Some things remain the same as nationwide demonstrations against U.S. President Donald Trump are planned again for Saturday, but much has changed in just five months since the last No Kings rallies.
More than 3,100 events are being organized in communities large and small across all 50 states, with more than nine million people expected to participate, according to Indivisible, the activist group spearheading the third event of its kind since Trump returned to office in January 2025.
“The first one had five million, second one had seven million — the largest political demonstration in American history — and this one, everybody’s kind of expecting that it’ll blow the roof off,” said former vice-president Al Gore, a Democrat, in a podcast this week for progressive magazine Mother Jones. “I think these things matter and I think it’s a reflection of a sense of renewing political will.”
Organizers say roughly 2,500 events were planned for the second nationwide ‘No Kings’ protest against the Trump administration — nearly double the number from earlier this year.
Sister protests are also expected in several countries, mostly in Europe, but also in Mexico, Australia and Canada. The No Kings website currently has callouts for volunteers for events in Toronto and Halifax, an event is also expected near the U.S. embassy in Ottawa.
In countries with constitutional monarchies the protests are dubbed “No Tyrants.”
Trump reacted to previous No Kings rallies by insisting “I’m not a king,” and saying attendees were “not representative of the people of our country.”
‘We’ll never forget what happened here’
There are reasons to believe the attendance projections aren’t just idle hype, given the torrent of major developments from the Trump administration since autumn.
When demonstrators gathered on Oct. 18, it was more than two weeks into a partial government shutdown, one that would last a record 43 days. While a current shutdown is more limited in scope, it has crucially seen Transportation Security Administration agents at airports go without pay, leading to spikes in absences and even resignations, while exacerbating wait times for consumers during a busy spring travel season.
The two events in 2025 also saw participants voice displeasure with the widespread immigration raids conducted by the administration in its goal to fill Trump’s expansive deportation goals, and the tactics of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents in carrying out those raids.
That anger has only increased after shooting deaths of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota in January, stemming from a federal operation that targeted Somalian-American residents. Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, and Pretti was hit multiple times as two CBP officers fired their weapons.
Organizers have designated Minnesota the flagship site on Saturday, and have told a state oversight agency that 100,000 people could converge on the state capitol complex in Saint Paul. Last June’s event drew an estimated 80,000 people there.
Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, told the Associated Press the national organizers chose Minnesota because it was subject to “some of the most horrific, sadistic behavior you can imagine” from the Trump administration.
“At the same time, in the Twin Cities earlier this year, we saw some of the most inspiring, neighbourly, brave organizing that we’ve seen anywhere in the country, and it serves as an inspiration to all of us,” Levin added.
Bruce Springsteen, who released the song Streets of Minnesota after the Good and Pretti killings, is expected to perform in Minnesota on Saturday, as well as legendary folksinger Joan Baez, whose protest history dates back over six decades and includes participation at 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’ll never forget what happened here, and we’re taking action,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told MS Now about the protests in an interview broadcast Thursday night.
Polls since Iran strikes not favourable
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 push from bipartisan group of House of Representatives legislators, over the protestations of Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The Trump administration has been accused of mismanaging the release of files, improperly redacting names in some cases, while mistakenly revealing the names of alleged victims in other instances. There have also been allegations, which the Justice Department denies, that it has slow-walked the release of files that mention Trump, who once said he knew Epstein for 15 years.
Trump has not faced substantiated allegations of wrongdoing with respect to his relationship with Epstein.
An even more animating, recent issue for protesters emerged after this protest date was announced in January — the war in the Middle East. Even before Saturday, dozens of demonstrations have taken place in the U.S. since the White House and Israel launced airstrikes on Iran on Feb. 28.
While polling indicates that self-identified Republicans who are surveyed support the Iran war, separate polls this week from Reuters/Ipsos, the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and Fox News indicate the president is being battered when it comes to Democrats and independents. The war, not well explained to the American public by the administration, has led to spikes in gas prices, an important priority for both Republican and Democratic voters, the AP poll found.
Spreading to the suburbs
While protests in big cities attract the lion’s share of media coverage, a growing number are set to occur in suburban areas in places like Scottsdale, Ariz., Langhorne, Pa., and East Cobb, Ga.
In Summit, N.J., one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs, Jeff Naiman told AP he feels like he’s living in an “authoritarian nightmare” of Trump’s making.
“It’s like our hair is on fire,” says Naiman, a 59-year-old radiologist who leads his local chapter of Indivisible. “Our country’s being torn apart.”
In a Wall Street Journal editorial on Thursday, author and psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert wrote that rallies like No Kings “accomplish nothing practical” and “resemble bad group therapy —gatherings that offer validation, solidarity and emotional release.”
U.S. historian Timothy Snyder, who left the country in 2024 to take a position at the University of Toronto, offered a different view in a post on his Substack page this week.
“Protest wins elections,” wrote Snyder. “In the situation that we are in now, the opposition must win elections to halt the shift to a one-person, one-party authoritarian regime.”
Snyder’s argument points to perhaps the biggest reason Saturday’s protests could be the most attended yet. While the Republican-controlled Congress has applauded much of the activity from the Trump administration, the calendar has flipped, and it’s a midterm election year where a president’s party typically loses seats in the Senate and House.