Trump shits on protesters. The president’s response to those thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations across the nation: An AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown, flying a “King Trump” fighter jet from which he drops feces on New Yorkers …
■ … in Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch’s words (gift link), “confirming everything that the largest protest in 56 years was all about.”
■ Columnist Paul Waldman: “Trump … told so many lies about No Kings during a gaggle with reporters Sunday evening … that it was hard not to wonder if he’s confusing AI videos with reality.”
■ Law prof Joyce Vance: “This morning, he resorted to a temper tantrum, insisting he would use his ‘absolute power’ to invoke the Insurrection Act … on the heels of a Seventh Circuit decision last week declining to permit Trump to deploy troops to Chicago.”
‘We didn’t come this far to only come this far.’ That’s retired Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown’s favorite sign at Saturday’s Chicago demonstration—with a runner-up a little too risqué even for Chicago Public Square.
■ Everybody’s Entitled to My Own Opinion columnist Jeff Tiedrich awards the Nobel Best Sign At No Kings Day Prize to Wonkette’s Rebecca Schoenkopf.
■ Novelist Gary Shteyngart, writing from Chicago, perceives “the rise of the Inflatable Chicken Resistance.”
■ The march here stretched two miles through the Loop …
■ … and the AP has shots from the U.S. and Europe.
■ The Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg on the protest in Highland Park: “I … was immediately struck by just how old everybody seemed.”
■ Police report not a single arrest as an estimated 100,000 people gathered in Grant Park …
■ … and as more than seven million demonstrated nationwide.
■ And yet, ex-New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan says, the Times’ coverage of the protests amounted to a “shrug.”
Now what? Lawyer/columnist Robert Hubbell: “Don’t wait for anyone to tell you what to do next! You know the drill! You have seen the template in action. Take charge! The resistance will achieve ultimate success when there are thousands of individual leaders who are rallying … every day of the week.”
■ Self-described “out of work political hack” Miles Bruner: “I’m leaving the GOP and … urging my former colleagues to do the same.”
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: “MAGA Republicans have abandoned the idea of politics. … What is left when a system loses the give and take of politics is force.”
■ Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman sees the U.S. in what he calls a “bubble autocracy,” in which “Trump has not yet consolidated anything like absolute political power. But parts of our society—the Republican Party and a number of supposedly independent institutions like, say, CBS—are in effect living inside a bubble in which they operate as if he has.”
Neighbors disrupt manhunt. The Trib says several Mount Prospect residents yesterday yelled expletives and videotaped masked federal agents chasing someone they described as a “dangerous criminal” and a “Venezuelan gang member.”
■ More (another gift link): “They were already living in one of Chicago’s worst apartment buildings. Then came the ICE raid.”
■ ProPublica: “Trump is building a violent, shadowy federal police force.”
■ Popular Information: ICE has increased its weapons spending by 700% this year over last.
■ The Supreme Court’s agreed to decide whether people who regularly smoke pot can legally own guns.
Meanwhile Saturday … Author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich asks, “Why the hell did the Marine Corps fire artillery shells over Interstate 5 … the largest and most-traveled north-south freeway in California”?
■ Vice President Vance’s motorcade and a least one California Highway Patrol cruiser were hit by shrapnel in that “celebration” attended by Vance and Defense Secretary Hegseth.
Nice while it lasted. Celebration of “peace” in the Mideast was short-lived as Israel launched a fresh round of airstrikes on Gaza …
■ … and southern Lebanon.
■ … exposing, in Quartz’s words, “just how centralized the internet-as-we-know-it has become.”
■ On the upside, columnist Matthew Yglesias says, “More streaming video is bad. If you’re streaming video, you’re not doing homework, reading, socializing, or sleeping.”
■ His innovative first-Tuesday-of-the-month Bluesday Tuesday series will continue at FitzGerald’s …
■ … but he says he expects just to be in the audience to “party with the regulars.”
* And cherished Chicago Public Squarian.