Why The Trump Protests Will Fail

By Evelyn Quartz

In a recent segment, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow breathlessly described an upcoming “No Kings Day” protest of President Donald Trump on June 14, pointing to a coordinated protest effort that day across all 50 states. 

These types of pro-democracy protests, she explained, are helping to “create a culture in which it is shameful to capitulate to Trump” — for law firms, media companies, billionaires, and business interests. Not shameful to uphold unjust policies or suppress workers. Shameful for the elites to align with the wrong brand. 

What do these protests look like? Rows of professionally printed signs reading “Not My President.” Choreographed chants about saving democracy. Speeches by nonprofit leaders and local officials, livestreamed for social media. Few named targets. Few direct demands. 

Maddow spoke with real sincerity. She and her guests’ urgency was palpable. But the vision they offered was limited — not a plan to challenge power, but an effort to shape elite respectability. The protest’s goal wasn’t to shift institutions. It was to signal social, professional, and aesthetic boundaries. Not leverage. Reputational management.

Nowhere does Maddow name the structures of power that enabled Trump’s return. An economic order defined by globalization, the money-ridden political system — this bipartisan consensus failed millions, but none of it is interrogated. 

Instead, the protest becomes a moral signal, not a strategic challenge. And it reflects something deeper about this liberal worldview: a belief that Trump is the singular threat while leaving the system that enabled him untouched. It’s a way of thinking that relies on a crumbling assumption: Trump was a fluke in an otherwise functional democracy. It demands that civic decency is the solution and that protest is not a confrontation with power, but a performance of moral alignment. 

The irony is that in the 1990s, Maddow was an AIDS activist involved with ACT UP. In 1999, while Al Gore was campaigning for president in New Hampshire, she risked arrest by holding a banner that read: “Gore’s Greed Kills, AIDS Drugs for Africa.” The protest targeted Gore’s role in siding with U.S. pharmaceutical companies to block South Africa’s access to affordable HIV medication. It was bold, confrontational, and aimed squarely at power.

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That kind of protest — disruptive, morally urgent, and materially specific — bears little resemblance to the one Maddow promoted on air, which was a plea for social boundaries and a reaffirmation of norms. A far cry from the banner she once held.

When Trump was first elected, the liberal class — MSNBC pundits, pro-democracy centrists, and the consultants shaping consensus — framed his rise as an anomaly, a rupture to be repaired. Defeating “Trumpism,” they argued, would be like cutting out cancer. But this diagnosis never accounted for the conditions that produced him. It treated Trump as a disease, not a symptom.

None of this is to deny that Trump’s return poses a real threat. His record of authoritarian rhetoric, political retribution, and contempt for democratic norms is well documented. But he didn’t claw his way back through brute force. He won — by expanding his base, turning out new voters, and capitalizing on the disillusionment of millions who had once backed the Democratic Party. Voters who showed up for Biden in 2020 stayed home in 2024.

But instead of facing the collapse of the bipartisan, neoliberal consensus they’ve defended for decades, the liberal class reverted to familiar tropes: Trump as a fluke, an aberration, a villain who somehow broke into an otherwise healthy system. The Resistance, they believe, will rise again to stop him. 

This dominant narrative in liberal circles — a symbolic clash between decency and fascism — obscures the deeper crisis beneath his rise. It avoids naming the economic, institutional, and political failures that made his comeback possible. And in doing so, it sidesteps the harder, more urgent task: confronting power itself.

Protest For The Hobbyists

For the liberal professional class, protest has become a political project, one that reasserts their moral authority while defending their position within a crumbling order. By framing the crisis as a breakdown of norms rather than a reckoning with power, they avoid harder questions: Who holds real influence? How is it maintained? What would it take to change it? In this framework, resistance becomes symbolic performance — an expression of virtue and identity, not a confrontation with the systems that govern us.

