In “Still No Kings: Millions to Protest Trump On Saturday: A coalition of civil rights groups expects the turnout on Oct. 18 will be even bigger than the first nationwide protest held in June, which by some counts was the largest in U.S. history,” Whitney Curry Wimbush previews Saturdahy’s nonviolent uprising against the Trump Administration’s policies at The American Prospect: “Millions of people will take to the streets again this Saturday to protest the autocratic regime of President Donald Trump, his government shutdown, and his demolition of Medicare, Medicaid, and other public programs in service of tax cuts for billionaires. The protests, under the brand No Kings, have the potential to be the largest ever in the United States…As of last Friday, 2,500 events were planned across every state, Europe, and Canada, No Kings organizers said. They expect that number to grow. Multiple cities will host anchor events, including Bozeman, Montana, a college town that rarely makes national news. Other No Kings anchor protests will be in Atlanta, Boston, Kansas City, New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. The latter two have been burdened by a persistent federal law enforcement presence over the past several weeks… “If you are cynical, you might not understand the utility of simply standing together and showing the massive agreement in this moment around our disdain for a president who believes he is a king,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen and one of the rally’s organizers.” More here.

In is latest essay at The New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall notes, “In a January 2025 paper, “Social Media, Disinformation, and A.I.: Transforming the Landscape of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Political Campaigns,” [Newcastle University Fellow Maria] Papageorgiou wrote that in the 2024 election,

social media also played a pivotal role in monitoring public sentiment and tracking real-time engagement through metrics like likes, reposts and followers. Candidate follower counts highlighted the digital dynamics: Trump led with 95 million followers on X; his running mate, JD Vance, had 2.8 million; Harris had 21.1 million; and her running mate, Tim Walz, had 1.2 million. Trump’s engagement metrics on X were significantly higher than his competitors’, with a record-breaking interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast garnering extensive viewership across platforms like YouTube and X.’

“Democratic messaging has been consistent and straightforward,” Bill Scher writes in “WTF Is Chuck Schumer Doing? (Psst. It Looks Like Winning.)” at Washington Monthly. “As Schumer said on the Senate floor on Wednesday: “The government is shut down for one reason and one reason only: Donald Trump and the Republicans would rather kick 15 million people off health insurance and raise premiums by thousands and thousands of dollars a year on tens of millions of Americans, rather than sit down and work with Democrats on fixing healthcare.”… And there is no evidence Democrats are suffering with the public. A poll from The Economist/YouGov sampled between October 4 and 6 found a plurality of 41 percent of American adults primarily blame Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress for the shutdown, versus 30 percent for the Democrats. Another YouGov poll conducted for CBS News a few days priorreported 39 percent blaming Trump and Republicans compared to 30 percent for congressional Democrats…  The most important poll number to watch is the congressional generic ballot test, which asks which party’s candidate you plan to support in the next House election. Two such polls have been taken since the shutdown, with Democrats leading by five points in one survey and three in the other. That’s a tick better than the average Democratic lead before the shutdown. So long as Democrats hold steady in the generic ballot, Schumer, as well as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, will likely be able to keep their members in line.”

Editor Josh Marshall puts the shutdown layoffs in perspective at Talking Points Memo: “Here’s an update on Russ Vought’s “mass layoffs,” following through on the threats he and Trump made in advance of the shutdown. From what I can tell, this seems to be a version of what we described yesterday: a comparatively small number of layoffs aimed mainly at allowing the White House to say it followed through on its threat (call it counter-TACO praxis) and tightly focused on a few agencies or departments President Trump is personally aggrieved at. The most concrete number I’ve seen refers to 4,200 employees across seven departments and agencies. That’s a big deal for the people losing their jobs. It’s also a very small number compared to what we saw in the spring. The New York Post suggests (famous last words, I know) that as many as a third of those layoffs may come from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been a focus of Trump’s anger since 2021 when its then-director Chris Krebs disputed Trump’s claims of cyber-election hacking in the 2020 election. I’ve gotten more concrete reports that at least a quarter of these firings are at the CDC alone, focused on core public health work. STAT News reports that almost the entire staff of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report have been fired. (That is essentially the publication that the CDC uses to communicate the latest information on disease circulation in the country.) Other targeted offices seem tied to clean energy projects and other bêtes noir. As one source put it, these are not ‘reductions in force’. They are ideological firings targeting specific offices and parts of the government Trump has long been mad at.”