Transcript: Deep in Texas Trump Country, No Kings Cleverly Shames MAGA

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 20 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

In the days leading up to the No Kings protests, President Trump and Republicans widely derided the protesters as extremists, criminals, and terrorists. Then the protests actually happened. They were a wild success. Peaceful, enormous, and representative of a very wide swath of American society. So what did Republicans do in response? They just kept on calling the protesters criminals and terrorists. Republicans only seemed able to talk to their own base about these extraordinary events. And in his response, Trump accidentally revealed in his own way that the protests had actually succeeded.

Writer Ana Marie Cox has a great piece for the New Republic reporting on what the protests looked like in a red county in Texas, an area that just happens to be represented by MAGA Republican Chip Roy, who had his own deranged response to them. So we’re talking to her about all this today. Ana, thanks for coming on.

Ana Marie Cox: Hi, it’s good to be here.

Sargent: So data analyst G. Eliott Morris estimates that well over 4 million people and possibly as many as 6 million people turned out at these protests nationwide. That’s within striking distance of what the organizers say, which is that 7 million turned out. Regardless, Morris thinks this was the biggest single day protest event in over half a century at least. Ana, can you tell us where you were and what you saw?

Cox: Yes, I was in New Braunfels, Texas, which is about halfway between here and San Antonio. I’m in Austin. And although the whole I-35 corridor has gotten pretty suburban and blue, this is a red district. It’s represented by Chip Roy, as you said.

And having gone to a bunch of protests in Austin over the years, what struck me about this protest is that it was older and whiter, and as I said in my piece, the aesthetics of it could have been transplanted onto a Tea Party rally. These are very self-consciously pro-America folks. I would consider them “normies,” to use an internet phrase.

Sargent: Yeah, I mean, the overwhelming message that came out of these from what I’ve seen both in person and on social media and so forth is the kind of powerful patriotism of it. Can you talk about that?

Cox: Yes. I saw that at Austin protests—but Austin protests bring out a lot of college students, a lot of folks who are wearing, let’s say, Palestinian flags and combination Palestinian-American flags. A lot of people with pretty traditionally, let’s say, leftisf, left-of-Democrat points of view. These people were not that, let’s say.

I had talked to one woman who had a sign—all of them, almost every sign I saw was handmade, by the way. There was no one there from Indivisible handing out pre-printed signs.

Sargent: Wait, it didn’t say paid for by George Soros at the bottom?

Cox: Not only did it not say that, but there was no one printing out the PDFs that Indivisible has available. There were people who just handmade their own signs. So that meant a lot of the signs had way too much information on them—which also tells me these might be first-time protesters.

So this woman I was talking to, in a lawn chair, had a sign that said: I love: God, country, church, family, friends, my dog, Texas, and democracy. And then she had a bunch of Bible verses—too many, in a way—Bible verses on the other side.

She was not someone who would have shown up—I didn’t ask her—but I don’t think she’s someone who would have shown up for the Women’s March. These are people who’ve been activated—I’m not going to say radicalized, I mean, maybe that’s coming—but activated by what’s happening in Washington. They’re not, they’re not, you know, Soros protesters. They probably don’t know who George Soros is.

Sargent: Well, absolutely. Now let’s listen to what Donald Trump said about the protests.

President Donald Trump (voiceover): I think it’s a joke. looked at the people. They’re not representative of this country. And I looked at all the brand new signs paid for, I guess it was paid for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. It looks like it was. We’re checking it out. The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective. And the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative, of the people of our country.

Reporter: Mr. President, besides San Francisco...

President Donald Trump (voiceover): I’m not a king. I’m not a king. I work my ass off to make our country great. That’s all it is. I’m not a king at all.

Sargent: What’s striking there is that Trump suddenly finds himself forced to deny that he’s a king. Now, obviously Trump is right now essentially trying to neuter the other branches to give himself unconstrained dictatorial power in various ways. He’s throwing out royal decrees. His advisors are openly asserting that his power is quasi unlimited, etc. But, Ana, at least Trump kind of accidentally illustrated there why these protests are necessary, right? One thing I got from your piece is that people really understand that that’s what’s at stake.