This isn’t a new problem. Over a century ago, sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that when societies lose moral coherence — when shared meaning breaks down — rituals may endure, but they lose their binding force. Politics becomes expressive rather than strategic. Protest becomes a performance of virtue, not an exercise of power.

Political theorist John Gray put it more bluntly. In the absence of real consensus, he argued, Trump had to be turned into “a theory of evil” by the liberal class — a villain so grotesque and singular that the system’s failures could be projected onto him. In this narrative, protest isn’t meant to transform the system. It exists to preserve the illusion that the system still works.

The upcoming “No Kings Day” is far from the first protest of its kind. Over the past decade, liberal protest culture has returned again and again to the same playbook. From the 2017 Women’s March to the “Bans Off Our Bodies” rallies after the leaked Dobbs memo, and even “Defend Democracy” vigils after the Jan. 6 riot, these demonstrations have mobilized outrage without confronting power. They prioritize tone, aesthetic unity, and moral alignment — often drawing massive crowds, but issuing few demands. The goal is to be seen, not to force concessions. 

The spectacle is uplifting, frictionless — designed to reassure participants they are on the right side of history. It’s no wonder figures like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) — Democratic leaders who have repeatedly upheld corporate interests — feel comfortable showing up with a bullhorn.

What’s missing from these protests is what once made protest effective: solidarity across individual differences — not personal virtue signaling — and direct demands aimed at those who hold power.

The labor uprisings of the 1930s weren’t expressions of personal outrage. They were organized disruptions. Workers in auto plants and steel mills walked off the job, occupied factories, and shut down production. These movements united immigrants, Black workers, and the rural poor — not around identity, but around shared interest. Their goal wasn’t visibility. It was leverage. And they won — not in one burst, but through decades of sustained struggle.

The civil rights movement, too, was rooted in material demands, despite being remembered today mostly for its rhetorical grace. The 1963 March on Washington — best known for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech — was officially a march for Jobs and Freedom. The campaign demanded a national living wage, federal jobs programs, desegregation, and voting rights. After the march, King and his fellow activist leaders went to the White House to bring their demands directly to President John F. Kennedy. The sustained activism of that era led to landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Justice for Janitors campaign has been a century-long movement that continues to this day. Started in the 1920s, led by workers of all genders and races, the movement won union contracts, wage increases, and health care through coordinated strikes and protests at corporate headquarters. They didn’t rally in parks. They organized and protested where power lived — and forced concessions.

These movements weren’t perfect. But they operated from a clear logic: Protest is leverage, not performance. They didn’t presume solidarity. They built it: through risk, through conflict, and across lines of difference.

Step Into The Void

In an era that has lost sight of what protest is for — how its power is built not through performance but through collective risk — it’s no surprise the liberal class prefers the sanitized version. These rituals offer catharsis without confrontation. They preserve the appearance of engagement without threatening the foundation of the status quo.

But if protest no longer threatens power, it leaves space for something else to rise. And in that failure lies an opportunity.

This is the left’s challenge — and its opening. Because protests like the one planned for June 14 will fail. They will fail to confront power, to offer a vision beyond moral symbolism. And they will fail to address the collapse of legitimacy that made Trump possible in the first place.

The truth is, the left has been trying to do this work for years — building unions, defending tenants, organizing across differences. But it’s been too often shut out. Mocked as too radical. Boxed out by a liberal class that would rather lose to the right than share power with the movement that could actually win something better.

Now, the center is cracking.

The question is what will rise in its place. The task is not just to protest the collapse, but to recognize what’s real and what’s performative. To see through the rituals — and step into the void with something more serious, more grounded. 

If the liberal class clings to the symbols of democracy, the left must fight for its substance. That means organizing where power lives, demanding what solidarity requires, and building something that doesn’t keep us trapped in the center’s endless cycle of “least bad” candidates — but instead begins to redistribute power — economic, political, and moral — back to the people.

Because when all is said and done, when the slogans fade and the cameras turn off, protest is not a brand. It’s a threat.