Love America Rallies: No Kings Day, October 2025

The MAGA Republican response to the second No Kings protest has been a combination of laughably extreme invective and childish hissy fit.

Republican after Republican issued over-the-top criticism of the organized demonstrations against the Trump regime, calling them Soros-sponsored antifa gatherings. House Speaker Mike Johnson called them “hate America” rallies.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the mean teen who appears to be perpetually auditioning for the remake of “Cruel Intentions,” said: “The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.”

She couldn’t even get subject-verb agreement in that moronic utterance.

All of these statements, including the bad grammar, sound suspiciously like the work of Stephen Miller, Trump’s Iago-like dispenser of cruel strategies and stupefying propaganda.

Of course, as Bernie Sanders said, October 18 was the total opposite of a “hate America” rally. Millions of people came out to gather, to hold signs and to commiserate about the Trump regime’s all-out effort to destroy our democracy. It was an act of love.
I was in Catonsville, Maryland, where hundreds of spirited, well-informed people stood along Baltimore National Pike for two hours, and where numerous cars and trucks honked horns as they went by. It was a great event, a real tonic to be among Americans who hate what’s happening and wanted to say so in public.

Each person I spoke with — young, middle-aged or older — was conversant in every aspect of the regime’s assault on the rule of law, the Republicans’ complicity in all of it, and the Supreme Court’s depressing deference to Trump.

Catonsville is a community that became synonymous with protest and civil disobedience during the Vietnam War. It’s where, in May 1968, a group of nine anti-war activists broke into the local draft board on Frederick Road, gathered Selective Service records and burned them in the parking lot. Among the Catonsville Nine were the Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, brothers whose willingness to go to jail inspired many other anti-draft and anti-war actions in the 1960s and 1970s, eventually leading to U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

At the time, many Americans saw Vietnam War protestors as a bunch of ungrateful, hateful hippies when, in fact, opposition to the war cut across a wide swath of the citizenry.

“America, Love It or Leave It” was a theme of the anti-anti-war movement, and there’s a very loud echo of that in what we hear from MAGA Republicans about No Kings.

I saw it after posting a few photos of the Catonsville gathering on Facebook. Trump supporters called the demonstrators “libtards” and ridiculed No Kings as a pointless exercise against a president “who’s here to stay, Trump 2028!”

As for Mike Johnson’s claim that the demonstrations against Trump policies amounted to “hate America” rallies, I say this:

— If there’s any hate, it’s not for the country. It’s for what Trump is doing to it.

— If there’s any hate, it’s for the cruelty: Cutting off foreign humanitarian aid to some of the poorest, hungriest people in the world; sending masked thugs to strong-arm, detain and deport immigrants who have committed no serious crimes; putting crackpots and ideologues in positions of power, allowing them to make the country less safe and the government less effective; taking benefits away from Americans who cannot afford health insurance without them.

— If there’s any hate, it’s for the lie that American cities are hellholes that need federal troops.

— If there’s hate, it’s for the denigration of science and smarts, the rejection of efforts to address climate change and further develop alternate sources of energy.

— If there’s hate, it’s for the mindless cuts to government agencies, the gleeful firing of federal employees and the loss of services they provided.

We reserve hate for the long, long history of a political party constantly opposed to progress in education, in health care, in housing and public transportation — all for the sake of giving more tax breaks to the country’s wealthy elite.

That’s not hate for America. That’s hate for what the country has become under Trump.