In the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota, a sea of people converged on the State Capitol, invoking the memories of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Demonstrators swarmed intersections in Portland, Oregon, motivated by what one called a “national crisis” that had “escalated to a whole other level”. In Little Rock, Arkansas, where more than 2,000 people marched across the Arkansas river, one woman carried her own MAGA sign: “Morons Are Governing America.”
Protesters filled streets and town squares across the US on Saturday at thousands of rallies, the third in a sequence of nationwide, loosely coordinated demonstrations under the banner of “No Kings”. They came to denounce President Donald Trump and much of his second-term
agenda, wielding signs and chants about issues such as mass deportation, restrictions on voting, attacks on diversity and two matters that have suddenly moved to the fore: the war in Iran and the soaring gas prices that have resulted from it.
“Prices are going up, and it feels like we can’t even afford to live anymore,” said John Moes, a Minneapolis resident who was dressed in a 15-foot puppetlike costume resembling the singer Prince, a local icon.
“This is one of the ways we can say we’re fed up,” said Moes, who described himself as an independent who leans Democratic.
The No Kings organisers said eight million people took part; their estimates in
some cities were higher than those of local public safety officials.
The demonstrations stretched across the country, from above the Arctic Circle (Kotzebue, Alaska: population 3,000) to the tropics, in Puerto Rico. There were also 39 international No Kings rallies, according to organisers.
The Twin Cities were a focal point of the day’s protests after tumultuous months of an immigration crackdown that included the killing of two protesters, Good and Pretti, by federal agents. On a windy and cold day, protesters marched in orderly waves
towards a stage at the Capitol in St. Paul, flying Minnesota state and American flags, chanting and singing. The Minnesota Department of Public Safety estimated that 100,000 people took part; No Kings organisers said the number was 200,000.
Jane Fonda, an icon of activism against the Vietnam War, addressed the crowd, and Bruce Springsteen took to the stage to perform Streets of Minneapolis, which he wrote as a tribute to the city and its defiance to the federal immigration crackdown.
“Here in our home they killed and roamed. In the winter of ’26,” he sang.
“We’ll remember the names of those who died. On the streets of Minneapolis.”
Other large protests took place in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. In Manhattan, demonstrators passed through Times Square in a procession that stretched for more than a mile. In Washington, D.C., marchers passed near the residence of Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and called for his removal.
With the midterm elections months away, the protests are being scrutinised for whether they could translate to any political shifts. Though the protesters were largely Democrats, dozens more No Kings events were held in Republican-dominated or battleground states on Saturday than during the last marches in October, according to the organisers. But overall the shift was marginal: Forty-nine per cent of events were held in red or battleground states on Saturday, compared with 48 per cent in October, according to data provided by the organisers.
Protests took place in deeply Republican enclaves such as Shelbyville, Kentucky, and Midland, Texas. In Anchorage, Alaska, a relatively liberal enclave in a reliably red state, scores of protesters gathered as temperatures hovered around -6 degrees Celcius.
One twilight march traversed the Florida district where on Tuesday, Emily Gregory, a Democrat, beat her Republican rival, Mike Caruso, in a special election for a seat in the state’s House
of Representatives.
The district, which includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, had been won by the Republican candidate by 19 percentage points in 2024. The march headed towards Mar-a-Lago, following a route that included the newly named President Donald J. Trump Boulevard.
The White House has reacted to No Kings rallies with mockery. On Thursday, a White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, said in a statement that “the only people who care about these Trump derangement therapy sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them”.
The nationwide marches under mostly bright skies came amid an unpopular war in Iran, months of fury by progressives over sweeping immigration enforcement raids, falling stock markets and sustained frustration over the cost of living, especially rising gasoline prices.
They also came as federal lawmakers on Capitol Hill remain at loggerheads in a protracted fight over funding for immigration enforcement by the department of homeland security. The resulting partial government shutdown has led to hourslong waits at the security checkpoints of some airports after many unpaid security agents stopped showing up for work. On Thursday, Trump announced he would pay them through another funding source.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published Tuesday found Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 36 per cent, the lowest point since he returned to the White House. Just 35 per cent of respondents approved of the US strikes on Iran, the poll found.
Valerie Tirado, the mother of a Marine who is headed to West Asia, marched in Brooklyn on Saturday with a sign that said “Bring My Son Home”.
“Trump is using these military men as pawns, just to flex,” said Tirado, 60.
At a time when conservative control of Washington remains complete, in the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, the marches were a chance for Democrats to make their voices heard and to try to portray Republican domination as teetering.
At a small protest in Richmond, Kentucky, Missy Manet, 29, donned a red yarn hat and said she had attended the gathering as a show of frustration with the direction of the country.
“I feel somewhat powerless,” she said of being a Democratic voter in a staunchly Republican part of the country. “I feel like my vote doesn’t do a lot most of the times.”
The marches had no shortage of sceptics.
In Oxford, Mississippi, Cass Rutledge, a first-year law student at the University of Mississippi, walked through the No Kings protest and around the town square on Saturday and questioned why people thought Trump was acting like a king.
“He is, you know, a duly elected President who won the popular vote and the electoral college in a landslide,” Rutledge said. “And so I’m a little bit confused on how he’s acting differently than any other President.”
He pointed to the stalemate in Congress over the SAVE America Act, the Republican-driven bill to tighten voter identification and registration rules, which Democrats have called an attempt to suppress turnout based on false claims of voting fraud. Rutledge said Trump was “going through the process” to try to get the legislation passed.
Saturday’s events were organised by national and local groups, including widely known progressive coalitions such as Indivisible, 50501 and MoveOn, as well as hundreds of smaller ones, like American Atheists, the Transgender Law Centre and the Michigan Climate Action Network.
In June, the first No Kings demonstrations took place on the same day that Trump scheduled a military parade in Washington for the army’s 250th anniversary, coinciding with his 79th birthday.
In October, more than seven million people attended No Kings demonstrations in all 50 states, according to organisers.
The No Kings protests are not focused on any particular issue, but are meant to serve as a unifying umbrella for people with various grievances about the Trump administration. In the long history of protest movements in the US, many have achieved remarkable change, but they tended to be more focused, on women’s suffrage or civil rights, for example.
In Atlanta, a centre of the civil rights movement, thousands poured out of the Memorial Drive Greenway to march across an overpass towards Georgia’s Statehouse. Led by a phalanx of labour union organisers, demonstrators demanded a $25-an-hour minimum wage. “We work! We sweat!” they chanted. “Put 25 on our check!”
New York Times News Service