The main “No Kings” messages echoed across Long Island by thousands of rain-dampened demonstrators on Saturday were remarkably far from divisive.

Rather, the crowd’s objections to the actions of the current White House were fueled by facts on many fronts and authentic concern for traditional and legal norms. From the White House these days emanates a scent of the regal — or at least a showbiz simulation of it — a style shunned in previous American centuries.

Now, numerous edicts are issued, in the form of “executive orders” encased in binders, that go unchecked by Congress. An ersatz digital “currency” is issued by the president’s family and backed by global investors. The gift of a superluxurious Air Force One jet is accepted by President Donald Trump from the constitutional monarchy of Qatar.

Criminal pardons are granted with no explanation. MAGA lectures about greatness become part of the official rhetoric. Federal soldiers are sent, symbolically, to a state whose elected officials didn’t ask for them. Teases of an unconstitutional third term are quietly indulged by the GOP’s submissive rank and file.

All that helps create a mood and context for the mass rallies that drew millions across the country citing a basic principle of the American Revolution, to rid us of kings.

In prior centuries, objections to presidential overreach would have been considered “conservative.” But for those who divide today’s American power scene into Democrats and Republicans, these demonstrators clearly belonged on the side of the “out” party.

Correctly and factually, defenders of Trump counter that less than eight months ago, he ended the one-term Democratic White House with not just an Electoral College win but a majority of the popular vote. He and his majorities in Congress have been legally elected.

Thus we had the scene of Democratic elected officials and candidates turning out Saturday to support a broad opposition coalition. Their party’s ferment over identity politics, taxes, income inequality and foreign alliances hadn’t vanished, but it came under the umbrella of a more unifying theme. They want to win over unaffiliated voters in Republican strongholds.

“No Kings” is the work of online organizers on one side of our polar divide.

Even some who watched and attended might not have been aware that “No Kings” and “Hands Off” protests grew out of the Fifty Fifty One movement, which stands for “50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement.”

The initial goal was to answer policies from Project 2025, an influential Heritage Foundation plan issued last year to guide Trump if he won to redirect the federal government.

If you judge by social and news media, they put on a more energetic and meaningful spectacle than Trump’s superfluous military parade in celebration of his own birthday. That had some anti-Trumpers saying optimistically that “the tide has turned” — if only because they met and encouraged each other, exercising their right of expression out in the open, not from behind computer screens.

All we know for sure, however, is that last weekend marked just one televised episode in an epic drama over the fate of the American republic and how it will be governed from here on.

Columnist Dan Janison’s opinions are his own.