The visuals from yesterday, juxtaposed against one another, were striking: sparse crowds lining Constitution Avenue NW in the muggy heat of Washington, DC, to watch a parade honoring the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army and also Trump's 79th birthday; and millions of Americans turning out in thousands of cities around the country to protest the policies of Trump's regime.
The point could not possibly have been lost on him that way more people wanted to rally against him than to party with him. In nearly all the photos I've seen of him from the event, he looks dour. In one video, it looks like he may have dozed a bit. (I can almost forgive him for nodding off. Not only is he old and possibly not in the best of health, but it was 81 degrees in DC, with 80 percent humidity, when the parade kicked off. The best word to describe that sort of weather is vile. I have lived through those summers; I moved to Santa Fe to avoid experiencing any more of them.)
I'm waiting to see how his press office spins this morose event tomorrow. Maybe somebody will break out a Sharpie.
In contrast, it was pretty much all sweetness and light around the rest of the country -- even in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where rally organizers canceled their event after a man posing as a police officer shot and killed a state representative and her husband and wounded another state representative and his wife. Despite the cancellation, 80,000 people showed up.
This protest was too big for the traditional media to ignore. Few outlets went with the "tens of thousands" dodge this time; some even admitted to six million people attending. The Alt National Park Service account on Facebook gave the final attendance figure as 12.1 million people -- and as I've said here before, the National Park Service knows how to count a crowd of people because they have been in charge of it for decades, even though they don't do it for public release anymore. At the same time, the media have a habit of lowballing such figures so as not to be accused of lying.
In 2019, Harvard political science researcher Erica Chenowith published a study she had done that showed nonviolent protest is better than violent protest at effecting change, and that if 3.5 percent of the population actively participates in such protests, change is virtually assured. From the BBC article I linked to a second ago: "'There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,' says Chenoweth – a phenomenon she has called the '3.5% rule'."
Mama Google tells me that the population of the United States (2024 estimate) is 340.1 million. Three-and-a-half percent of that is 11.9 million. If Alt National Park Service is right, and I think they are, then we've hit the tipping point.
Which brings me to my favorite sign of the day from yesterday's events.
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| Stolen from Facebook. If you know the photographer, let me know. |
None of this means we can rest on our laurels. Trump and his minions aren't going to give up that easily. So what's next?
More protests, I would imagine. This cannot be a one-and-done. The more despised this regime appears to be, the more it will encourage folks on the fringes to defect. It may also influence those in office to act more boldly against Trump -- and I'm not just talking about the Democrats. Trump will die at some point (we all will, as Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst has helpfully pointed out), and Republican office holders would be idiots to believe they can ride his coattails forever. No one else in the party even remotely has his star power.
I'm not expecting immediate change -- not from the bunch currently in Washington. But as they say, things happen slowly, and then all at once.
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Happy Father's Day to everybody who is, was, has, or had a father, perfect or im-, and including those with offspring who are or were persons of the nonhuman persuasion.
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These moments of calculating blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there, y'all.
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