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It wasn't just the largest protest in US history. It may have been the largest protest in world history. An estimated 7 to 8 million people gathered together in the United States on Saturday to protest the fascistic Trump regime. But it didn't stop there. Huge crowds outside the US embassy in London and other European cities joined America in solidarity. The message was clear: the rest of the world doesn't want Trump either.
The banners in London, Madrid and Washington carried the same unadorned message. No divine right. No special immunity. No man above the law. One particularly clever banner read, "Make Orwell fiction again."
Leah Greenberg of Indivisible, one of the organisers of the No Kings protests, called the movement "a peaceful show of defiance." And peaceful it was indeed. The protesters were, as Heather Cox Richardson put it, "waving American flags and wearing frog and unicorn and banana costumes and carrying homemade signs."
The protesters were not pro-Hamas, they were not "Antifa" (except in the sense that they were anti-fascism), they didn't hate America, in fact they love America. They were parents, grandparents, old and young, black, brown and white, Democrats and Republicans, of all backgrounds and beliefs and professions.
They were united by the single idea of rescuing the American tradition of self-governance from a man who believes public power is his own personal property.
Since taking office ten months ago, Trump has indeed behaved as though the American republic was his personal inheritance. He has threatened to defund universities for allowing dissent, mustered National Guard troops into cities that displeased him and mocked courts that refused to indulge his whims.
Trump, characteristically, pretended not to be bothered by Saturday's enormous protests, proving yet again that denial is his favourite form of confession. "They're referring to me as a king. I'm not a king," he told Fox Business. Republicans meanwhile accused Democrats of staging a "hate-America rally," as if love of country were measured by obedience to one man.
The protests drew support from over 300 grassroots groups, the ACLU among them, and from figures like Senator Bernie Sanders, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bill and Hillary Clinton. But the most telling feature was the sheer ordinariness of those who joined, the teachers, the veterans, the shopkeepers, the students.
Saturday's protest was everything we hoped it would be, and more. Whenever there was violence it was started by Trump's goons and finished by the people, who refused to participate. The protest was the quintessential refutation of Trump. It proved that Americans hate Trump almost as much as they love their country. It was America's finest hour. Or certainly one of them.