Yesterday, demonstrators gathered in more than 2000 locations across the United States and around the globe for overwhelming peaceful, exuberant, and defiant anti-Trump protests, with the shared theme of “No Kings.”

With the possible exception of the early days of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, there have never been this many coordinated protests on a single day in the United States before. The ubiquity of these protests is historic.

This minimizing horseshit is more than institutional arrogance and bad reporting. It’s a continuation of a longstanding Times habit of downplaying both the scale and significance of protest, especially when it’s overwhelmingly nonviolent, as the No Kings demonstrations were.

Rather than linger on the possible causes for this consistent distortion, I want to focus here instead on why it matters that demonstrations against the current Trump regime have been more ubiquitous and numerous than at almost any other time in U.S. history.