The Empire requires consensus, not a king

Last weekend, Americans in record numbers took to the streets in what organisers called the “No Kings” protests – a nationwide rebuke of Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts, his administration’s aggressive deportation campaigns, its rush to war with Iran, and its assault on free expression. The demonstrations were large, impassioned, and understandable. They were also, in a crucial sense, dangerously insufficient.

Trump invites a particular kind of attention. His public statements are blunt to the point of being cartoonish, his contempt for expertise and scientific reason is worn as a badge of honour, and his disdain for diplomatic niceties makes the violence of American statecraft visible in ways that more polished presidents are careful to obscure. It is tempting to read in him a singular villain, a man whose personality alone has bent the arc of American power towards cruelty. But to hold Trump alone responsible for the actions of the American state is to misread what that state actually is, and has long been.

Weeks earlier, Joe Kent, a senior United States counterterrorism official, resigned in protest over the war in Iran. His stated reason was that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US, and that the administration had launched the war under pressure from Israel and its American lobby. The candour was remarkable. The underlying reality, however, is not new.

Iran’s defiance of American-Israeli dominance in West Asia makes it an obstacle to Israeli expansionist ambitions in the region – and through AIPAC, the most powerful foreign policy lobbying organisation in Washington, Israel has secured unqualified, bipartisan support across administrations for decades. The worst of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza unfolded with the full, unwavering backing of the US under President Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic predecessor. American weapons, American diplomatic cover, and American vetoes at the United Nations made the campaign possible. None of that changed when administrations did.

Nor is American interference in Iranian affairs a Trumpian innovation. In 1953, the CIA – working alongside British intelligence – orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, in an operation known as Ajax. Mosaddegh had nationalised Iran’s oil industry, threatening Western commercial interests. The CIA funded media propaganda, bribed officials, and paid agitators to manufacture political chaos, ultimately restoring the Shah to power. The hostility that defines today’s crisis has roots that Washington itself planted, across administrations of every stripe.

The same structural continuity applies to immigration enforcement. During Trump’s first term, between 2017 and 2021, Democratic members of Congress repeatedly voted for omnibus spending bills that included full funding for the Department of Homeland Security and, within it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The justification was procedural – a complete shutdown would disrupt the Transportation Security Administration and other functions – but the effect was to fund the very apparatus now being used for mass deportations.

Some Democrats even voted to confirm leadership for agencies that implemented the “zero tolerance” policy and the family separation programme they simultaneously condemned at press conferences. The legal framework permitting detention and deportation was never seriously challenged; Democrats called for “humane” enforcement, not structural reform.

An entrenched rationale

On questions of speech and information, the Democratic record is similarly compromised. The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined – a pattern that journalists argued produced a chilling effect on national security reporting.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, spent years in a British prison fighting extradition to the US. This prosecution, initiated under Obama-era legal frameworks and continued under successive administrations, stems from his publishing classified documents that revealed American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killing of civilians and journalists. The prosecution of a publisher for publishing was treated by much of the mainstream American press not as a constitutional crisis but as a matter of national security.

That press had itself, a decade earlier, repeated without adequate scrutiny the false intelligence claims that justified the invasion of Iraq, claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be entirely fabricated. The same outlets framed the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya as a humanitarian undertaking, obscuring the devastation that followed.

Undergirding all of this is a racial logic that long predates Trump. American imperial power has historically treated the lives of non-White peoples – in West Asia, Latin America, and Africa – as expendable, their nations as theatres for resource extraction, regime change, and proxy conflict. Trump’s rhetoric makes this contempt explicit. Earlier administrations expressed it in the measured language of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. The violence was the same; only the vocabulary differed.

This pattern – the bipartisan consensus that sustains American imperial foreign policy, the media apparatus that legitimises it, and the domestic enforcement machinery that both parties have built and funded – is the structure that produces the violence people are now protesting. Trump has not created it. He has only made it louder, cruder, and less deniable. That is merely a difference in tone, not in kind.

The danger of the “No Kings” framing is that it treats the problem as a matter of personality rather than architecture. If the goal is to replace Trump with a more eloquent president who will continue the same alliances, maintain the same enforcement apparatus, and advance the same foreign policy with greater rhetorical sophistication, the protests will have succeeded only in making the machinery more comfortable to look at.

The Empire does not require a king – it requires a consensus. Demanding that Trump go while leaving that consensus intact is not resistance, but self-interest dressed up as righteousness.

The writer is an assistant professor with the Department of Professional Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)