That sure felt good, didn't it?

Downtown Milford on Saturday. Photo: Tracy Harris

Well, it’s not enough.

In truth, nothing would be enough in opposition to Donald Trump and the all-out, balls-to-the-wall, no-limits criminal enterprise he calls his presidency. But along with the Hands Off protests in April, and other marches and demonstrations here and there over the last four months, Saturday certainly was a good start.

Organizers of the No Kings protests, including the ACLU and Move On, claim that some 5 million turned out for more than 2,000 demonstrations and rallies around the country on Saturday. The NYPD estimated that crowds in NYC were in the “hundreds of thousands,” according to CBS News. Tens of thousands turned out in Portland, Oregon, and though crowd estimates are still coming in, it is beginning to look like larger cities such as Philadelphia and Atlanta saw crowds at least in the tens of thousands. Right here in Milford, Pennsylvania, they’re estimating the turnout on Broad Street was at least 1,000, which equals the population of the Borough of Milford.

In Washington, D.C., the Trump military parade had a permit for 200,000, but shots of the crowds along Constitution Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue showed thinly occupied bleachers, with some almost empty.

The parade itself was a bust. Trump ordered up way too many tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs), which had to hold their speed to less than 5 miles per hour to limit damage to the streets, so it took forever for the tanks to pass Trump’s absurd reviewing stand – fronted by two more stationary tanks – in front of the White House. One report from the parade noted that when a vintage tank moved along the parade route, it passed half-empty bleachers, and the only audible sound was that of its old treads clanking desultorily in the stifling heat.

Trump himself fell asleep at one point during the parade, as did his wife, Melania, seated next to him. I watched part of the parade on TV and saw no marching bands, so the parade completely lacked the upbeat mood of martial music along the way. The many Army units marching in the parade – there were way too many of them, too – were out of step, causing them to look less like precision military units, and more like soldiers out for a stroll.

Nobody at the Pentagon told the soldiers commanding and driving tanks and APC’s to study tape of parades in Red Square and North Korea to see how they should behave in order to appear strong and “lethal,” to use Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s favorite word. So, the guys in the tanks were smiling and waving to the crowds as if they were in a homecoming parade instead of a military display of force for the president, which is what Trump had wanted.

The whole thing looked like amateur hour at Dictatorville. Trump was seated throughout nearly all the parade, except for the passing of the colors, when he struggled to his feet and gave an awkward salute.

There was no mistaking the contrast in the visuals between the thinly-attended Trump military show in D.C. and the crowded streets and sidewalks of towns and cities around the country.

The day was “marred,” as the mainstream media put it, by violence. Other than a few clashes between police and protesters in Los Angeles, the violence was from the other side. Two were killed and two wounded in a politically-motivated assassination and attempted assassination in the suburbs of Minneapolis, which I wrote about yesterday. The Texas Department of Public Safety issued a formal warning of a “credible threat” on public officials who planned to attend the protest at the state capitol in Austin, and the building and surrounding area was shut down. In Salt Lake City, a person attending one of the No Kings protests was shot and wounded. In Culpepper, Virginia, a town about 70 miles outside of Washington D.C., police say a man “intentionally” drove an SUV into a crowd of people leaving the No Kings protest, striking at least one departing protester. A 21-year-old man was arrested and charged with reckless driving.

According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a Harvard University and University of Connecticut research project, there have been 15,000 protests of one kind or another since Trump’s inauguration this year. That compares to about 5,000 at mid-June in Trump’s first term in office.

In other words, as those who oppose the presidency of Donald Trump and the destruction the Republican Party is attempting to wreak on the government and the nation, we are doing our job. More than 200 lawsuits have been filed against Trump’s moves to defenestrate the federal government by executive order, many of them opposing what can only be called his deportation regime.

This week, we learned that Trump intends to have his ICE agents lay off arrests and deportations of immigrant workers in the agriculture, hotel, and restaurant industries. Of course, it has been pointed out that Trump is engaged in applying policy and the law disproportionately, targeting some groups while consciously leaving other groups alone. I would point out that this is the way Trump sees the job of being president: to reward his friends and punish his enemies, so he is doing exactly what he said he would do when he was campaigning.

It clearly has not dawned on his MAGA base that they may end up on the receiving end of his discriminatory application of law and policy. There are already reports of small business owners who supported Trump losing half or more of their workforce and being driven out of business. One guy told a reporter that Trump is doing what he voted for him to do, so he is not unhappy.

Stories like that one give you a good idea of how impenetrable the MAGA base of Trump’s support really is. In 2016, he said he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. He was right then, and it’s even worse now that he has a Supreme Court decision that would immunize him from prosecution if he made an entirely spurious claim that the killing was part of his “official business” as president.

Trump has nearly four years to do pretty much anything he wants to do, and there is very little that can be done to oppose him. I fully realize that is depressing. But I would point you to this weekend as an example of what can be done to oppose him, and what he is likely to do to himself. He is so ignorant and narcissistic that he completely blew his big military celebration of self, turning the entire spectacle lame, uninteresting, and so boring, it put him to sleep. His uneven and discriminatory application of law and policy is bound to backfire on him. Because of Trump’s war on Medicaid, we will soon see stories of rural hospitals closing and people dying because of lack of emergency rooms and ordinary healthcare. It’s hurricane season, and he has announced he wants to cancel FEMA. He appointed a director of that essential emergency relief organization who can’t read a map, wouldn’t know a storm front from an offensive line in football, and even confessed that he didn’t know there is a hurricane season. Hurricanes hit red states, and they hit them hard. (Some blue states receive aftereffects, but they are minor compared to what happens further south.) Trump and his administration are as unprepared for disasters of every kind as it is possible to be.

Trump started out saying he didn’t know anything about the Israeli attack on Iran, then he knew about it, then he approved it in advance. Next, he’s going to say he was the weapons officer in the lead F-35 and personally fired the missile that killed Iran’s top nuclear official.

In the meantime, he’s had to backtrack on his move to cancel the Voice of America, which had to order, not ask, but order 75 Farsi speakers back to work from their mandatory suspensions to counter Iranian propaganda. He’s had to do the same thing in other departments because judges’ orders have forced him.

This is the kind of stuff that’s going to happen over and over and over again. Trump will cut something, then he’ll reinstate funding. He’ll cancel another thing, then he’ll bring it back. He’ll take his Sharpie and try to redirect another hurricane, and then it will kill dozens in flooding and do $5 billion in damage to one of his MAGA strongholds.

I don’t know what’s going to happen over the next three-plus years, but something truly terrible is going to happen that may not turn the heads of his 30 percent MAGA base, but will get everyone else’s attention, and that is 70 percent of the adult voting public. I’m not in the business of making predictions, but this time, I think I will. I don’t know how it’s going to happen, by impeachment, or 25^th Amendment, or illness, or death, but he’s not going to serve out his term.