as a fast-sinking ship — dragged down, in their view, by egalitarianism, universalism, multiculturalism, and even democracy itself. At Saturday’s protest, by contrast, we saw people from all walks of life professing sincere belief in and standing in defense of the American democratic project, whatever their criticisms of its execution.

As a younger leftist developing my critique of America’s many shortcomings, I might have found the patriotic sentiment at No Kings off-putting. Today I find it encouraging. It was never a good idea to cede the entire territory of national identity to the Right. When given uncontested rein, they were always going to define what it means to be American in the manner of Steve Bannon and J. D. Vance, whose mystic nationalism blends seamlessly into blood-and-soil chauvinism.

The Left need not confuse our criticisms of American domestic inequality and global domination with an aesthetic rejection of all things identifiably American. We should stand our ground and fight for those symbols. Our symbols are as mercurial and contradictory as our nation’s history: they can stand for exclusion or inclusion, for domination or equality, for our greatest moral ambitions or our basest impulses and most damning hypocrisies. Choosing to contest their meaning rather than reject them outright gives us political space to declare that poverty, war, prejudice, and political repression are betrayals of our highest values, rather than inevitable fulfillments of our flawed nation’s tragic destiny. In other words, it leaves room for political progress.

These symbols and ideas of Americanness hold incredible power for millions of average people, as we saw in the streets on Saturday. It made me think of the words of the late socialist organizer and intellectual Michael Harrington:

It was as a socialist, and because I was a socialist, that I fell in love with America. . . . If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a socialist — to be a Marxist — is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies. To be a radical is, in the best and only decent sense of the word, patriotic.

Saturday was the largest single day of political protest in recorded American history. That’s a triumph in its own right. It was an added bonus that the No Kings protests also completely contradicted right-wing portrayals of it as a hateful “anti-American” spectacle. Donald Trump is a reliable font of hatred for Americans, and it’s already wearing thin. In the long run, our side will fare better with love.