This battle line is needed to bring Trump to his knees
Frederick Douglass would not have. I could see his ghost, with that astonishing mane of hair, shaking his head.
Douglass, once enslaved, but by 1848 an international bestselling author, was one of the few men to sign the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, the foundational document of the movement for women’s rights.
But Douglass famously warned the women warriors:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
A single demand. The Seneca Falls Declaration was a long list of 16 enumerated grievances, from the right to become church deacons, the right to property after a divorce, to a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. Douglass implored them to settle on ONE demand, the mother of all demands: suffrage, the right to vote. With the singular focus on suffrage, the Suffragettes, after some decades, attained all their other goals (including Prohibition).
So, what was is our demand? What did we want to get from the march of seven million? What would we recognize as a victory? What was our cause? Stop ICE raids? Free Gaza? Transgender rights? The crowd seemed to coalesce around one mushy theme: “TRUMP’S A JERK! TRUMP’S A CREEP! A NO-GOOD-NIK!”
From there, it broke down. Everyone had a pet cause, all worthy, a mélange of rightness, a soup of issues, all urgent, all mixing together into a glob of complaints, all injustices demanding our attention. I can hear the admonishing ghost of Douglass: When you demand everything, you get nothing.
My own talk, I’ll admit, yawed from Trump’s imperial sexism in the firing of the first female Commandant of the Coast Guard (that really upset Mom, I’m sure) to my screed against ICE for trying to deport my grandmother a week before her 100th birthday.
[You can watch me and mom here.]
My speech about my “illegal” immigrant family got a great response from the crowd. But even I wasn’t sure of what I was trying to accomplish.
Trump said, “I’m not a King,” because he probably considers it a demotion. In his own mind, he’s the new Caesar.
By Nicole Powers 2025 for Palast Investigative Fund.
Sorry, Donald, you are as much a maniacal monarch as George III. Let me count the ways.
- You took a bulldozer to the people’s house with an actual bulldozer.
- According to Reuters, the Emirati sheikhs who fund Hamas put $864 million, “actual income – cash flowing, free and clear, into Trump family coffers,” via their purchase of the your soon-to-be-worthless cyber-coin.
- You gave out pardons to cop-killing insurrectionists and other more well-heeled friends of your regime.
- In Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and who knows where next, you “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” a charge our Declaration leveled against King George.
- You effectively ordered the indictment of the former head of our FBI despite your own chosen prosecutor finding no crime.
The Constitution prohibits a “bill of attainder,” any law which targets an individual at the whim of the King. But what is the Constitution to this Royalist tub-o’-lard?
And Trump’s kingly imposition of tariffs runs right into one of the charges in our Declaration of Independence leveled against King George decrying, “Taxes imposed upon us without our Consent.”
I could go on for pages, but I’ll spare you because we all know the list.
At the microphone, looking over the crowd of marchers that Mom and I joined, where anger turned to inspired joy … I thought, something was missing.
Then I realized it. The March missed the most important thing of all. The Demand.
Was No Kings Day, in the end, just a big national complaint-fest?
WHAT DID WE WANT? What DO we want?
MLK’s demand
I go back to the successful marches of my long-ago youth. Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery had one single demand: LET MY PEOPLE VOTE. King placed the Voting Rights Act on President Johnson’s desk, demanding he propose it to Congress. LBJ feared signing it — it would end the Democratic Party’s rule of the South — but the march, and the fearless sacrifices of the marchers, forced his hand.
Image: californiabucketlisters.
For all the terrors faced by Black people, from lynchings to housing red-lining, they focused to that one single demand: the right to vote.
The Moratorium marches of 1970 had a single demand: “U.S. out of Vietnam! Hell no, we won’t go!”
The single-demand march has been the people’s effective weapon.
In 1932, starving veterans had myriad legitimate grievances, but the 32,000 Bonus Army marchers settled on one demand — “Pay our Service Certificates!” — and won the veterans benefits Americans enjoy today.
In the 1880s, as robber barons fattened off industrial servitude, workers marched on the first Monday of each September under banners with one demand: a 40-hour workweek. Ultimately, they won.
Our Founding Fathers began their revolt with inchoate complaints. Few of these angry Englishmen were ready for independence until, prodded by Thomas Paine, they coalesced under one slogan: “No Kings.” That was no metaphor. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration had a long, long list of grievances, but only one single demand: independence, “a new nation…dedicated to the cause that all men are created equal.”
When we have no demand, or a hundred of them, it doesn’t end well. Remember the Women’s Marches? Sorry, but in another generation, NO ONE will remember them. The first one in 2016, days before Trump’s inauguration, was the biggest demonstration in U.S. history, until No Kings. Do you remember the marchers’ demand? Neither do I. And do you remember what those Women’s Marches accomplished? Neither do I. In fact, I suggest that incoherence of the Women’s Marches looked to Trump like weakness and laid the groundwork for overturning Roe v. Wade.
Douglass would have shook his regal mane sadly at the mish-mash of unfocused complaints at No Kings. Yes, it felt damn good to call Trump a tyrant, an imperious schmuck, a heartless, vindictive, power-abusing dickwad. Which, as far as I can tell, just puffed up his already bloated narcissism watching the eyes of millions turned to him.
Don’t duck the question
So, Mr. Smarty-Pants Palast, what would YOU suggest as a demand? I won’t lie: I’m a bit stumped because EVERYTHING is just so effing awful. I mean, where do we begin?
As my readers know, I am fixated on the issue of voting. If we had a fair and square system, without racist suppression trickery, 3.55 million voters purged or denied ballots would have sunk Trump in 2024. Voting is the queen of rights without which we have no others.
But I would not expect to get seven million into the streets for voting rights, though it is my deepest concern. (I was truly gob-smacked, actually horrified, that I did not see a single voter registration table. People, we need to talk about this, but not right now.)
Civil rights leader and social reformer Frederick Douglass c. 1879. Public domain.
I’m realistic: if we followed Fred Douglass’s rule and focused on a demand, the crowd would have thinned substantially. The ideological stew allowed everyone to have their own beef, their own peeve. Even the folks who didn’t vote and helped elect Trump because they didn’t like “Genocide Joe” or whatever their issue got to shout their slogans against the King of Orange.
So, Palast, don’t duck the question: What should have been The Demand?
If I may be so humble as to note that, while we marched, America’s government was shut down. Food stamps were running out. Food inspectors went unpaid. The shut-down, you’ll recall, was focused on ONE damn good cause, a line in the sand that I’ll bet every marcher would agree with: HANDS OFF OUR HEALTH INSURANCE.
Yet, at our celebration, there was nary a word about the shutdown, nary a word about this one crucial demand — protect our healthcare — that needs our full attention, to which we must together dedicate our lives, our liberties and our fortunes.
And so Trump won. A handful of feckless Democratic senators defected because they knew there was no public will to go into the streets for health insurance.
Trump’s shut-down victory is his coronation, proof of his monarchic status, puffed up with the power of vanquishing the most vulnerable among us.
Today, instead of, “Give me liberty or give me death,” it must be, “Give me health insurance or give me death,” because, as a practical matter, that’s what many Americans will face.
I know it’s not exciting as other issues, and our “leader” is, Lord help us, Chuck Schumer. But right now, this is the battle line, the Rubicon which we cannot permit the New Caesar to cross.
If we can’t do that one thing, if we can’t win that one demand, we are just marching in circles.
- Investigative reporter Greg Palast is the author of several bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His latest film is Vigilantes Inc, America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, produced by Martin Sheen and narrated by Rosario Dawson. Sign up for more reports at https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/