Cox: Yes. I believe that people have internalized the idea that this is an existential threat—that this is America under a kind of threat that we haven’t seen ever, I think. This kind of internal threat.

And I don’t think that the lack of far-left signage and whatnot at this protest should be taken as a sign that they’re not serious. These people are incredibly aware of the stakes. And that’s why they were on Main Street in New Braunfels at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, when they probably could have been... there are much more traditional things to be doing. But there were at least a hundred people at this protest.

It was so orderly. There was a woman patrolling the sidewalk, keeping people off the main sidewalk—and one cop, one in shorts, off to the side.

Sargent: That’s amazing. It really doesn’t sound like it was criminals and terrorists. It sounds like a Sunday school picnic.

Cox: It had that vibe. It had like, I said in my piece, either church, a church picnic or band fundraiser, I would say.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s definitely not the caricature. And what I find so strange about it is that they’re really only able to speak in this one key about this, you know? And to that point, I want to play some audio of Mike Johnson. This comes after Trump posted this imagery of him in a plane, literally shitting on the protests, shitting on Americans, shitting on America. Mike Johnson was asked about that and said this.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (voiceover): The president uses social media to make a point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that. He is using satire to make a point. He is not calling for the murder of his political opponents. And that’s what these people are doing.

Sargent: So Johnson again calls the protesters criminals and violent, etc. They can only talk to their base on this topic. They’re not allowed to admit that mainstream America is largely turning on Trump. It would infuriate the despot. But his approval is at a new low—he’s underwater on every major issue—but they can’t allow that any popular anti-Trump sentiment is real or authentic.

Cox: I think that this is a mistake on their part—to continue to talk about the protests and mainstream Americans as violent extremists. You know, as paid protesters, as part of Antifa. In doing that, they’re creating a disconnect between people’s lived experience and what the Trump administration is saying.

So one of the most heartening things to me about going out to this protest in red America—in red Texas—is that people were like, Antifa who? As someone who likes the movement, I would prefer that they be able to embrace it. But these people know they’re not violent. They know they’re not paid. They know they’re not members of something called Antifa—although they think Antifa is an organization.

But because Trump and his cronies are calling Antifa an organization, these people who are showing up on a Saturday morning know they’re lying. They’re seeing a lie in real time. And I think that that could be very bad for the administration.

Sargent: I mean, that’s an essential point, it seems to me, because if I read you correctly, what you’re getting at there is that a lot of these people that are showing up at these protests just aren’t really kind of terminally online. So they’re not like they’re not like kind of deeply embedded in these debates that you and I are embedded in.

Cox: So I think a good example of how they have fallen into this—this pattern of people not actually seeing their lies, or of exaggerating too much—has to do with ICE. And there were anti-ICE signs at this very mid-sized protest I was at.

And I think that is people seeing law-abiding immigrants being taken away by masked forces. The line I have in my piece is that it doesn’t compute for an everyday, normal, non-online American to hear from the administration, We’re going after MS-13, and then to see the ice cream guys curb-stomped, right? Like, you can’t tell people, We’re going after drug dealers, and then a suburban homeowner can’t get their deck built because all the guys they used to go to at Home Depot aren’t there anymore.

This is a thing that everyday Americans are suddenly seeing—like trans ideology, they know that’s not happening. They know that there is nothing to be afraid of there. And that disconnect is bad for them. That disconnect then leads to other realizations of disconnects, I think.

Sargent: I find it really interesting that you saw anti-ice signs in this place in red Texas. I really think the masks have tremendous power for a lot of people. That the imagery of these masked secret agent types, these secret police as they’re being called, that triggers an anti-totalitarian impulse in a lot of Americans. And I don’t think that the mainstream discourse has gotten its collective head around just how triggering that is in a good way. It’s really alienating to a lot of people to see the masked secret police, I think.

