Third Kingless Protest in Washington, D.C., March 28, 2026

Some media commentators said that Trump will not pay any attention to these protests because as a sitting duck president, he has nothing to lose. This line of thinking is misleading. We've seen this before. I remember the 1969 anti-Vietnam War march on Washington passing the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, and President Nixon telling the press that he didn't realize it because he was watching a football game, which was more important after all. Watergate revealed the extent of his obsession with protest (an obsession also depicted in Oliver Stone's film “Nixon”). The main danger now is that the protest movement is integrated into the campaigns of Democratic candidates in the midterm elections. Something similar happened at the Black Lives Matter protests in the run-up to Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. The protest movement needs to be independent of and sometimes critical of the Democratic Party, if for no other reason than the pro-war stance of the Democratic establishment and the Republican Party.