Monash University
Expert: The No Kings Day Protests in the United States – Why Trump Doesn’t Want to Be King
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to protest Donald Trump’s Presidency at No King’s Day gathering across the US this weekend. Associate Professor Ben Wellings explains that, while Trump doesn’t really want to be King, his path to autocracy, via chaos like calling the National Guard to quell the Los Angeles anti-immigration protests, is actually a highly strategic plan.
Available to comment: Associate Professor Ben Wellings is from Politics and International Relations at Monash University
Contact: +61 421 470181 or [email protected]
Comments attributable to Associate Professor Ben Wellings:
Why President Trump doesn’t want to be King of the United States
“Hundreds of protests will occur on the same day across the United States, under the banner of “No Kings”. It’s not clear that Trump wants to be a king like George III, but he certainly does seem to admire autocrats. His ideal model of leadership is closer to that of Russia’s Vladamir Putin, Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Sure, they conduct elections, but these are effectively held only to endorse the incumbent leader. Illiberal democracy is the goal.”
Nationalism and the response to the Californian protests
“If it all seems terribly chaotic, that’s because it is. Indeed, the chaos is the point. It’s part of a deliberate plan to create confusion and to stoke the outrage, in order to provide cover for the enactment of a reactionary vision of the American nation. This is nowhere clearer than in Trump’s decision to deploy first the National Guard and then the Marines to quell the protests over the forced removal of undocumented immigrants. The president is thus employing heavy-handed measures to put down the very unrest that his draconian actions have incited.”
What is happening in the US is not chaos, it’s strategic
“The sequence of decisions taken by Trump in Los Angeles are all designed to reinforce a particular narrative: that the MAGA movement is in power; that resistance will not be countenanced, not even from a state as large and wealthy as California; that only the president can bring calm to the chaos — even if that chaos is a consequence of his government’s actions. Sometimes in politics, it looks good to solve a problem that you yourself created and that serves your own interests.”
Associate Professor Welling’s opinion piece on ABC Online - Trump’s politics of chaos are on display in Los Angeles — liberal democracies everywhere should take note - ABC Religion & Ethics
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Contact details:
Monash University
Tania Ewing Media and Communications Contractor
E: [email protected]
T: +61 (0) 408 378 422
