Things have changed since the last major No Kings protests, in October 2025. Back then, an estimated 7 million people poured into the streets to protest the Trump administration; this Saturday, at more than 3,000 events planned nationwide, the crowds are likely to be even bigger. In part, that’s because the Trump administration keeps pursuing more and more unpopular agendas, often with a sadism and indifference to popular opinion that becomes prominent in the news.
In January, ICE agents in Minneapolis killed two protesters – first Renee Good on 7 January, and then Alex Pretti on 24 January – who were in the streets trying to obstruct the agency’s kidnappings and voice their opposition to the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing program. The two dead Americans were among the thousands who have become enraged at ongoing revelations of the extent and cruelty of Trump’s mass kidnapping, detention, and ethnic cleansing program, which has swept up tens of thousands of men, women and children.
Then, on 30 January, roughly 3m files related to the dead paedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein were released by the Department of Justice under a law passed by Congress, providing further details about Epstein’s extensive connections with members of the financial, academic and media elites – prominently including members of Trump’s cabinet and extended circle. One document, first withheld and then released by the justice department, contains a woman’s allegation that she was sexually abused by Donald Trump under Epstein’s auspices when she was a child. (The White House denies the claim.)
In March, Trump launched a disastrous and seemingly impulsive war of choice in Iran, killing few prominent Iranian political leaders (and no small number of schoolgirls and other civilians), but which has failed to approach his administration’s stated goal of regime change. Trump has offered meagre and conflicting rationales for the war, which has drawn comparisons to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq – a war Trump built much of his own early political reputation on being willing to condemn. Meanwhile, the war has sent fuel prices soaring and is already inflicting harm on consumers. Not that people have much disposable money to consume with, anyway: the economy is continuing to lose jobs as the Trump administration prioritizes handouts to the wealthy, lavish spending on immigration enforcement, and investment in the AI sector over American workers.
Which of these acute injustices and ongoing catastrophes will be the focus of outrage at this weekend’s edition of the mass anti-Trump street demonstrations? It is hard to say. Like the Women’s Marches during the first Trump administration, the No Kings Marches that have emerged during his second have become a repository for a vast spectrum of anti-Trump grievances. There will be people there who oppose his deportation regime, people who have been hurt by his cuts to federal programs or his attacks on medicine and universities, people who oppose war in principle, people who oppose wars in the Middle East from bitter experience, and people who are simply angered by the staggering new cost of gas. There will be people who are angered at Trump’s rapid and reckless expansion of executive power – blessed by the Republican-dominated supreme court – and there will be people who are offended by his corruption and self-dealing, by his hostility to green energy, by his history of alleged violence against women, and by his tiresome narcissism and personal vulgarity. There will be, in short, every possible objection to Trump along the left-liberal spectrum of American politics represented in the streets on Saturday; name any objection to Trump from this camp that you can imagine, and someone at a No Kings protest this weekend will be holding it aloft, on a handmade, cardboard sign.
It is a frequently lobbed criticism of No Kings, as it was of the Women’s Marches, that these sorts of vast public demonstrations of broad anti-Trump feeling suffer from being overly inclusive and insufficiently precise. And it is true that the No Kings marches have no demands, as such: they are more expressions of the passion and size of the anti-regime feeling in the United States than a meaningful program to leverage that feeling for specific political ends.
But it is not true that the breadth of the coalition of the No Kings movement means that that coalition cannot be wielded in the service of more specific policy changes. In demonstrating the vastness of American popular discontent and the intensity of ill will toward the political right, the No Kings protests will show the human faces behind Trump’s disastrous approval rating; they will give politicians, ahead of the looming November midterms, a sense of the wisdom, or lack thereof, in following Trump’s political lead. In 2024, after Trump eked out a victory in the presidential election and won the popular vote for the first time, many commentators assumed that his return to power represented a dramatic and permanent cultural shift: that the culture wars were over, and that the right had won. But in reality, much of Trump’s support in 2024 was weak and noncommittal, his famous diehard fans less central to his support than their legend makes it seem. The No Kings protests are an opportunity to demonstrate – to politicians, to the media, and to America itself – that this country also contains large swaths of liberal and left-leaning people, people who dare to imagine that they matter as much to what this country is as the conservatives do.
Nor will the No Kings marches be the end of the popular demonstration of anti-Trump sentiment. It is true that there are some protesters who will walk a few miles and go home, their cardboard signs put away, their sense of civic duty fulfilled. But it is also true that many of those who attend, some of whom have been activated to politics for the first time, will meet other impassioned people there; that they will be recruited to new forms of organizing and new means of engagement, and will begin to look for new and more consistent and ongoing ways to enact their values locally, on the ground, in a country that sometimes seems to be turning away from them. That, too, is a victory.