It was the largest protest in US history. It was also embarrassingly irrelevant

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A sequel to the first and equally feckless demonstrations held in June, they involved what the organisers claimed to have been 7 million Americans, potentially making them the largest protests in American history.

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For all the participants’ bile and determination, the event unfolded as a vulgar, cranky carnival of disgruntled old people holding signs with saucy slogans, dressing up in bizarre costumes, and carrying the occasional American flag upside down, a traditional indication of distress. “No Kings” has no obvious leaders, no coherent political programme or action plan, no clearly defined next steps, and not even a hint of another date for a third such demonstration. Apart from a disdain for Trump and personal endorsements by some Democratic leaders, it has no discernible ideology, no community, and little else that could define it as a movement.

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And for all the supposed urgency of the demonstrations, by mid-afternoon the protestors were largely gone. In the end, all they succeeded in doing was draining themselves of energy that could have gone into practical measures to oppose policies to which they object.

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And, in what “No Kings” protestors may well have taken as an especially strong rebuke, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s controversial deployment of National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, is legal and can continue. Perhaps we will see the protestors again, but their wheels are spinning in a world that has no regard for them.

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