In response to the record-setting No Kings protest attendance around the country, MAGA-aligned Republicans have largely dismissed their validity, and they keep coming back to a single argument: How can President Donald Trump be a king if America voted for him?
"I don’t understand how Trump is a King when he won every single swing state, the electoral college and popular vote in a democratic election," right-wing TV personality Meghan McCain wrote on X as the protests got underway over the weekend.
But this argument completely misses the point, wrote conservative analyst Jonah Goldberg in a lengthy post of his own, because autocrats come to power through winning elections all the time. It's what they do in office that makes them dangerous.
"Again, this No Kings thing is not my bag. But the almost cultish refusal to understand the point by Trump’s usual apologists is bizarre," wrote Goldberg, a frequent critic of Trump's agenda. "Yes: He was lawfully and legitimately elected. But Stephen Miller’s Jacksonian-Wilsonian theory that Trump has a 'mandate' to do whatever he wants is anti-Constitutional hogwash (it’s amazing how the position of two of the most iconic Democrats in American history is now the religion of the GOP)."
Indeed, he noted, the idea of "mandates" is a fictional concept that doesn't appear anywhere in the Constitution — and "even if Trump won an actual landslide (he didn’t), and all of the voters wanted him to exceed his authority, it wouldn’t (and certainly shouldn’t) matter."
"I honestly never want to hear the faux right wing eggheady refrain 'we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic' ever again from people claiming that Trump can do whatever he wants because 'the American people voted for this,'" wrote Goldberg. "That is the exact opposite of republicanism ffs. It’s also not true. Trump got lots of votes from people who just wanted prices lower or didn’t want [Kamala] Harris to be president. The idea all of his voters pre-approved everything he has done or will do is more cultish nonsense."
Ultimately, he concluded, even if Trump has public support for his actions, it doesn't give him "a scintilla more right or authority to violate the constitution" — and "I’m used to explaining this to democracy fetishists of the left. Didn’t expect to spend the last decades of my career trying to explaining it to populism fetishists of the right."
