[Today, let me recommend the splendid latest novel by that splendid novelist Beverly Gologorsky, who once upon a time wrote for me at TomDispatch. Its title: The Angle of Falling Light and in it she draws on her own working-class background (as she has done in the past) to compose a gripping tale of working-class life in New York City. Don’t miss it! Tom]

Yes, I’ve done this twice before, both times in 2025. Consider this my third (post-)No Kings Day piece, which, like the previous ones, won’t appear until days after that protest holiday (of sorts) goes down in history. Unfortunately, in the latest version, there will be a distinct emphasis on the “no.”

The news coverage of the most recent No Kings Day appeared significantly more subdued than in the past and the marches and rallies that day seemingly (or at least reportedly) were smaller than once upon a time. It evidently mattered not at all that we are now in a world where kingships (a politely outmoded word for dictatorships or autocracies) seem to be spreading. After all, two of the three greatest powers on the planet, the United States and Russia, certainly seem to have moved toward modern-day versions of kings with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and the third one (Xi Jinping of China) isn’t exactly an elected leader.

As it turned out, my own version of No Kings Day reportage has put an emphasis on that “no” and may have proven all too personally symbolic of the moment we’re now in. Once upon a time, I went to the huge No Kings demonstrations/marches in New York City where I live and recorded and wrote about them in my own fashion. As I put it in October 2025 about the previous one I attended,

“Yes, in the ever more ominously unsettled (dis-)United States of Donald J. Trump, I recently went to the ‘hate America’ rally in New York City. Or at least that’s what Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson insisted it was. Who knew that so unbelievably many Americans, millions of us across the United States, would “hate” this country enough to go out and march in the recent No Kings demonstrations, even in places where we might have feared being in distinct danger from the troops of “our” president? In the days before the latest No Kings demonstrations, no matter whom I talked to or where they lived, they seemed to be planning to go to their local version of that march/rally….”

However, in the days before the latest NKD (if you don’t mind my now abbreviating it), nobody in the Trump administration or among the Republicans in Congress had a nasty thing (or even anything) to say about it as far as I could tell. For that matter, just about no one I knew said much of anything about it either or was making plans to attend one of the NKD events in New York City.

I did, however, prepare for it myself in what has become my usual fashion. I carefully pocketed a couple of pens and the very modest-sized notebook that I had already used when I last interviewed and chatted with people (and scribbled down their endlessly inventive protest signs) at the No Kings rally I attended in October 2025 and about which I wrote a piece for TomDispatch (which I was then still running).

Then, walking to the subway to head down to it, I experienced a first. A nearly all-white pigeon just about flew into me, its wing grazing my right jacket sleeve. I considered it a sign (but of what I hadn’t the faintest idea).

I then ran into an acquaintance on the subway platform, where on such days I would usually begin my coverage by writing down all the protest signs people on the subway were carrying to one of the demonstrations. On this day, however, I saw not one single homemade sign in anyone’s hands on the subway car I was riding in or in the station. She and I went downtown together until the train stopped at 57th Street (where she was also going) and we climbed the stairs to Columbus Circle, where I’ve often enough begun marches in the past.

Here, however, was the strange thing: when I stepped out, it was early afternoon in New York and that busy circle in the heart of Manhattan did indeed have any number of people passing to and fro on it, but there wasn’t a protest sign in sight or the typical cluster of demonstrators gathering for the start of any march. I circled that circle carefully, asking random people repeatedly about the No Kings march, but no one knew a thing. Finally, I came across an older fellow (like — hint, hint — someone I know all too well — and I mean myself, of course) and he pulled out his cell phone to check on the nearest march and showed me that I had ended up in the wrong place entirely.

And then, strangely depressed and shivering in the chill, I walked back to the subway station and headed home. Let’s hope I do better at the next No Kings Day demonstration, since, barring an act of nature, we’re all too likely to have both King Donald and me around for (at least) two more years.

The Symbol (Beyond All Symbols!) of Decline and Fall

In some strange fashion, however, my experience came to seem to me like the perfect protest moment in Donald Trump’s misbegotten version of America, where nothing turns out right anymore. If I had made a sign, I think it might have said: “This Land Is (Not) My Land” (or the world version of the same), since these days that’s the way it increasingly feels to this old man.

When I finally got back home, irritated at myself and thoroughly protest-less, and thought about what I had just experienced, it seemed like the perfect personalized protest symbol of Donald Trump’s America. After all, whether you’re trying to protest or not, nothing really seems to be going well in this country (or this world) of ours, does it?

I mean, how the hell did my land ever get him a second time around? We’re talking — and I don’t care what you think of him — about a madman running what had not so long ago been the most powerful country on Earth. Someday, if we’re all still around on this ever-stranger planet of ours, he will undoubtedly be remembered as the symbol (beyond all symbols or, in noise terms, do I mean cymbals?) of decline and fall — not just of the most powerful nation on the planet but (no small thanks to him) of the planet itself (at least as a livable place for humanity).

Honestly, in this day and age, on this ever more disturbed and overheating world of ours, how could a near majority of Americans have re(yes re!)elected a man who denies that even the most obvious planetary changes are actually happening. In truth, it’s beyond madness. Or rather, I mean: he’s beyond madness and so, increasingly, is this world of ours.

At some deep level, none of this makes any sense whatsoever to me anymore. Climate change is not exactly a hard phenomenon to grasp, and a president of the United States who is determined to deny reality at such a basic level, in some ways the most basic imaginable, seems (or at least should seem) beyond comprehension. And yet here — and nowhere else — we are now, even if I can’t quite take it in.

I mean this is simply not the world I ever would have wanted to leave to my children and grandchildren. And yet, welcome to Donald Trump’s planet Earth.

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