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“NO KINGS” WAS A REBELLION IN TRUMP COUNTRY  
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Branko Marcetic
June 16, 2025
Jacobin
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_ It wasn’t just large, liberal cities but the heart of Trump
country that formed the base of last Saturday’s “No Kings”
protests. Together with his underwhelming military parade, they’re a
warning of the softness of his support. _

At between two to six million people across more than two thousand
cities, Saturday’s demonstrations were not just on par with the
largest protests of Trump’s chaotic first term but may have been one
of the biggest mass protests in American history. , Kamil Krzaczynski
/ Getty Images for No Kings

 

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory didn’t just usher in political change
but a cultural one. The fact that Trump won both the popular vote and
every battleground state meant, for many (Trump himself foremost among
them), that the country had eagerly accepted his worldview as their
own, was fully on board with his political program, and that any
resistance was futile. Media outlets, businesses, and other
institutions quickly folded or bent the knee to the incoming
administration, which, upon taking office, didn’t meet anything
approaching the kind of widespread pushback and energized, large-scale
protest that had hounded Trump in his first term.

This was all based on perception. In reality, Trump’s win, though
more emphatic than 2016, was anemic in the scope of history. He had
failed to cross the 50 percent threshold, his battleground state
victories were all secured by wafer-thin margins, and Republicans had
actually won a bigger share
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of the popular vote in the 2022 midterms — an election widely viewed
as a historic flop for the GOP.

But even though Trump had nothing close to the kind of mandate to
embark on the radical, deeply unpopular program that followed, the
widespread liberal demoralization his win produced did a lot of the
work for him by preemptively neutering much left-leaning opposition to
his actions.

The “No Kings” protests that took place over the weekend,
motivated by broad unhappiness with Trump’s term so far, are a
signal that this state of affairs has, nearly half a year in,
decisively changed.

It wasn’t just the sheer size of the protests, though that was
significant: at between two to six million people across more than two
thousand cities, Saturday’s demonstrations were not just on par with
the largest protests of Trump’s chaotic first term but may have been
one of the biggest
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mass protests in American history.

Some of the numbers in major US cities were staggering: 80,000 in
Philadelphia; as many as 75,000 in Chicago; 50,000 in New York, San
Francisco, and in the much smaller Portland, where the march stretched
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for twelve city blocks; at least 70,000 in Seattle, one of the biggest
protests in the city’s history; ten thousand or more in cities like
Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Spokane. In contrast to recent protests
against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, many of the
protesters trended toward the older, more middle-of-the-road
Democratic voter, with many saying it was their first protest in
decades or in their whole lives, and the rallies overwhelmingly saw no
property damage or police violence.

But the protests were arguably more significant for their depth.
Thousands turned out in larger, more liberal cities in otherwise red
states, like the at least four thousand who protested in Nashville;
the ten thousand or more who attended protests in Austin, Dallas, and
Houston; the three thousand in Fargo, North Dakota; the thousands more
in Topeka, Boise, and Little Rock, or the nearly one thousand
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who turned out in Charleston, South Carolina.

The protests reached deep into Trump-voting country, and not just in
massive, populous cities. Thousands turned out across thirty-five
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different Iowa municipalities, including several thousand
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in Cedar Rapids and seven thousand
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at the state capitol in Des Moines. In Nebraska, ten thousand
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came together in Omaha, which had seen 1,000 people gather a day
earlier to protest recent ICE raids, while two thousand people filled
up the main strip of Lincoln and hundreds more
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protested in rural cities like Hastings and North Platte. Both states
had in February seen some of the earliest mass gatherings against
Trump, when overflow crowds turned out
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in Omaha and Iowa City for Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy”
tour in red states.

These scenes were replicated by many thousands more demonstrators in
numerous Trump-voting states: across thirty cities
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in Missouri, dozens more
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cities in Texas, at least twenty-four
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communities across Alaska, more than a dozen in Kentucky and Indiana a
piece, and more than seventy cities
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in Florida, an ever-reddening state that last year saw even
traditionally more liberal metropoles like Miami-Dade County move
markedly toward Trump. For some of these locations, Trump’s recent
controversial actions, including
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siccing the military on US protesters, had clearly spurred more
grassroots opposition: in Mobile, Alabama, for instance, the two
thousand
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protesters who turned out were a major step up from the hundreds
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who taken to the city’s streets two months ago, during the first
series of nationwide “No Kings” protests.

It wasn’t just solidly red states, but also purple states that have
wavered between Trump and Democratic candidates the past decade. These
states’ uniform Trumpward shift last year was widely viewed as a
bellwether for the country’s overall political mood, yet this
Saturday they also saw thousands of people attend widespread
demonstrations: in seventy
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towns and cities throughout Michigan, more than fifty across Wisconsin
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and around forty in Arizona
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where a thousand people were on the streets of GOP-voting Scottsdale
in temperatures that reached a hundred degrees.

