As President Trump presided over his poorly attended military parade, an estimated 5 million people across over 2,000 U.S. cities took to the streets for “No Kings Day” to protest this administration’s brutality and drive to consolidate authoritarian power.
The nationwide protests were a collective rejection of Trump’s authoritarian impulses — from sending masked ICE agents to kidnap people and deploying the Marines and National Guard to quash dissent.
As longtime peace activists, we’re used to protesting military deployments overseas. But now we’re in an era where ICE is raiding schools, workplaces, churches, and homes, tearing apart families by abducting legal residents, rounding up students for protesting U.S. foreign policy, and detaining elected officials standing with immigrants and for due process.
The U.S. public can no longer afford to ignore the lethal consequences of militarism on our democracy. For starters, just look at the Trump budget that’s moving through Congress.
Trump is calling for an unprecedented $1.1 trillion Pentagon budget — money for war and weapons that comes directly at the expense of programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and other initiatives that actually keep Americans safe.
Fully half of the Pentagon budget goes to for-profit military contractors that sell weapons of mass destruction to authoritarian states and human rights abusers, like Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Other contractors include tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who spent $277 electing Trump. For that, he won a $5.2 billion Pentagon deal and a free pass to demolish government programs the American people support. Or Peter Thiel, whose company Palantir weaponizes surveillance tech against Americans and who says he doesn’t “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Trump and Republicans also want to spend an additional $43.8 billion on mass detentions and deportations next year alone. When you add that Pentagon and anti-immigrant spending together, this militarized budget accounts for 75 percent of the entire discretionary budget.
On top of massive tax cuts for billionaires, this helps explain why there’s no money for social programs and federal agencies that actually help our communities feel safe — like those that promote clean air and water, health care, child nutrition, education, and housing assistance. (In fact, for the $17.9 billion we sent Israel’s military alone last year, we could have funded health care for more than a million veterans at the VA.)
The Trump administration is cutting the heart out of communities to further enrich billionaires, war profiteers, and techno-fascists. At a time when a growing number of people want an end to war, Trump is using our tax dollars to consolidate authoritarian power at home.
We should heed the prescient words of President Eisenhower, a five-star general who led the Allied Forces in WWII to defeat fascism. Eisenhower famously warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
As the White House prepares for an all-out war against Iran, redefining what really makes us secure will be central to defending and expanding democracy.
We must oppose our government’s militarism in responding to peaceful protests, spending our taxpayer dollars, and engaging with the rest of the world. The “No Kings Day” demonstrations — contrasted with Trump’s pathetic military parade — reflected the country Americans want: democracy, care, and cooperation — not more militarism, domination, and violence.
