Are They Listening?

Spectator

Organizers say it was the largest single-day protest gathering in U.S. history. The No Kings Coalition claims there were rallies in all 50 states, 3,300 of them in total attended by eight million people. Locally, Traverse Indivisible, which organized the Traverse City rally and march, estimated 4,000 people participated.

The rallies were mostly peaceful, though that many people couldn’t all get along for so long. A man was shot in Salt Lake City, and MAGA counter-protesters in Palm Beach attacked some No Kings marchers in the vicinity of Mar-a-Lago. And, of course, in Portland, Oregon, a handful of nitwits decided it would be a good idea to throw rocks and try to burn some stuff like they always do. In Portland, the protesters are now joined by nihilistic anarchists who would throw rocks at a funeral and try to light a headstone afire.

So, what were all these people protesting? There is much, much more than a single issue.

There is the violence perpetrated by ICE, including the shooting deaths of two protesters in Minneapolis. There’s the irrational immigration crackdown sweeping up people based on little more than skin color and an accent. There’s the likely extra-legal attacks on boats in international waters we claim are carrying drugs but have offered no proof. There’s the kidnapping of a foreign head of state. There’s the war against Iran we started with little or no provocation and skyrocketing gas prices that resulted. There’s the ill-conceived tariffs that have increased prices for so much for so many American consumers. There’s our part in the never-ending destruction of Gaza. There’s the SAVE Act, an attempt to disenfranchise millions of legal voters.

(Our District 1 Congressman, Jack Bergman, has not specifically commented on the latest rallies but previously said people should announce what they’re for, not just what they’re against.)

In short, President Trump has made decisions and taken the country in a direction few but the hardest core MAGA true-believers care to follow. The “America First” platform on which he was elected quickly rotted and splintered, replaced with something entirely different.

Most Americans don’t believe America First includes new foreign entanglements when there are issues aplenty to solve here at home, like rescuing Social Security and Medicare, which edge closer and closer to insolvency.

Most Americans agreed with a policy that was going to round up those here illegally who engaged in violent criminal behavior in their home country or here and summarily deport them. That somehow morphed into a numbers game of how many deportations a day we could manage regardless of criminal behavior.

At one point Trump claimed he could deport 10 million illegal immigrants. In what must be a cruel reality for his followers, Trump has not managed to deport as many as did Barack Obama or, shockingly, even as many as Joe Biden. According to ICE’s own statistics, Biden deported 685,000 illegal immigrants in 2024, and Trump only managed 622,000 deportations in 2025.

Obama, who was derisively known as the Deporter-in-Chief by pro-immigration activists, deported at least 3.2 million during his two terms. Trump, by comparison, has deported 1.6 million in his five years, so far.

Trump also claimed he could “easily” balance the budget in 10 years while bringing the price of gas to less than $2 per gallon. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in his first term, rather than balancing the budget or reducing debt, Trump added $8 trillion to the debt and in just one year of his second term he has already added another $2 trillion in debt. Gas prices hover around $4 per gallon.

Meanwhile, the war in Iran, which we started, is costing us about $1 billion every day according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That is mostly due to all the munitions we’re using. The costs will increase exponentially, in logistics alone, if we put boots on the Iranian ground. We’ve already declared victory multiple times and claim Iran’s fighting capabilities have been obliterated, decimated, completely destroyed, wiped out, and so on. And yet, Iran keeps fighting back, apparently unaware of their total destruction.

The rallies were a powerful statement of discontent among many, many Americans. Trump’s approval ratings range from a low of 31 percent in a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll to a high—if you can call it that—of 41 percent in a Fox News poll.

Surely Washington sees and hears the protests, but do they actually listen? The president and his billionaire cronies don’t pull into gas stations, nor do they spend much time in grocery stores, and there is little evidence they much care about those of us who do. This government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich sees the rest of us as just cogs on their wheels of wealth.

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