Nearly 7 million demonstrators in small towns and cities across the country showed up for No Kings protests to rally against Donald Trump’s presidency, according to organizers.
The president declared he was “not a king” on Fox News on Friday, but that didn’t stop millions of rally-goers in more than 2,500 locations across the United States from protesting the second Trump administration.
Saturday’s event marked the third mass mobilization since Trump reclaimed the White House and one of the largest single-day nationwide demonstrations in U.S. history, surpassing the more than 5 million demonstrators who turned up to the first iteration of No Kings protests in June, organizers said.
“Today, millions of people showed that we, the people, will not be silenced,” Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Protesters at rallies across the country shouted a common refrain: “Hey hey! Ho ho! Donald Trump has got to go!” Inflatable suits, Revolutionary War references, and posters depicting Trump in a crown were ubiquitous.
Organizers called the protests “overwhelmingly peaceful,” though there were scattered reports of violence and arrests, including in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where a man allegedly flashed a gun near a protest crowd.
Larger-scale arrests took place in Portland and the wider Chicago area, where crowds protested outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities amid the larger No Kings events taking place nearby.
More than 350,000 people across New York City protested Saturday, organizers said, with New York City Police making zero arrests connected to the protests. Rallies from Charlotte, North Carolina, to San Diego, California also did not see any arrests, according to police.
As millions of Americans marched against the president, Trump spent the day in Palm Beach, Florida. Online, meanwhile, he posted an AI video of himself flying a “King Trump” fighter jet that bombs a crowd of protesters with brown liquid.
Many Democratic officials made appearances at rallies, while several prominent Republicans urged Americans to stay home and watch college football after baselessly labeling the protests “Hate America” rallies.
“We call it the ‘Hate America’ rally that’ll happen Saturday,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this week. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you see pro-Hamas supporters. I bet you see Antifa types. I bet you see the Marxists on full display.”
Chicago
In Chicago, where the Trump administration has deployed scores of federal immigration agents, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker addressed a massive crowd of 100,000 people to deliver a pointed rebuke after Trump asked the Supreme Court for permission to deploy National Guard troops to the state after lower-court judges ruled against the move.
Pritzker, who has repeatedly criticized the Trump administration’s demands, spoke of resistance.
"History will judge us by where we choose to stand right now, today,” he said. “Future generations will ask: 'What did we do when fellow human beings face persecution? When our rights were being abridged? When our constitution was under attack?' They'll want to know whether we stood up or we stayed silent.”
“Tyranny requires your fear, your silence, your compliance; Democracy requires courage,” the Democratic governor continued.
"Resistance means choosing solidarity over fear and means recognizing that an attack on free speech on immigrants' rights on due process is an attack on everyone’s rights," Pritzker told the crowd. "It means understanding that we’re either building a society based on human dignity, or one based on domination."
Actor John Cusack also remarked on Trump’s Supreme Court appeal. Speaking to CNN, the Say Anything star had a direct message for the president: “No, you can’t put troops on our streets. You can’t create enough chaos to invoke the Insurrection Act so you can stay in power. We all know what your plan is.”
Cusack, a Chicago native, said the city has a message to the administration: “Go to hell!”
Later, 15 people were reportedly arrested in a protest outside an ICE facility in the area that’s regularly seen violent clashes between heavily armed agents and mostly peaceful protesters. Such tactics previously prompted a federal judge to stop immigration officers there from using riot weapons on the crowds.
Portland
Similar scenes played out in Portland, another Democrat-led city that’s been in the center of the Trump administration bullseye.
Tens of thousands of people gathered for the main No Kings events taking place across the city, and no arrests were made, Portland police said.
However, related protests against an ICE facility in the city that’s been a locus of recent activism saw some clashes.
Agents fired pepper balls, tear gas, and flash-bang grenades into a crowd outside the facility, and three people in the crowd were detained on assault, bias crime, and harassment charges.
Small towns across America join in
Big cities weren’t the only places that saw No Kings protests.
Towns across the country featured passionate events.
In Brattleboro, Vermont, an estimated 4,000 people turned out, or about a third of the town’s population.
San Francisco
The Bay Area turned out for No Kings, as well, with an estimated 50,000 people marching in San Francisco, 10,000 in neighboring Oakland, and another 10,000 in Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge, according to organizers.
Folk music icon Joan Baez, famed left-wing scholar and activist Angela Davis, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined the protests, though some marchers heckled the latter with "retire!"
The weather was warm and the atmosphere carnival-like, with drummers, brass bands, a bugler, and a plethora of inflatable animal costumes including bears, dinosaurs, chickens or roosters, a snail, an axolotl, a macaw, and of course several frogs, which have become something of a protest mascot after images of a Portland demonstrator in an inflatable frog costume went viral.
Transit authorities in Oakland were forced to open fare gates at the Lake Merritt metro station.
Washington, D.C.
Taking the stage in Washington, D.C., where more than 200,000 demonstrators turned up, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders immediately took aim at Speaker Johnson’s comments demonizing the protests.
“Boy, does he have it wrong,” Sanders said. “Millions across thousands of cities across the country showed up not because they hate America, but because they love America.”
He warned that the American experiment is “now in danger,” citing several Trump actions, including sending masked federal agents into cities, the president’s lawsuits against media companies, and Trump’s threats to arrest and imprison his perceived political enemies.
“This moment is not just about one man’s greed, one man’s corruption, or one man’s contempt for the Constitution,” Sanders told the crowd. “This is about a handful of the wealthiest people on earth, who in their insatiable greed, have hijacked our economy and our political system in order to enrich themselves at the expense of working families throughout this country.”
He denounced the billionaires who helped fund Trump’s re-election campaign and attended his inauguration, specifically naming Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
“We rejected the divine right of kings in the 1770s. We will not accept the divine right of oligarchs today,” he said.
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Miami
Down in Miami, where thousands of protesters gathered, Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader, showed up alongside a videographer. In 2023, Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years behind bars in connection with the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. He was among more than 1,600 people connected to the riots who Trump pardoned earlier this year.
“I support all these people, especially her with the bullhorn,” Tarrio said.
“These protestors are 100 percent expressing the same rights as during January 6,” said the person who was livestreaming Tarrio.
Atlanta
More than 35,000 protesters turned out in Atlanta, where Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock told the rally crowd that Americans should be “concerned” about Trump’s recent remarks to the military.
Last month, Trump told top military leaders in Quantico, Virginia, that troops deployed to U.S. cities run by Democrats could be seen as “training grounds.”
“If you are an American citizen, you should be deeply concerned,” Warnock said Saturday. “And I know you are. That’s why you’re gathered here today. We should all be deeply concerned about an American president who stood in front of our military and said that the real concern is the enemy within.”
The senator also slammed ICE, pointing to a recent raid at an apartment building in Chicago.
“Literally separating Black people from brown people. I’m a preacher, but I have to say this. What the hell is happening?” he said. “And all of us have to be concerned.”
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