What To Expect From The 'No Kings' Protests Against Trump

Millions of Americans are expected to gather Saturday for another round of ‘No Kings’ demonstrations protesting authoritarianism under President Donald Trump, who, in recent months, has sicced the National Guard and immigration agents on blue strongholds, pressured the Justice Department to charge his politicalenemies and used his power to wield control over mediagiants.

While House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has claimed the 2,500-plus protests are being arranged by “the pro-Hamas wing and the Antifa people,” the actual groups helping rally protesters include Indivisible, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign and the American Federation of Teachers.

“I’ve had it with these people,” Johnson complained on Fox News last week.

If the size of June’s No King protests are any indication, Saturday’s events will be widespread and massively attended. The one in late spring drew around 5 million people and is thought to be one of the largest single-day coordinated protest events in U.S. history, organizers said.

And while a map of events shows huge clusters of protests planned in blue areas, there are still more than a dozen each in deep-red Wyoming and Oklahoma.

“This is bigger than political disagreement,” the official ‘No Kings’ website states. “This administration has defied our courts, deported American citizens, disappeared people off the streets, and slashed our services — all while orchestrating a massive giveaway to their billionaire allies. Enough is enough.”

This time, there will be one in Washington, D.C. For the June events, organizers asked people to keep their protests outside the capital, where Trump was holding a more sparsely attended military parade on his birthday, saying they wanted the “center of gravity on June 14 everywhere President Trump isn’t.”

D.C. is one of the cities where Trump has deployed out-of-state National Guard troops since August, with the White House claiming violence there is “out of control.” In reality, D.C. violent crime rates have significantly dropped since a spike in 2023 and remain dramatically lower than those of the 1990s.

Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott say they already plan to deploy National Guard troops to the protests, describing them as a “planned antifa-linked demonstration.”

He’s one of several Republicans indicating they expect the protests to get violent, even though June’s gatherings were largely peaceful. There was one fatal shooting at a Salt Lake City protest and some people injured by people who drove their cars intoprotesters.

Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, told HuffPost on Wednesday that it’s obvious to him why the GOP is railing against the marches.

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“I don’t think it’s that complicated,” he said. “The one thing an unpopular authoritarian regime is scared of is mass, organized, peaceful people-power. That is it.”

People interested in arranging a protest in their area can do so using the ‘No Kings’ toolkit.

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