People critical of the policies of the Trump administration rally in Deering Oaks Park in Portland, Maine, as part of the nationwide No Kings protests in October. The movement is gearing up for its biggest day yet as thousands of protests are scheduled across the country on Saturday. (Photo by Jim Neuger/Maine Morning Star)
Thousands of protests are scheduled across the United States on Saturday as part of the “No Kings” movement opposing President Donald Trump’s administration.
Organizers expect millions of people to turn out for this third round of No Kings demonstrations, with more than 3,000 local-level events mapped on the movement’s official website.
Previous No Kings protests, held in June and October of 2025, were among the largest single-day demonstrations in U.S. history, according to Harvard University’s Crowd Counting Consortium, a data project that documents political protests and other demonstrations around the country.
Driving the No Kings movement at the national level are prominent progressive organizations, including Indivisible, 50501 and MoveOn. But demonstrations are organized at the local level by coalitions of hundreds of progressive groups that run the gamut from civil rights organizations to labor unions, religious communities to nonprofits dedicated to issues such as education, climate, gun control and immigration.
“People are angrier. Our numbers are growing and we’re really widening the tent of people that are going to stand up to a consolidation of authoritarian power,” said Hannah Stauss, one of the organizers of New York City’s No Kings protest. “Every time that (Trump) attacks, we get to reach a new section of people that are ready to stand with us.”
Top Republican leaders, after dismissing last year’s No Kings protests as “hate America” rallies backed by “radical leftists,” have remained mostly silent ahead of these latest scheduled protests.
But as the weekend promises massive crowds and spectacle across the nation, political observers and protesters alike wonder whether the demonstrations signal a coming wave of change at the polls, or whether momentum will fizzle after the crowds go home.
Democrats and other progressives are good at mobilizing people for large-scale protests, note some experts, but they’ve been less successful than conservatives in recent years at building the kind of local infrastructure needed to effect sweeping policy changes.
To that end, as No Kings enters its second year, organizers are looking for ways to connect the disparate groups that have united under the No Kings banner. Indivisible and other national organizers have offered training, online tools and other assistance that extends beyond the protests.
“There’s this traditional critique of protests or rallies, that single-day events don’t do much and don’t connect people to action,” said Salvador Espinoza, a board member of Hands Off Central Texas, a progressive nonprofit that’s one of the main organizers of Austin’s No Kings event. “So we consciously took steps to change the shape of how those events are structured, starting with the second No Kings, and now with No Kings 3.”
A sense of momentum
Trump’s approval rating this month is the lowest it’s been since his reelection. His administration is governing amid national and global upheaval that includes an unpopular war with Iran, an immigration crackdown that nearly two-thirds of Americans view as excessive, spiking gas prices and continued fallout related to the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“The No Kings protests are a powerful way to explain that the way President Trump has behaved is just out of step with the way presidents have behaved historically,” said Dan Greenberg, a senior legal fellow at the conservative-leaning Cato Institute.
No Kings is not an organization itself, but the movement’s protests are supported by national progressive groups, such as Indivisible, that solicit donations to provide training, digital tools and marketing help. In 2023, Indivisible received a two-year, $3 million grant from the Open Society Foundations, which funds a variety of groups that support democracy and human rights. It was founded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, long a bête noire of conservatives.
A nonprofit called Home of the Brave is running a $1 million ad campaign in hundreds of newspapers nationwide to promote the event. Meanwhile, local groups provide their own grassroots-level organizational support, such as event logistics and volunteer coordination.
Past No Kings events have included big-city marches with tens of thousands of attendees as well as small-town demonstrations with just a handful of protesters. They’ve taken place in staunchly Democratic states as well as ruby-red Republican strongholds.
In Fairfield County, Connecticut, this year, a progressive group called REBs is planning a costumed line dance along a four-lane highway in Wilton.
In Austin, Texas, organizers are expecting tens of thousands at a downtown rally that will include live music, art and performances.
