[[link removed]]

MILLIONS MARCH AGAINST TRUMP – NO KINGS  
[[link removed]]


 

Marina Dunbar, Sarah Haque, Rachel Leingang
October 18, 2025
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ More than 2,500 US rallies are planned in all 50 states as
protesters call for limits on presidential power _

A protestor dressed in an inflatable pig costume in Washington DC,
October 18, 2025. , Kirstin Garriss/The Guardian

 

 

Millions are expected to show out for protests on Saturday at more
than 2,500 locations across America, from small towns to large cities,
to speak against the Trump administration
[[link removed]].

No Kings, the coalition behind a mass demonstration in June, is again
calling people to the streets to send the simple message that Donald
Trump [[link removed]] is not a king,
pushing back against what they see as increasing authoritarianism.

Several US cities now have a militarized presence on the ground, most
against the will of local leaders. Trump has promised to crack down on
dissent as part of an ongoing retribution campaign. Still, organizers
say they expect to see one of the largest, if not the largest, single
day of protest in US history.

What are the No Kings protests?

A coalition of left-leaning groups is again leading a day of mass
demonstrations across the US to protest against the Trump
administration. The coalition spearheaded a previous No Kings protest
day in June, drawing millions to the streets to speak out against the
president on the same day Trump held a military parade in Washington.

The protests are called No Kings to underscore that America does not
have kinds of absolute rulers, a ding against Trump’s increasing
authoritarianism.

“‘NO KINGS’ is more than just a slogan; it is the foundation our
nation was built upon,” a website for the protests, nokings.org
[[link removed]], says. “Born in the streets, shouted by
millions, carried on posters and chants, it echoes from city blocks to
rural town squares, uniting people across this country to fight
dictatorship together.”

Where are they happening?

Organizers say there are more than 2,500 protests planned across the
country, in the largest cities and in small towns, and in all 50
states. It is part of a distributed model where people protest in
their own communities rather than traveling to large urban hubs to
show that discontent with Trump exists in all corners of the US.

For the 18 October day of action, organizers have identified several
anchor cities: Washington DC; San Francisco; San Diego; Atlanta; New
York City; Houston, Texas; Honolulu; Boston; Kansas City, Missouri;
Bozeman, Montana; Chicago and New Orleans.

The protests start at different times depending on location. The No
Kings website has a map [[link removed]] with details
for each location.

Washington DC Oct 18, 2025 Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for No Kings

Why are organizers asking protesters to wear yellow?

No Kings protesters are being asked to wear yellow by organizers to
signal unity in a visually striking way – and to align with other
pro-democracy movements in Ukraine, Hong Kong and South Korea.
As organizers put it: “Yellow is our shared signal, bright, bold and
impossible to ignore, a reminder that America’s power belongs to our
people, not to kings.”

Who organized the protests?

More than 200 organizations are signed on
[[link removed]] as partners for the protests.

Indivisible
[[link removed]],
the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US, is
a main organizer. The American Civil Liberties Union is a partner, as
is the advocacy group Public Citizen. Unions including the American
Federation of Teachers and SEIU are in the coalition. The new protest
movement 50501, which began earlier this year
[[link removed]]
as a call for protests in all 50 states on a single day, is a partner.
Other partners include the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn, United We
Dream, the League of Conservation Voters, Common Defense and more.

Home of the Brave, a group affiliated with
[[link removed]] the Trump critic George
Conway that describes itself as a “community of Americans who refuse
to be silenced”, announced a $1m ad campaign to promote the rallies.

How many people were at the last No Kings protests? And how many are
expected this weekend?

Several million people showed up for the June protests, though numbers
vary depending on the source.

Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which uses publicly available
data to estimate the size of political crowds, said
[[link removed]]
the June event was “probably the second-largest single day
demonstration since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017”,
second to the Women’s March in 2017.

The Harvard consortium estimated that between 2 and 4.8 million people
participated in more than 2,150 actions on 14 June, though the group
notes that it wasn’t able to confirm figures for 18% of protest
sites, nearly all in small towns. This was a significantly larger
turnout than a Hands Off protest in April, the first big day of
protest of Trump’s second term.

Another estimate
[[link removed]],
by data journalist G Elliott Morris of the Substack newsletter
Strength in Numbers, calculated
[[link removed]]
turnout between 4 and 6 million. For context, the 2017 Women’s March
drew an estimated 3.3 million to 5.6 million.

So far, 2025 has seen “far more protests” than during the same
time period in 2017, the consortium noted.

Organizers anticipate millions will turn out for the 18 October
protests. More locations have signed on to host events than for the
June day of action, and organizers expect to see an overall larger
number of people in the streets than in June.

Why now? What are the organizers’ messages?

