Mike Johnson Is Pissed the No Kings Protests Didn’t Turn Violent

Millions of Americans exercised their First Amendment rights on Saturday, turning out in the largest single-day protest in U.S. history to reject Donald Trump’s monarch-like grip on the federal government. But some leaders in Washington were unimpressed by the enormous display of dissent.

Speaking with reporters Monday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson condemned the rhetoric of the protests, falsely claiming that the No Kings protesters advocate for violence against political officials.

“Congratulations, they didn’t burn any buildings down. That’s a big achievement for the left, to have some kind of gathering where they don’t have looting and rioting and burn a building down,” Johnson said.

By and large, the multi-month protest series has advocated for Americans’ First Amendment rights and rejected Trump’s agenda. Signage related to the event has emphasized the fight for democracy and against dictatorships. In the same political vein, No Kings participants have used their enormous visual footprint to fight against ICE’s unchecked authority, turn out for universal health care, condemn the release of disgraced former Representative George Santos, and raise national awareness to the rise of American fascism.

Somewhere between five and eight million people participated in the nationwide protest over the weekend, and it was remarkably peaceful. Organizers said that more than 2,500 individual events had been planned across the country for Saturday. Despite premature mobilizations of the National Guard in red states such as Virginia and Texas, there was no violence.

As evidence: One of the nation’s largest gatherings in New York City, which amassed some 100,000 people, according to estimates, resulted in zero protest-related arrests by the New York City Police Department.

Still, Republican leadership interpreted the event as an all out assault on the president’s life.

“Over and over again, you could see signs like ‘86-47,’” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, referring to an old restaurant term that means to nix an item off the menu. “I think everybody knows what that’s about. Multiple signs like that, advocating for the death of our president.”

Johnson was similarly unwilling to celebrate or even highlight the crowd control achievement. Instead, he fired paltry rhetorical shots at Portland, which has seen anti-ICE protesters dance and dress up in inflatable frog costumes since Trump directed the National Guard to the hipster paradise.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer was even more vocal about his party’s contempt for the anti-Trump demonstration. Speaking at the same conference, Emmer falsely claimed that protests were the fruit of an alliance between establishment Democrats and domestic terrorists.

“It’s pure partisan politics in a desperate attempt to score points with the radical, pro-terrorist wing of their party,” Emmer said. “Now that their Hate America Rally is over, I hope that at least five Senate Democrats will finally do the right and responsible thing by breaking ranks with Chuck Schumer, passing our clean C.R., and reopening the government.”

Meanwhile, political violence has proved to be a phenomenon that persists in and defies both major parties, failing to fall neatly into a convenient, sellable narrative that can be repackaged for voters or donors. In truth, recent spikes in political violence have harmed both public figures (Charlie Kirk, Melissa Hortman) and regular Americans alike.

The only common denominator amongst all recent political violence is wide public access to guns, a detail that sets the U.S. far apart from the rest of the developed world.

Donald Trump on Sunday admitted, once again, that he is treating the ongoing government shutdown as a revenge tour against Democrats, boasting about impeding federal funds for a crucial transit route in the New York metropolitan area.

On day one of the shutdown, White House budget director Russell Vought announced that he would withhold funds for the Hudson Tunnel project, a plan to expand service along the country’s busiest rail route via new and improved rail tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey.

Vought said the freeze was to ensure the funds were not used for diversity, equity, and inclusion purposes. But the president’s comments reveal “DEI” to have been a fig leaf, with the move actually meant to hurt Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat who has long pushed for the project.

Making this ulterior motive not-so-ulterior, Trump last week said: “The project in New York, it’s billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get. It’s terminated. Tell him it’s terminated.”

On Sunday, the president continued to make clear that he’s using the shutdown to exact revenge on Democrats, particularly vis-à-vis the Hudson Tunnel project.

“As of now, it’s terminated,” Trump said of the project while aboard Air Force One. “And that’s up to me. And as of now it’s terminated, and it’s terminated because the Democrats are so foolish, what they’ve done to the country.”

It’s a damning sound bite. While Trump’s intended target is clearly Schumer, the real victims of the move are the hundreds of thousands of rail riders who commute daily across the Hudson River—not to mention the millions more adversely impacted by other cuts Trump has made during the shutdown to programs that he claims Democrats “like.”

On Sunday, Justice Department whistleblower Erez Reuveni told 60 Minutes what the public has suspected for months now: The Trump administration told him to lie to a judge about Kilmar Ábrego García being a gang member after it mistakenly deported him.

“And I respond up the chain of command: No way. That is not correct. That is not factually correct, it’s not legally correct. That is a lie. And I cannot sign my name to that briefing,” Reuveni, who has since been fired from the DOJ, said.

“You’re not saying Ábrego García is a choirboy, you’re just saying no one had managed to prove that he was a terrorist,” 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley replied.

