President Donald Trump was once quoted by an unnamed source in the New York Times saying this about U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer’s endorsement of him in early 2024: “They always bend the knee.”
Minnesota’s senior Republican was required to add some extra enthusiasm to his genuflection to Trump. That’s because he’d had the temerity to vote to certify the 2020 election results that Joe Biden was the winner.
You might remember that day, Jan. 6, 2021, when a gang of regime partisans took over the Capitol to keep Trump in power after he’d lost the election.
“Hang Mike Pence,” they’d chanted.
With the House out of session these days — lest any pesky votes to release the Epstein files come up — Emmer seems to have settled into a role as House Republicans’ demagogue.
“The Democrats,” Emmer said this week, “would rather cater to the pro-terrorist wing of their party than to reopen the government.”
This follows up last week’s gem: “This is about one thing and one thing alone,” he said about the government shutdown, “to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold a hate America rally in D.C next week.”
To use this kind of language is peculiar: I was reliably informed just weeks ago that right-wing star Charlie Kirk’s killing was the result of inciteful language that some of us have used to describe the Republicans’ fascistic turn, but I digress.
Let’s talk about the “hate America” rally that Emmer referred to, known as “No Kings” and being held in 2,500 locations nationwide, including 69 Minnesota cities, among them such hotbeds of anti-American fervor as New Ulm and Owatonna and — in Emmer’s own district! — St. Cloud.
At the last No Kings rally, in June, Joan Nelson, 82, talked to a Reformer reporter. She was attending a political rally for just the second time in her life, she said, but there she was, with her daughter and granddaughter, too.
Three generations of America hating!
The June rally was the same day of the assassination of Mark and Rep. Melissa Hortman, but thousands turned out anyway at the Minnesota Capitol, to demand an end to the unconstitutional actions of an executive run amok.
Among the people likely to attend Saturday’s No Kings rally: My 76-year old mother-in-law visiting us this weekend, a suburban retiree who spent nearly four decades as a Montgomery County, Md., librarian.
She married her college sweetheart, an Iranian immigrant. (You wanna hear someone bag on about a regime? Ask my father-in-law about the mullahs.) Massoud was a literal rocket scientist for decades, helping defend America, including as part of a team that developed the technology we now know as GPS. (Massoud, who has a history of voting for minor party candidates for president, emphasized to me that he won’t be at the protest.)
They worked hard and sent their kids to college. They go to the beach once a year for a week and invite us along. Massoud likes hockey and country music. (Weird, perhaps, but I don’t judge.) Lisa occasionally, um, borrows our HBO Max password and likes Broadway showtunes. Massoud keeps a lovely yard, and Lisa runs a book club and blogs about her reading.
Theirs is a deeply American story.
Lisa will join teachers, veterans, tradesmen, nurses and doctors, business people — and no doubt plenty of other librarians — who will go to the rally to express the most American idea ever: They are citizens who share in self-governance, not subjects of a monarch or tyrant.
Let’s explore why this is called “No Kings.”
- Trump has sent the National Guard from his allied red states to American cities that have no want or use for them.
- He’s ordered masked federal agents to sweep up people without warrants. He’s violated their due process rights and in some cases sent them to repressive foreign lands known for human rights abuses.
- He has ordered career prosecutors to go after his political enemies, and to spare his political friends. He has fired career public servants who refused his unethical orders.
- He has pardoned the people who stormed the Capitol and assaulted police officers in their failed coup attempt.
- He and his family have collected billions of dollars in foreign money while doling out favors — like the right to sell sophisticated technology to the Chinese — to the very same foreign oligarchs.
- And, he’s openly musing about another term despite the Constitution’s prohibition.
Hey Tom Emmer: Someone around here seems to hate America, or at least the one most of us grew up with. But it’s not my mother-in-law or the millions who will join her across the country Saturday, in burgs and villages and big cities and in your own 6th District, from sea to shining sea, to remind the regime that we are not a nation governed by monarchs and never shall be.
- J. Patrick Coolican is Editor-in-Chief of the Minnesota Reformer. Previously, he was a Capitol reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for five years, after a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan and time at the Las Vegas Sun, Seattle Times and a few other stops along the way. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and two young children
