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.
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 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 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, 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, D.C.; 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 with details for each location.
Who organized the protests?
More than 200 organizations are signed on as partners for the protests.
Indivisible, the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US, is a main organizer. The American Civil Liberties Union is a partner, as is 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 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 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 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 June 14, 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, by data journalist G Elliott Morris of the Substack newsletter Strength in Numbers, calculated 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 October 18 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 updeportations, gutting health care, 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 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 October 18 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 onto 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,” 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 cofounder 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.”
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 nonviolently against a regime, the regime will fail. This theory has been dubbed the “3.5% rule”.
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 11m 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 is 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, nonviolent resistance can topple governments.
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, homeland security assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said: “As it does every day, DHS law enforcement will enforce the laws of our nation.”
The No Kings coalition is committed to nonviolent 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 attendees know how to advocate for themselves if there are issues.
