Maeve Bidonde, Staff Writer
The No Kings Protests started on June 14th, President Trump’s birthday. The parade put on by president Trump was referred to by The No Kings Protest website as an “attempt to turn June 14th into a coronation”. This parade was drowned out by protesters rallying against President Trump. Over 2,700 events across the country which the protest website categorized as “an uprising nationwide” was 14 times larger than both of Trump’s inaugurations combined. The protests are designed to be a peaceful stand against the President and his administration.
Recently a mass of protests dubbed “No Kings” has made its way across the nation. There were protests in some towns in New York as well. However, recently there was a protest in Washington D.C. Before the protests started off last weekend notable Republican politicians set to work condemning the protests. NPR writes that Speaker Mike Johnson referred to the protests as “Hate America” rallies and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave the warning that the protests would bring out “the most unhinged in the Democratic party.” However the protesters that showed up seemed to be the opposite of what Republicans feared.
A plethora of frogs, pandas, koalas, woodchucks, sharks, and lobsters instead joined the protests and one such protester showed up in an inflatable unicorn. The unicorn’s name is Scott Rohrbach, a senior optical engineer at NASA. Joining Scott was a poodle and a chicken dancing to drum music along with three dinosaurs near the National Gallery. When NPR asked Scott why he came as a unicorn instead of a frog he said “I would have come as a frog, but I couldn’t find a frog,” sadly all of the frog costumes were sold out at the store. He also revealed that he wore the costume to show that protesters are not the hate filled Americans Republicans think they are.
The president’s response to the protests according to NPR was to tell reporters that “I think it’s a joke, I looked at the people. They’re not representative of this country.” He even went as far as to post an AI generated video of himself wearing a crown and flying a jet dumping brown sludge on protesters. This came on the heels of an interview preview clip in which BBC quotes Trump as saying “A king! This is not an act, You know – they’re referring to me as a king. I’m not a king.”
The idea of wearing fun animal costumes to protests came from a video of a previous protest in which ICE pepper sprayed the air valve of a frog costume because the man in the costume was trying to help a fellow protester at an anti-ICE protest. In Portland such costumes were bought with money donated by Jordy Lybeck’s, a political streamer’s viewers and delivered to ICE Facilities. They called it “Operation Inflation” and the goal is to counteract Trump’s stance that Portland was a war zone and needed immediate intervention from ICE and the National Guard. According to the BBC, cities in Europe are standing in solidarity with the protesters. Those cities include Berlin, Madrid, and Rome. There were similar protests in Toronto, Canada outside the US Consulate where signs saying “hands off Canada” were held up.
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