Why this former Republican aide will march on No Kings Day

What are the No Kings protests about?

It’s a natural question if one has never been to a large protest. I’ve seen many of my friends on the right, especially after the first No Kings protests in June, wonder why people choose to do so. Let me offer a view.

I was at the first Boise No Kings rally in June and will be at the next on Saturday … which would surprise some people given my long Republican past.

I spent decades being active and working in GOP politics, at the local, state, and federal levels, including working for a Republican U.S. senator and President George W. Bush.

And I want nothing to do with the presidency of Donald Trump.

Some critics of No Kings question the value of peaceful protests. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, et. al. disagree. Critics also get hung up on the “No Kings” name and argue we don’t have a monarch, so what’s the point?

We don’t have a king, but we do have a hot mess in this country thanks to a chaotic and impulsive president and his administration.

We have an unlawful and economically damaging tariff regime that both changes on a whim and has sent us into a jobs recession while stoking more inflation.

We have publicly ordered, flimsy prosecutions of political enemies, even as veteran U.S. prosecutors and Justice Department officials are being fired and resigning rather than follow unlawful and unethical orders.

We have equally unlawful firings of federal employees during a government shutdown, happening because a Republican president and GOP majorities in both houses of Congress can’t govern. Ironic firings since many similar layoffs during the failed DOGE experiment (remember that?) were reversed in court because — and I believe we have a pattern here — they were unlawful.

But not just unlawful, incompetent too. The Trump administration’s war on public health continued last Friday with mass layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But mirroring the failures of DOGE, hundreds of those firings were rescinded within hours. Maybe someone figured out laying off people with important jobs working on epidemics and infectious diseases is a bad idea?

Proving the point of the incompetence, one CDC employee currently working on measles outbreaks (caused by the anti-vaccine thinking now touted by the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) was one of the recent, quickly rescinded layoffs, even after she experienced the same, “Now-you’re fired, now-you’re not” whipsaw under DOGE while working on Ebola earlier this year.

All of which gets to part of what is driving protests like No Kings: These are not just protests about policy disputes, they are protests about the very nature of how our government is being run.

And there is no clearer example of that right now than the conduct of ICE and other federal agents, lawlessly detaining and abusing U.S. citizens and others legally in our country because of how they look, not because of probable cause that such persons have committed a crime.

I remember from my decades in Republican politics that the right used to object to the idea of masked, unidentified agents of the federal government roaming the streets of America in unmarked vehicles going after people they think don’t look like real Americans.

That’s as good a reason to protest as any if you believe in the Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

Some on the right will claim No Kings is just “antifa” or that such protests are riots. That’s laughably false. I’ve spent enough time in politics in the Northwest, especially around Seattle, to know what is called “antifa” is a tiny, motley collection of anarchists and far-left activists who think Bernie Sanders is a bit too conservative.

I’ve also been to enough protests and have friends around the country who have done likewise to know the No Kings protests are legal, permitted events in public spaces to exercise the right of free speech. There were millions of Americans at those protests in June. There will be millions more at hundreds of protests around the country on Saturday.

Some may disagree with the anti-Trump motive for these protests, but that is their purpose, and as U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, encouraged to: “Be peaceful, patriotic, and joyful.”

• Eric Earling previously worked for U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Washington, and at the U.S. Department of Education for President George W. Bush. He lives in Boise.