Venezuelan media increasingly present the mass protests in the United States, including the “No Kings” actions against Trump, not merely as news but as an explicit expression of popular protest against authoritarianism, militarism, and systemic racism. Reports and analysis emphasize that these mobilizations are perceived as a public rejection of policies of exclusion, dehumanization, and external military interventions, indicating significant domestic opposition to Trump’s course and its international consequences. Such coverage serves both as a contrast to American claims about democracy and as an invitation for a Latin American audience to watch developments as an important element of global political dynamics. This article is based on materials from www.youtube.com (Venezuela) and www.instagram.com (Venezuela).
The Venezuelan Mirror of Protests Against Trump and Latino Passivity in the US
The El País video about the “No Kings” protests against Donald Trump in the US, published on YouTube under the headline about thousands of people taking to the streets in various cities and available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZuUUUC_07Q, and an Instagram comment about the passivity of many Latinos in the face of Trumpism, posted here https://www.instagram.com/p/DWZgypzDoWm/, at first glance seem like two independent and heterogeneous fragments of media noise. However, when viewed from Caracas, they form a single political and cultural narrative about how Venezuela “reads” American politics and the behavior of its diaspora.
The El País video provides a minimal factual framework: “thousands of people take to the streets in various US cities to participate in symbolic ‘No Kings’ protests against the policies of the Trump administration” — without deep context, without analysis of who these people are, what slogans they carry besides the formula “No Kings,” what their demands are, and what their political ties might be. This is a typical European news format: concise shots of placards, chanting protesters and police lines, a voice‑over noting the mass turnout and the anti‑monarchical, metaphorical message of the actions, and the report ends there. In this form the material easily fits into the international news feed: another episode of conflict around the figure of Trump, another demonstration against “a president who behaves like a king.”
In Venezuela, where political polarization and constant confrontation with Washington over the past two decades have formed a specific lens of perception, such footage almost never remains “just pictures from the US.” It is immediately picked up by local media and interpretive communities — from state television to independent bloggers — and imbued with local meanings.
For the official media and more broadly for the pro‑government, Chavista camp, the “No Kings” protests serve as visual evidence of the “decline and hypocrisy” of American democracy. On state channels such scenes are often commented on as a “legitimacy crisis” in Washington, as confirmation of the thesis that the US claims to teach the world democracy but itself suffers from authoritarian, racist, and militaristic tendencies. The slogan “No Kings” is read here literally as an accusation against the American political elite that it behaves like an “imperial monarchy,” dictating sanctions, blockades, and regime change to the world, including against Caracas. In this frame the figure of Trump is linked primarily to a hardline stance against Venezuela: an authoritarian, belligerent leader, “the main architect” of financial and oil sanctions that struck PDVSA and the country’s revenues. Footage of Americans with placards condemning him gives the authorities in Caracas the opportunity to claim: even within the US there is growing rejection of policies that “attack” Venezuela, and therefore the sanctions line is not only allegedly unjust but also unpopular among US citizens themselves.
In the opposition and independent analytical sphere the same protests are read in the opposite way: as an example of the still‑alive ability of American society to mobilize, take to the streets with strong anti‑presidential messages and not be immediately labeled “terrorists,” “fascists,” or “agents of foreign conspiracy” — what opponents of the government in Caracas have come to expect, especially after 2014. For this audience the El País video becomes a kind of mirror: in Washington people can block streets for hours, shout slogans that effectively equate the president with a usurping monarch, and still maintain relative institutional protection; in Venezuela, by their experience, mass street action quickly runs into repression, criminal cases and the stigma of being “golpistas.”
Against this background the Instagram comment on the passivity of Latinos in the US regarding Trumpism and similar protest movements becomes a logical continuation of the same conversation, only with a shifted focus: if El País notes that “thousands came out,” the Venezuelan Instagram author tries to explain why “nothing happens” with the “majority” of Latinos, why they do not become a mass force capable of consistently supporting anti‑Trump protests or at least consistently “punishing at the ballot box.”
In his text, available at https://www.instagram.com/p/DWZgypzDoWm/, he formulates several key explanations characteristic of the Venezuelan optic. First, it’s about “latinos asimilados que ya se sienten gringos”: according to the author, Trump “obtuvo mucho apoyo de latinos, que ya han sido asimilados culturalmente, sintiéndose gringos (perciben a inmigrantes como competencia y generadores de problemas de seguridad), reforzando su creencias de gringos.” This is essentially a diagnosis of part of the diaspora which, having obtained documents, work and relative stability in the US, begins to look at new migrants through the eyes of the white conservative establishment: as a security threat and competitors in the labor market. For the Venezuelan audience this motive is recognizable: conversations about Miami, Houston, or Orlando often surface stories about former compatriots who, once established, begin to support a hard “law and order” line, including tougher immigration policies and sympathies for Trumpism. In this logic the “No Kings” protests remain somewhere “over there,” on the screen: a significant part of the Latin American community is already internally integrated into conservative American discourse and does not perceive such actions as their own.
Second, the author points to a loss of cultural identity among the descendants of migrants: “Gran cantidad de latinos, son descendientes de inmigrantes, crecieron como estadounidenses, perdiéndose la identidad cultural de sus ascendientes ya sea por moldeamientos, otros por vergüenza, etc.” For Venezuelans this sounds like a warning to themselves: the children and grandchildren of those who emigrate from Caracas, Maracaibo or Valencia today risk growing up as “plain Americans,” weakly connected to the political dramas of their countries of origin. From this perspective Latin youth in the US, even seeing protests like “No Kings” on TV or social networks, do not necessarily read them as part of a broader “Latin American” struggle against authoritarianism, be it in Washington, Caracas or Havana. They live in a different symbolic universe where their parents’ national conflicts dissolve into the American cultural mainstream.
The third explanation, directly echoing the Venezuelan experience, is “learned helplessness.” The author writes: “La indefensión aprendida: no protestarán ni castigarán en las urnas porque muchos priorizan otros problemas o porque consideran que no hay nada que hagan que cambie las cosas.” The term “learned helplessness” has long been rooted in the Venezuelan political and psychological lexicon as a description of the apathy and despair of part of society after years of economic collapse, repression and unmet hopes for electoral change. Now this concept is transferred to Latinos in the US: many, the author thinks, are convinced that their vote changes little, and life priorities — survival, work, legalization — are more important than abstract battles around Trump or “No Kings.” For Venezuelan readers this is a painful observation: hopes that the diaspora in the US would become a powerful lever of influence on Washington’s foreign policy appear exaggerated in this picture.
Finally, the fourth element — a reference to Zygmunt Bauman and the concept of “liquid modernity”: “La generación líquida (Bauman) son opositores de sofá, quieren cambios, están inconformes, pero esperan que otros actúen.” The figure of the “couch opposer” is well known in the Venezuelan political scene: it describes city dwellers who actively comment on and condemn the government on social networks but rarely take to the streets and hardly participate in offline organizations. Transferring this scheme to Latinos in the US, the author describes a generation that sympathizes with anti‑Trump and anti‑authoritarian content, likes El País videos about “No Kings” marches, leaves angry comments, but does not reach the point of real participation in protests or systematic electoral mobilization. Altogether this creates an image of the Latin American diaspora as a “potential but unactualized” political subject.
Combining these two levels — the dry European report and the emotional‑analytical Venezuelan post — yields a broader narrative. The “No Kings” protests shown in the El País video, for official Caracas, confirm the thesis that Trump and the American elite behind him behave like “imperial kings,” provoking rejection even among their own citizens. For critics of the Venezuelan government the same footage demonstrates how street channels of pressure on power can work where institutional constraints on arbitrariness remain. And for the Venezuelan Instagram commentator, relying on concepts of “assimilation,” “loss of identity,” “learned helplessness” and the “liquid generation,” the question shifts to why a large part of Latinos remains on the sidelines of this confrontation.
There is also an economic‑political, distinctly Venezuelan interest in all this. In mass consciousness within the country, Trump is closely associated with sanctions, the fall in oil revenues and periods of acute fuel shortages. Any weakening of his positions, any confirmation of his unpopularity on the streets of the US is interpreted, above all by pro‑government voices, as a possibility to ease pressure on Caracas. At the same time, for millions of families dependent on remittances from the diaspora, on the status of relatives in the US, on decisions about TPS and asylum, the question of Latino activity or passivity in American politics is not an abstraction but a factor that can affect their everyday lives.
It is also interesting how these external events return to Venezuela in the form of self‑criticism. When the Instagram author speaks of “couch opposers” and “learned helplessness,” he is not only talking about Latinos in the US but also about his own society. The “No Kings” protests thus become not only an object of discussion but a reason to look at the Venezuelan street, at the lost momentum of mass mobilization, at the gap between digital outrage and real political action. American “kings” and Latin “subjects,” authoritarianism in the White House and learned helplessness in the suburbs of Caracas — all of this in the Venezuelan media space folds into one common conversation about an era of strong leaders, weary societies and dispersed diasporas.
Thus a short El País video about protests in the US and a subjective Instagram post, read from Caracas, turn into material for a much deeper discussion: about who and how today is capable of resisting authoritarian tendencies — whether in Washington, Caracas, or in the growing Latin diaspora on both sides of the continent.
