I’m kind of cynical about popular movements like this now, after the trash fire that “Defund the Police” was.
I mean, they were on to something important, and set that shit entirely on fire with the most r-word slogan they could have possibly have come up with, that was 100% guaranteed to alienate everyone but the most liberal and radical person they could find.
I think you are spot on.
The 4th of July is coming up, perhaps give the No Kings a little boost. It’s certainly a lot more concise than anything else tried. (plus all those No parKing signs waiting to be altered)
Pithily pointing out how silly or absurd Trump and his whole circus are isn’t itself silly. Trump got here with slogans and insults, what’s wrong with finding slogans and insults of our own? Maybe some will hit their thin-skinned targets and, unlike theirs, ours have a strong foundation in reality.
There WERE “No Kings” protests in Omaha, Birmingham, and significantly smaller and notionally “redder” towns than that, not just liberal big cities. 
And I was at one; I won’t say there weren’t any hippies, but they weren’t remotely the majority. For using the word “we,” your caricature of the No Kings protests sounds straight from the MAGA talking points I saw regurgitated on social media.
Circling back to “silly posters and signs,” my sign was “Immigrants make America great!” That is far from silly, and the very fact that such an anodyne (“buttoned-down,” even) statement you’d expect in a textbook or JA/Rotary speech in decades past is remotely controversial in the second decade of the 21st Century is a sign of how deep the Trump/MAGA sickness has seeped into the nation.
My wife’s sign was a variant of the “Nobody paid me to protest” signs. Because the actually silly people were asserting on social media that hundreds of thousands of protesters nationwide were paid by Soros and the like.
This. I can’t stand his voice either. It just makes the crap he spews worse.
It’s actually based on my own interpretation of the news and social media coverage of protests around the country, with emphasis on the protests in my own city (Dallas).
My point is that if you’re trying to win the hearts and minds of Joe Six-Pack in some small town somewhere rural-ish, or Ashleigh Scrapbooker in the big-city suburbs, you can’t look like the people they’ve been taught to dislike. They tune that stuff out immediately because it’s clearly nonsense from a liberal.
That’s why I said that the protests need to be people who aren’t the “usual suspects” who are protesting the usual progressive/liberal stuff. Maybe then it’ll sink in to the people who might be undecided, or at least uncomfortable that people like them are out there protesting, not people they’ve been taught to disrespect.
After all the point of these protests has to be to sway voters for 2026; it’s not like anyone in office is actually going to care about this stuff. So with that in mind, the message has to be tailored to the people whose minds we’re trying to change.