Missouri saw one thousand protesters turn out in solidly blue Boone
County, but at least a hundred people also protested
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in Cooper County, which has given Trump 70 percent or more of the vote
each of the last three elections. This was part of a nationwide trend,
where Trump-supporting communities saw their own, sometimes
surprisingly large “No Kings” protests emerge at the county level.

Texas’s deep red Bastrop
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and Brazos
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counties, where Trump has won with upward of 55 percent of the vote
each time he has run, saw protests of more than seven hundred and
nearly a thousand, respectively. In Pennsylvania, around a thousand
protesters showed up
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in Westmoreland County, which has gone for Trump by more than 60
percent the past three elections, while four separate protests were
held in Bucks County, a previously blue county that has shifted red
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— including 1,800 people who demonstrated
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outside GOP congressman Brian Fitzpatrick’s office in the rain.

In Lee County, Florida, where registered Republicans outnumber
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Democrats by more than two to one and Trump has won three times in a
row, more than
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two thousand protesters turned out in Fort Myers, the county seat.
Likewise, thousands
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were demonstrating in the state’s Volusia and Flagler counties, both
solidly pro-Trump areas where Republicans dominate elected office, as
well as hundreds more
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in the Villages, a sprawling retirement community that has been
synonymous with Trump.

Local media reported
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similar phenomena in numerous
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heavily Trump-voting, often rural communities, albeit at less elevated
numbers, whether in Marion County
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Ohio; Pulaski County
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Kentucky — which saw its first ever anti-Trump protest this past
weekend — Ohio County
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West Virginia; or the towns or Lebanon, Oregon
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and Lafayette Parish
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Indiana’s Tippecanoe County has been a swing county for the past ten
years, narrowly breaking for Biden five years ago and voting for Trump
the other two times, but saw what organizers estimated was three
thousand
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attendees for its local “No Kings” rally this weekend.

Some areas were notable for the level of protester turnout relative to
the size of their populations. In Homer, Alaska, a rural town of six
thousand people that features a mix of broadly libertarian voters of
both the Left and Right, more than 600
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people demonstrated. _Axios_ reported
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that Pentland, Michigan, saw its local rally attended by a crowd that
was half the size of its total population of 800.

Making the turnout particularly impressive were the weather conditions
and risks that protesters were defying. Anywhere between three and
five thousand Hoosiers rallied outside the statehouse in what was
described
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as “rain-soaked” Indianapolis, for instance.

Meanwhile, around the country, Republican officials threatened
demonstrators in advance with legal and even physical consequences.
Turnout in Texas did not seem to have been dampened by Gov. Greg
Abbott deploying
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the National Guard in advance, and thousands protested in New Orleans
after Louisiana’s pro-Trump attorney general threatened
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prosecute protesters who resorted to “anarchy, vandalism, and
rioting,” broad terms that have been recently used
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to crack down on peaceful activists. More than two thousand protested
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in Cocoa, Florida, after the local sheriff threatened
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to hospitalize and murder protesters who got out of line. This was on
top of defense secretary Pete Hegseth warning
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that the National Guard might be deployed all around the country as
they have been in Los Angeles.

Many commentators have compared the protests to Trump’s
underwhelming
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military parade in DC, where attendance fell way short of the 200,000
people that was expected, partly because of the worry of rain, and
without any similar threats of violence. The comparison is meant to be
insulting and embarrassing to the president.

But there’s a more important point to be made here. The turnout in
liberal cities and even in Trump-voting towns and counties doesn’t
necessarily mean that anti-Trump voters outnumber the president’s
supporters in these areas or their states — in many cases, they
don’t. But it does suggest that voters opposed to Trump’s agenda
— who across the country were met with few to no counterprotesters,
even in deep red parts of the country — are vastly more energized
than his supporters, and that despite his having won the popular vote
against a weak candidate
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running a bad campaign
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Trump’s public support is a lot softer and more passive than his
2024 victory made it seem.

It should also be a wake-up call for institutions that have
opportunistically and cynically shifted rightward in the wake of the
election to meet what they see as a changed public mood, or out of
fear of the White House. The peaceful show of force from the
anti-Trump side of the political spectrum on Saturday shows that the
country has not necessarily changed as drastically from the years of
the highly
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but well-organized liberal “Resistance” that plagued Trump’s
first term as it may seem — just people’s willingness to make
their opposition known. And as Trump pushes a deeply unpopular
austerity bill, crosses legal lines that few to no presidents have
crossed, and plays with another war in the Middle East, that
willingness is also changing.

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Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of
Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

* No Kings Protests; President Donald Trump; Anti-Trump;
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