The No Kings coalition has cited Trump’s “increasing authoritarian
excesses and corruption” as motivation for the protests, including
ramping up deportations, gutting healthcare, gerrymandering maps and
selling out families for billionaires.

The movement describes itself as pro-democracy and pro-worker, and it
rejects “strongman politics”, vowing to fight until “we get the
representation we deserve”.
The coalition is highlighting what it sees as several major concerns
about the second Trump administration: Trump is using taxpayer money
for power grabs, sending in federal forces to take over US cities;
Trump has said he wants a third term and “is already acting like a
monarch”; the Trump administration has taken its agenda too far,
defying the courts and slashing services while deporting people
without due process.

“Whether you’re outraged by attacks on civil rights, skyrocketing
costs, abductions and disappearances, the gutting of essential
services, or the assault on free speech, this moment is for you,”
the No Kings website [[link removed]] says.
“Whether you’ve been in the fight for years or you’re just fed
up and ready to take action, this moment is for you.”

The goal is to “build a massive, visible, nonviolent, national
rejection of this crisis” and show that the majority of people are
taking action to stop Trump.

What have Trump and the GOP said about the protests so far?

Trump himself has not weighed in on the 18 October protests. After the
June protests, though, he said, “I don’t feel like a king, I have
to go through hell to get stuff approved.”

Other top Republicans have cast blame on the protests for prolonging
the government shutdown, smearing them as anti-American. Some of
Trump’s cabinet members have piled on to unsubstantiated claims that
Democrats won’t agree to a budget deal to keep the government open
for fear of backlash from their base at the protests.

“‘No Kings’ means no paychecks, no paychecks and no
government,” the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. Sean
Duffy, the transportation secretary, said Democratic leaders weren’t
running the show in the Senate, but protesters were. He also repeated
a common false refrain that protesters were being paid.

Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible, wrote on Bluesky of
Duffy’s comments: “This is what it looks like when you’ve fully
lost control of the message and you’re panicking.”

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said the protests would be filled
with the “pro-Hamas wing” of the Democrats and the “antifa
people”.

“They’re all coming out,” Johnson said. “Some of the House
Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event, and it’s being told to
us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that
rally because they can’t face their rabid base. I mean this is
serious business hurting real people … I’m beyond words.”

Tom Emmer, a Minnesota congressman, also called the protests the
“hate America rally” and said Democrats were beholden to the
“terrorist wing of their party”.
The No Kings coalition said Johnson was “running out of excuses for
keeping the government shut down” and decided to attack “millions
of Americans who are peacefully coming together to say that America
belongs to its people, not to kings”.

What is the 3.5% rule in protest?

Organizers and protesters this year have repeatedly drawn on research
that showed if 3.5% of a population protests non-violently against a
regime, the regime will fail. This theory has been dubbed the “3.5%
rule”.
[[link removed]]

Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan created a
database of civil resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, analyzing
whether non-violent or violent movements were more likely to succeed
and whether there was a tipping point in terms of size for protests to
actually expel the party or person in power. The results showed
non-violent campaigns were often much larger and were twice as likely
to succeed than violent movements. They were more representative of
the population, and, they found, active and sustained participation by
3.5% of a population meant a movement would succeed, with very few,
specific exceptions.

In the US, 3.5% of the population would be more than 11 million
people. So far, these mass days of action have not hit this threshold,
though the threshold is not a magic number. Chenoweth noted in 2020
that the figure was a “descriptive statistic” derived from
historical movements, “not necessarily a prescriptive one”,
meaning it is not necessarily a guarantee to organize around, as some
are explicitly doing now.

While the exact number isn’t magic, the basics behind the statistic
hold true: sustained, mass, non-violent resistance can topple
governments.

Protesters in Washington DC. Photograph: Kirstin Garriss/The Guardian

Are there safety plans?

The 18 October protests come as Trump is cracking down on dissent,
targeting immigrants who have participated in protests and going after
pillars of civil society he sees as standing in the way of his agenda.
They also come amid increasing instances of political violence.

In response to questions about whether immigration enforcement
officials will be at protest sites, the homeland security assistant
secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “As it does every day, DHS law
enforcement will enforce the laws of our nation.”

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott said he will deploy national guard
troops to Austin, the capital city, though there will be protests in
cities and towns throughout the state.

The No Kings coalition is committed to non-violent action. On its
website, the coalition says it expects all participants in its
protests to “seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with
those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these
events”.

The group has seen tens of thousands of participants on safety
planning calls. Events will have designated people in charge of safety
and marshals who will make sure people are able to safely exercise
their rights.

The coalition also said it will hand out “know your rights” cards
or codes to download them so that attenders know how to advocate for
themselves if there are issues.

* No Kings Day
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]