And in Red Oak, Iowa, Jenny Horner expects at least 50 people to show up to protest in her small, conservative farming community. Horner is a Spanish teacher and immigrant advocate who’s scheduled to speak at her hometown event.
“I’ve never in my life thought there would be so many issues at any given moment that are horrendous, that are scary, that need addressing,” she said. “But here we are.”
Expanding power
The idea and the anger behind the No Kings protests stem from the belief that Trump is governing as though Congress and the courts should be subservient to the president rather than being co-equal branches of the government, said Shannon O’Brien, a political scientist and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies American presidents.
She doesn’t like referring to his behavior as “kinglike” because she believes the term can be hyperbolic and inflammatory. But, she said, Trump has worked to expand the power of the government’s executive branch and pushed the boundaries of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances.
“We have an executive who does not believe in the constraint of guardrails, and I think he does believe that the bureaucracy exists to serve him rather than the American people,” O’Brien said.
And some of Trump’s actions have jarred Americans, calling to mind the trappings of monarchy or dictatorship, such as hanging massive banners with his face on the facades of U.S. government buildings or seeking to rename public buildings after himself.
“It’s grotesque in the way that an American king is grotesque, to have someone eager to get his name plastered all over these government buildings,” said Greenberg, of the conservative Cato Institute. “We think of it as kingly behavior, not presidential behavior.”
O’Brien also noted the belief, propagated by his supporters and some in his government, that Trump has been divinely “anointed” or ordained, or that his decisions, such as going to war with Iran, are blessed by God. It’s the kind of belief that underpins monarchies.
That thinking, she said, leads “down that slippery slope of royalty, of infallibility, being blessed by God and being the chosen one.”
Lasting impact
The first No Kings event in Austin, Texas, last June was a traditional rally on the steps of the state Capitol. But the biggest takeaway afterward, said Espinoza, was that organizers felt they could have done more to push rallygoers toward the next step of getting more deeply involved in a cause they care about. With the second No Kings event, and with the third on Saturday, they’re hosting a traditional protest march from City Hall to a large outdoor venue that will have speakers and performers, but will also be packed with booths from local progressive groups.
“We built a garden of opportunities so everybody could find the organization that matched their values,” said Espinoza. “From mutual aid to civil rights, students and young people, labor, LGBTQ+ groups. The goal in changing the events was about connection and action.”
In Huntsville, Alabama, a midsize city in the northern part of the state, No Kings organizers plan to group attendees by neighborhood at the rally on Saturday, so that people can start to build their own networks around local issues.
We want people to know that they don’t have to wait on us to organize.
– Brittney Whitehead, vice chair of the Huntsville, Ala., Indivisible chapter
Attendees are encouraged to write the name of their neighborhood on their protest signs so it’s easier to find each other.
“We want people to know that they don’t have to wait on us to organize,” said Brittney Whitehead, vice chair of her local Indivisible chapter. She said that while Indivisible would love more volunteers, the group primarily wants to help people connect and organize around any local issues that matter to them.
“They can organize themselves, and they can do so more quickly than waiting for us to get to them, so we’re going to look to make connections and networks through all of our neighborhoods, as well as gather them all together in a larger network.”
She said that since Trump’s inauguration, her chapter of Indivisible has seen an increase in the number of people volunteering with it and its coalition groups, which include get-out-the-vote organizations, civil and disability rights advocates and Indigenous groups.
More volunteers have signed up for political canvassing after the upcoming state primaries, she said. Others are joining local groups that track immigration incidents.
Horner, in Iowa, hopes the No Kings protests won’t echo the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 — a progressive movement with lots of spectacle but few lasting changes. She remembers it as being a “fractured” movement without strong consensus on how to solve problems.
“I wonder if we can do something like Occupy Wall Street, but this time have it not be fractured, so that it can actually get the traction it needs, and get staying power and grow,” she said.
Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Georgia Recorder, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