“Here’s the really important thing. Whether Mr. Ábrego García is or isn’t a member of MS-13 or a terrorist or anything else, is beside the point,” Reuveni continued. “What matters here is that they did everything they did to him in violation of his due process rights. What’s to stop them if they decide they don’t like you anymore? To say you’re a criminal, you’re a member of MS-13? You’re a terrorist? What’s to stop them from sending in some DOJ attorney at the direction of DOJ leadership to delay, to filibuster, and if necessary, to lie?”

The Trump administration has been peddling lies about Ábrego García for months, even comparing him to Osama bin Laden.

“The administration maintains the position that this individual who was deported to El Salvador and will not be returning to our country was a member of the brutal and vicious MS-13 gang,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, back in April. “That is fact number one. Fact number two: We also have credible intelligence proving that this individual was involved in human trafficking. And fact number three: This individual was a member, actually a leader, of the brutal MS-13 gang, which this president has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”

These were all lies. Ábrego García remains in ICE detention in Pennsylvania after the administration failed to deport him to Africa, despite his having no ties to the continent.

Donald Trump suspended aid to a country whose leader compared him to Adolf Hitler—and has since accused the U.S. president of murder.

Trump announced Sunday that he would slash all financial assistance for Colombia. He claimed on Truth Social that the decision was in response to levels of drug trafficking from Colombia to the United States, calling Colombian President Gustavo Petro “an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs, in big and small fields, all over Colombia.”

The U.S. president later told reporters that he planned to impose new tariffs on the Latin American country. It’s unclear what the new level would be, or how much aid would be cut. The New York Times reported Sunday that Trump had previously slashed aid to Colombia to about one fourth of what was promised at the beginning of the year.

On Saturday, Petro took to social media to criticize the Trump administration for carrying out an extrajudicial military strike on a Colombian vessel in September, claiming that the attack had killed a lifelong fisherman. “U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Petro wrote on social media.

This wasn’t the first time Petro had spoken out against Trump. Speaking in front of the United Nations last month, Petro called Trump America’s “new Hitler.”

“The old societies of Europe are collapsing,” he said, “and the United States is applauding its new Hitler. It’s not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants, and it’s stated that migrants are of an inferior race, and they blame them just like Hitler blamed the Jews. They call them drug traffickers and thieves.”

Petro responded Sunday to Trump’s outburst, in a post on X, claiming the Trump administration had been “rude and ignorant” toward Colombia, in spite of his country’s respect for American culture.

“I don’t do business like you do; I am a socialist, I believe in aid and the common good and in the common goods of humanity, the greatest of all: life, put in danger by your oil,” he wrote. “If I am not a merchant, then much less a drug trafficker; in my heart there is no greed.

“I could never get along with greed,” he added.

Donald Trump’s latest meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy began with lunch and ended in a shouting match.

The attempted peace negotiation Friday reportedly saw Trump cussing out the Ukrainian leader and throwing Zelenskiy’s maps of the battlefield while insisting that he cede portions of Ukraine-controlled eastern Donbas to Russia.

Trump’s options for the war-battered leader, according to a European official that spoke with the Financial Times, were either accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s terms or “be destroyed.”

“If [Putin] wants it, he will destroy you,” Trump reportedly told Zelenskiy.

But leaders in Ukraine’s Parliament understand that Putin’s offer is a fundamentally impossible choice.

“To give [the Donbas] to Russia without a fight is unacceptable for Ukrainian society, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin knows that,” Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the Ukrainian Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told the Financial Times.

European governments rushed to Zelenskiy’s defense, alarmed by Trump’s trust that the Russian dictator would end the encroachment on such terms.

“We see President Trump’s efforts to bring peace to Ukraine, all these efforts are welcome but we don’t see Russia wanting peace,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, told the Financial Times on Monday. “We are discussing what more we can do.”

Trump (and his wife Melania) has boasted for years about his cozy relationship with Putin, but in recent months appeared to pull an about-face on his opinion of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, seemingly negotiating in favor of Ukraine.

Last month, Trump claimed that Ukraine could reclaim all of its occupied territory, and last week raised the possibility of delivering Tomahawk missiles—which have a range of more than 1,500 miles with incredible accuracy—to Kyiv should Russia not end its assault.

Putin’s other strategies for a peace deal have similarly involved egregious land grabs. Earlier this year, Trump and his allies were more than willing to reverse long-standing U.S. policy by acknowledging Crimea as part of Russia. That flub made Kremlin propagandists on state-sponsored television laugh at the downfall of American power.

Trump claimed Sunday night that he and Zelenskiy “never discussed” ceding all of Donbas, but that the Ukrainian president should just “let it be cut the way it is.”

“I think 78 percent of the land is already taken by Russia. You leave it the way it is right now,” he told reporters on Air Force One.