Donald Trump is the most despised person in America

“Trump made me an activist,” 62-year-old disabled veteran John Mena told the Washington Post Saturday.

Mena, who was born in Ecuador but grew up in the United States, showed up Saturday for a No Kings rally near Los Angeles City Hall. He brought his pug, Coquito.

The most pressing issue, he told the Post, is the economy: “The prices. Oh my gosh. I call it a golden era of high prices, now even higher with the war in Iran.”

And yet millions of conservative voters believed Donald Trump in 2024 when he lied and said his upside-down policies would be good for the consumer. Nothing about the second Trump presidency has been good for the consumer.

I was among the more than 8 million Americans who showed up Saturday in 3,300 cities and towns coast to coast to protest the Trump administration and its authoritarian conquest of our democracy. Not to mention the high prices of consumer products, the five military conflicts Trump has started around the globe and the trashing of America’s reputation abroad.

This was the single largest mass protest in American history — knocking out of first place the last No Kings rally last fall.

Donald Trump is the most despised man in America. And for good reason.

He is a liar. He is a criminal. He is a thug. He is a bully. He is a mob boss. He is a serial sexual abuser. He is a business failure multiple times over. He is mentally ill and clearly has dementia on top of his existing personality disorders.

Yet a slim majority of Americans who went to the polls in November 2024 decided he was the better choice than a mixed-race woman with a track record of religious devotion and public service. Now we are all paying the price.

That’s why people like John Mena are showing up at No Kings rallies. That’s why a woman in Dallas carried a sign reading, “Things are so bad even the introverts are here.”

Can you imagine what it does to Trump’s fragile ego to realize he has sparked the largest resistance movement in American history — all because he is so despised? He deserves every bit of anxiety that produces.

And yet his enablers keep propping him up. Just two days before the No Kings rallies, evangelist Franklin Graham told a CPAC gathering in the DFW Metroplex they need to work to get Trump re-elected — even though the U.S. Constitution prohibits Trump from a third term in office.

Graham later backtracked and said he meant to urge evangelicals to keep voting for Trump’s agenda, not for the man himself.

It is highly unlikely someone as accustomed to public speaking as Graham misspoke at a national gathering with reporters and cameras everywhere. But even if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, the rest of what he said is just as absurd.

“God loves you. He loves this country. And I love Donald Trump,” Graham said. “Is he perfect? No. But I love that guy. I love him. And we’ll only have one chance at this. We’ll never get another president like Donald Trump. Never.”

Graham said of Trump: “He stands not only for religious freedom. He stands up for Christians like no president we’ve ever had. And he’s not afraid. He’s not ashamed of the name of Jesus Christ. Other people are ashamed. He’s not ashamed. And I just appreciate that so much about him.”

Graham and those around him who deify Trump are living on a different planet than the rest of us. What they say and believe is simply bonkers. To quote the Apostle Paul, they “have exchanged the truth of God for a lie.”

There’s a reason more than 8 million people showed up to protest Saturday. And there’s especially a reason more than 100,000 people showed up in St. Paul, Minn., for the No Kings rally. That is one-third the population of the city of St. Paul.

Why did they show up in such numbers? Because Trump and his thugs have rained terror on their city this year and murdered two ordinary citizens in the streets.

Imagine that you are such a horrible person that one-third of a city’s population shows up to protest you. That’s the legacy of Donald Trump.

Not only is Trump a danger to himself and others, but the people he has surrounded himself with this term are incompetent idiots. People like Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Krist Noem and Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt shouldn’t be put in charge of a church potluck.

If you’re a conservative reading this and ready to blast me for being a leftist, consider this: Your hero is unleashing a countermovement that is giving voice to far-left groups you will hate even more than Kamala Harris. Labor movements, Democractic Socialists and anti-war groups are speaking up at these rallies alongside pastors and civic leaders and sane elected officials.

What you have unleashed in your blind support for Donald Trump is coming back around with such a huge backlash that you will wish Harris had been elected. Your gluttony for power and privilege has opened Pandora’s Box.

That’s why more than 8 million people took to the streets this Saturday.

 

Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global and is author the book Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves.