Paid Political Protesters. Is That a Job?

Aug 18, 2025 05:23 PM EDT, Mon

As Trump accuses Democrats of ‘buying protestors,’ the lie comes with a radical subtext

For nearly a decade, the president has accused his public critics of being “paid protesters.” It’s a ridiculous claim rooted in a radical subtext.

Aug. 18, 2025, 8:38 AM EDT By Steve Benen

For those who keep an eye on Donald Trump’s rhetoric, there are a handful of giveaways that make it clear the president is trying to deceive. When the Republican tells a story about large, crying men, overcome with emotion because of some amazing thing Trump claims to have accomplished, it’s a telltale sign he’s lying.

When he tells a story in which unnamed officials keep calling him “sir,” that’s a dead giveaway, too. Likewise, anytime Trump uses the phrases “ahead of schedule,” “got caught” or, my personal favorite, “exonerated,” he’s lying.

But the president also has a habit of using the phrase “just came out” when describing evidence that he’s made up out of whole cloth. On Friday, when he should’ve been preparing for his summit in Alaska with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Republican pushed an unfortunate variation of the line. As The New Republic noted:

Washington’s malcontent over the sudden federalization of its law enforcement has apparently come as a surprise to Donald Trump. In a post on Liars Club Friday morning, the president claimed that the people protesting his decision to leverage hundreds of National Guards members to combat a seemingly unfounded rise in crime were actually paid Democratic agents.

“It’s just been found that the Democrats are buying protestors in order to fight my attack on crime,” the president wrote online, using clumsy passive-voice phrasing. The convicted felon added, “These are criminals who support crime.”

The nonsensical claim, which he predictably failed to support with anything resembling evidence, is certainly familiar. Indeed, a couple of months ago, amid protests in the Los Angeles area, Trump railed against “paid insurrectionists1,” “professional agitators” and “paid troublemakers”

As regular readers might recall, it’s been one of his go-to claims for a long while. Nine years ago, when Trump’s 2016 candidacy inspired protests, he assumed that the people involved couldn’t possibly be sincere in their dislike of him. They were, he said at the time, “paid agitators.”

After he prevailed on Election Day 2016, there was related anti-Trump activism. Those involved, he said in November 2016, were “paid protesters.” Months later, after his inauguration, the activism continued. Trump assured the public once more that these Americans deserved to be ignored — because, he assumed, they were “paid protesters.”

The following year, Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination inspired another round of progressive activism. The protesters, Trump insisted, were “paid professionals.”

Earlier this year, as congressional Republicans faced public backlashes at local events, the president assured the public: “Paid ‘troublemakers’ are attending Republican Town Hall Meetings.”

For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has embraced the same tactic. Let’s instead consider the unavoidable bottom line: For Trump and too many in his party, Americans who disagree with them are effectively an impossibility that can only be explained through corrupt schemes and illicit payments.

It’s hardly a stretch to draw a straight line from “paid protesters” rhetoric to election denialism: Americans who side with Trump and Republicans are real, while Americans who disagree must necessarily be seen as inauthentic.

Whether the president is prepared to accept this or not, the fact remains that Americans who take to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with him, as happened again over the weekend, don’t need to be compensated: Their outrage is sincere.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

  1. @RalphHightower: The only insurrectionists were those that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. ↩

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