Cox: I think so, too. I think that it’s happening in their neighborhoods. And that’s the disconnect I’m talking about. And it’s happening in Texas all around us that we live among an immigrant population and are friends with them, and they are service workers. And then suddenly they’re not there. And you know that that person you hired to help you out on some task around the house or like a contractor suddenly disappears, you know that they’re a law abiding citizen and you maybe see on the news that they were taken away by masked men. We’ve all seen the movies, you know? We’ve seen the movies. That’s not the good guys that do that.

Sargent: Right. Disappearances in the dead of night without due process. That’s the thing that I think means something to a lot of people.

Cox: I think so too. I think that the other thing I saw at this protest, and I want to be clear, they were mostly normie offline folks. And of course there were some people who are probably outliers in their neighborhood, but who showed up. There was several people in shirts that said resist like it’s 1933, which is a real specific reference.

Sargent: I think the No Kings protests do upend a lot of the pundit and MSM mainstream media understanding of the moment in this other way. You’ll probably recall that at the outset of Trump’s second term, a big take was that, you know, super savvy take was that the anti-Trump energy isn’t close to what it was the first time around. I think in media speak, that was sort of shorthand for the idea that Trump had won, right? In some deep sense, that his right-wing populism had triumphed, that the country has authentically moved towards Trump. You just read that everywhere. But if anything, like the anti-Trump energy might be more active this time than the last time. What do you make of all that? And what do you think it says about where we are in this moment broadly?

Cox: I think the real difference between the first Trump win and the second Trump win is that the second Trump win felt like a real dagger to the heart in a way that the first one didn’t. The first one was a surprise—the first one was, Oh my God, this sucks. Oh my God, we better do something, right? And then we did something. Lots of us—we did something. We went out, we marched, we protested, and then Biden won.

It was kind of like, we’re going to be okay. And I think there were people who thought things were going to be okay. You know, a lot of liberals—even if you were worried about Trump winning—there was like, Oh, you know... And then Trump winning a second time, even if it was somewhat predicted by the polls, although I was a little surprised—it was crushing. It was really crushing.

And then the way that they came out of the gate, you know, all shock and awe—it wasn’t that people felt less strongly about how terrible it was. It was that—I don’t know about you—but I was crestfallen. I was, like, I think literally quite depressed and felt pretty helpless. And it’s taken a little while for people to start buying in again to the meaningfulness of protest.

Sargent: Yeah. Because I, to put that all together, what I take from it is that The first time nobody really knew what Trump was made of, maybe he was a showman, maybe a lot of it wasn’t sincere, blah, blah, blah, blah. The country actually organized and worked really hard to get him out and did so successfully. One in 2018, 2020, and then largely one in 2022 to sort of, you know, hopefully kind of put the hammer blow on, on MAGA. And of course it didn’t happen for a whole bunch of reasons. And I think maybe people looked at that and thought, well, the system acted democratically to constrain this guy and he still didn’t face accountability in the courts and in the justice system. And then we couldn’t sustain that democratic impulse long enough to keep him out a second time. The whole system is in real trouble. That’s what I think you’re saying, right?

Cox: Yeah, it was. I think what people—the mainstream institutional journalists, pundit take—was...they saw the lack of energy, which I do think was a lack of energy in direct response. I think you didn’t see the same kind of, like, immediate mobilization, right? They saw that, and they determined—they inferred from that—that it meant people didn’t feel as strongly. And that was a misinterpretation.

What I think happened was that people felt so strongly that they were dispirited. They were so impacted by the Trump second win and were so against what was happening that it felt like a body blow. And it took a little while—and I have to thank, you know, Indivisible and No Kings and the other people behind that. And also let’s not forget the on-the-ground organizers who we’ve never heard of, who are at work in mutual aid organizations across the country that you may never meet, that never gave up, right? Like Hands Off Central Texas here in Central Texas, the Free Fridge program here in Central Texas, which also mobilizes around other things.

