No Kings, Just Pageants
The parade and the protest told the same story in different costumes. One of power performed, the other of power refused.
It looked like a scene from a movie you didn’t agree to watch.
Tanks rolled down Constitution Avenue. Fighter jets screamed overhead. Somewhere behind the bulletproof glass, President Trump grinned as soldiers saluted.
He turned 79 that day. The parade was for the Army’s 250th birthday. But no one seemed confused about who it was really celebrating.
Across the country, millions took to the streets under a different banner: No Kings. That was the slogan. No monarchs. No autocrats. No cult of power wrapped in bunting. They protested in over 2,000 cities — a decentralized, loosely choreographed rejection of everything the parade seemed to represent.
It was a strange American split-screen.
On one side: a pageant of strength. Troops in dress uniforms. Rows of armored vehicles. Jet trails against a summer sky. On the other: cardboard signs, impromptu chants, bodies in motion. It wasn’t just about Trump. It never is. It was about something older, and more unsettled.
The same country that once rebelled against a king now builds entire political movements around the performance of power. The ritual of military display. The language of dominance. The aesthetic of victory. We don’t do kings. But we’re very good at coronations.
Trump didn’t invent this. He just saw the costume rack and tried everything on.
He wanted a military parade back in his first term. Back then, the idea was shelved — too expensive, too chaotic. But now, with a second term underway and little resistance from within the Pentagon, the machinery clicked into place. The Army had already been planning a 250th anniversary event. Trump made it a spectacle.
He said, “Every other country celebrates their victories. It’s about time America did, too.” The sentence sounds reasonable if you don’t listen too closely. But what exactly are we celebrating?
The U.S. military has spent the last two decades fighting wars no one wants to talk about. Iraq. Afghanistan. Syria. Somalia. And soon, Iran.
Hundreds of bases around the world. Trillions spent. Victory, if it exists, is abstract. Tactical. Conditional. Mostly, we leave and say nothing.
But the parade rolls on.
The “No Kings” movement — if you can even call it that — is less coherent. That’s its strength. It isn’t centrally funded or ideologically tidy. It’s more like a pressure valve. A raw insistence that something is wrong. That the pageantry masks decay. That the state’s obsession with muscle hides a deeper brittleness.
Protesters weren’t just holding signs. They were holding contradictions. Some came for democracy. Some for Gaza. Some for unions. Some just wanted to scream. And yet, together, they understood the moment better than any press release could.
The thing about authoritarianism is that it doesn’t announce itself with a boot. It comes draped in ceremony. It co-opts tradition. It borrows patriotism’s wardrobe. It makes tyranny look like tribute.
And we are, perhaps, uniquely vulnerable to that kind of trick.
Because in America, power always pretends to be performance. It smiles. It salutes. It kisses babies. It throws parades. But under the choreography, something more serious is happening — a hardening. A narrowing. A normalization of the exceptional.
There were some scattered incidents of violence. A man shot in Salt Lake City. A car driven into protesters in Virginia. A protest halted in Texas over threats. These weren’t part of the plan. But they weren’t outside the pattern either. The edges of dissent are always policed harder than the core of power.
What does it mean when millions take to the streets and the most powerful man in the country doesn’t flinch?
Maybe the answer is in the symmetry.
The protest and the parade happened on the same day. That’s not coincidence. It’s ritual. Every empire needs its opposition. Every show of strength provokes a show of defiance. We don’t settle things anymore. We stage them. In parallel. Ad infinitum.
There is no resolution. Just spectacle.
Still, the protests mattered. Not because they stopped the tanks. They didn’t. Not because they changed minds. They won’t. But because they reminded us — if only briefly — that citizenship isn’t just about choosing which part of the pageant to clap for. It’s about refusing the script altogether.