None of the King’s protests in the US on Saturday could be too big yet. Here is the reason
Some things remain the same as nationwide protests against US President Donald Trump are planned again on Saturday, but much has changed in just five months since the last No Kings rallies.
More than 3,100 events are planned in communities large and small in all 50 states, and more than nine million people are expected to participate, according to Indivisible, the activist group leading the third such event since Trump returned to office in January 2025.
“The first one had five million, the second one had seven million – the biggest political demonstration in American history – and this one, everybody expects it to blow the roof,” said former vice president Al Gore, a Democrat, on a podcast this week for the progressive magazine Mama Jones. “I think these things are important and I think they show a sense of renewed political will.”
Organizers said around 2,500 events were planned for the second national ‘No Kings’ protest against the Trump administration – almost double the number from earlier this year.
Sister protests are also expected in several countries, especially in Europe, but also in Mexico, Australia and Canada. The No Kings website currently has calls for volunteers for events in Toronto and Halifax, with an upcoming event also near the US embassy in Ottawa.
In states with constitutional monarchies the protests are called “No Tyrants.”
Trump has responded to previous No Kings rallies by insisting that “I’m not a king,” and said those in attendance “do not represent the people of our country.”
‘We will never forget what happened here’
There are reasons to believe that the attendance projections are not just idle talk, given the major developments from the Trump administration since the fall.
When protesters gathered on October 18, it was more than two weeks into a partial government shutdown, which would last a record 43 days. Although the current shutdown is very limited, it has sadly seen Airport Security Management agents go without pay, leading to increased absenteeism and even resignations, while increasing wait times for shoppers during the busy spring season.
The two events in 2025 also saw participants express their displeasure with the administration’s rampant immigration raids in their pursuit of Trump’s deportation goals, and the tactics of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents in carrying out those raids.
That anger has only grown since the shooting deaths of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota in January, which stemmed from a regime operation targeting Somali-American citizens. Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, and Pretti was hit multiple times when two CBP officers fired their weapons.
Organizers have designated Minnesota as the prime location for Saturday, and told the state monitoring agency that 100,000 people could gather at the state headquarters in Saint Paul. Last June’s event drew an estimated 80,000 people.
Ezra Levin, the founder of Indivisible, told the Associated Press that the national activists chose Minnesota because it has been subject to “some of the worst, most brutal actions imaginable” from the Trump administration.
“At the same time, in the Twin Cities earlier this year, we saw some of the most inspiring, neighborly, bold initiatives we’ve seen anywhere in the country, and they’re an inspiration to all of us,” Levin added.
Bruce Springsteen, who released the song Minnesota roads after the murders of Good and Pretti, is expected to perform in Minnesota on Saturday, along with legendary singer Joan Baez, whose protest history dates back to the sixties and includes participation in Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington in 1963. Speakers are expected to include longtime activist Jane Fonda and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“We will never forget what happened here, and we are taking action,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told MS Now about the protests in a speech that aired Thursday night.
The polls have since been ignored by Iran
One month after the last protests, the Epstein Files Transparency Act – named after the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – became law, the result of a caucus of the House of Representatives, due to the protests of Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
The Trump administration has been accused of mishandling the release of files, improperly redacting names in some cases, while mistakenly disclosing the names of alleged victims in other cases. There are also allegations, which the Department of Justice denies, that the release of files about Trump, who once said he knew Epstein for 15 years, was slow.
Trump has never faced strong allegations of wrongdoing regarding his relationship with Epstein.
Crowds at anti-ICE protests and No Kings rallies across the United States are filled with colorful frogs, chickens, lobsters, dinosaurs, axolotls, and more. The activist from Portland, Ore., who founded Operation Inflation, says wacky, inflatable costumes are changing the narrative about America’s protests.
The latest hot topic for the protesters came after the announcement of this day of protest in January – the war in the Middle East. Even before Saturday, a number of protests have taken place in the US since the White House and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28.
While polls show that most Republicans surveyed support the Iran war, separate polls this week from Reuters/Ipsos, the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and Fox News show the president is being beaten by Democrats and independents. The war, poorly explained to the American public by the administration, has led to higher gas prices, which are more important to Republican and Democratic voters, the AP poll found.
It distributes in the suburbs
While protests in big cities attract the majority of media coverage, a growing number will come from the suburbs in places like Scottsdale, Ariz., Langhorne, Pa., and East Cobb, Ga.
In Summit, NJ, one of the wealthiest areas in the country, Jeff Naiman told the AP that he felt like he was living in a “constitutional nightmare” created by Trump.
“It’s like our hair is on fire,” said Naiman, a 59-year-old radiologist who leads his local chapter of Indivisible. “Our country is being divided.”
In a Wall Street Journal editorial Thursday, author and psychiatrist Jonathan Alpert wrote that gatherings like No Kings “accomplish nothing practical” and are “like bad group therapy — gatherings that offer validation, solidarity and emotional release.”
WATCH | Timothy Snyder in an interview with CBC News:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PcxC1p-Zg
American historian Timothy Snyder, who left the country in 2024 to take up a position at the University of Toronto, offered a different perspective in a post on his Substack page this week.
“Protest wins elections,” Snyder wrote. “In the current situation, the opposition parties must win the elections to stop the shift of the one-man dictatorship.”
Snyder’s argument points to perhaps the biggest reason Saturday’s protests were so well attended. While the Republican-controlled Congress has applauded much of the work from the Trump administration, the calendar has changed, and it’s a midterm election year when the president’s party often loses seats in the Senate and House.