Those people did not quiet down. Those people quietly built up all these places of resistance—including trans people supporting trans rights also did a lot of this. They couldn’t afford to go quiet. Trans people in Texas needed their ideas changed immediately, right? And before Trump was inaugurated there was a huge push to do that.

And then, step by step, I think people started to see that resistance was still possible. And by the time you got to June, No Kings—that was a real inflection point. And seeing that solidarity, I think, was very moving to a lot of people. And there were probably people who didn’t go in June, who saw those on social media, saw those signs, and saw those numbers, and then in October felt, You know what? Maybe it does make a difference. I think it’ll continue to build.

Sargent: Well I want to ask you about that but first we’re going to do a little comic relief. Here is Representative Chip Roy talking about the protests.

Congressmen Chip Roy (voiceover): And the truth is the Marxists, the radicals and the Islamists, the Democratic Party promoted this weekend. They cannot handle the truth. The truth is that there is a king and that king is Jesus. And the president has been willing to say it. His administration has been willing to say it. And Charlie Kirk was willing to say it and he got killed for it.

Sargent: So a funny thing about that is Chip Roy denounced the protesters as extremists. You were in Roy’s territory and you saw something pretty funny along those lines. Can you tell us what it was?

Cox: Ironic, if not hilarious. So, you know, Chip Roy and other MAGA Christians often do this thing about No King but Jesus. They have a theocratic interpretation of. I also am a Christian, and what I learned in Unitarian and Protestant, you know, liberal churches—more progressive churches—is that what No King but Jesus means is: I bow to no earthly authority; I answer ultimately to Christ, whose instructions are pretty clear, honestly, about how we treat immigrants and how we treat each other.

And so I feel like Chip Roy is missing the point of his own quote there. Because MAGA Christians who say something like that have actually installed a king. They have installed Trump as their king. They are not adhering to what they claim to believe theologically, which is that Trump should not be ruling. We should be taking our cues from the, you know, love one another part of the Bible—the red letters, I always like to say.

Sargent: Well, and also some of the Christians on the ground there, I would assume, would use that same language, No King but Jesus, but he’s calling them extremists. And of course their understanding of it is not the extreme one. His is.

Cox: There were signs that said No King but Jesus. And there were those signs, and other signs, that had the quotes from Leviticus and John about how we treat each other and how we care for the sojourner and the immigrant. And we feed, and we clothe, and we house those who are, you know, suffering. And that, to me, is the part of the Christian doctrine that resonates—just for me personally. And it’s often, when I talk to other people who are showing signs like that or who are coming—like, there were priests and nuns at protests all across the country—when you talk to them about their faith, they see their faith as very much in the mainstream of Christianity.

Sargent: Can this be sustained and will it be enough?

Cox: I can’t answer the latter question—whether or not it can be enough. I believe it can be sustained. I think that you have to keep going. And my approach—you know, I have to think in terms of the next right step and not the end result.

If I get too caught up in, like, This is definitely going to work, that can lead to things like what happened for me after the election, which is I was so downtrodden that it was hard to function. Instead, I have to think about doing the things that I can do, which are somewhat constrained by being a journalist. But, you know, we work for The New Republic. We can do a lot.

And I hope that that’s what people listening and reading do as well—do the thing that you can do, even if it seems like it won’t necessarily work, even if you have a big dream and that big dream seems impossible, because you never know what will happen.

And I think the more people that go to these protests, the more they get in touch with other organizations on the ground and do the things you do between protests. Like this movement—I think people feel how necessary it is. Then the next step is to let them know that they’re necessary also, and that they get to be a part of... they’re necessary to this necessary movement. And then I think that just snowballs. I believe it will be enough.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you the big messages coming out of this are you’re not alone and every little bit you do counts. It really does count. Anne-Marie Cox, thank you so much for talking to us. It was so much fun.

Cox: Thank you.