The nationwide “No Kings” protest movement is back for round two — and after avoiding Washington during the summer, protesters descended on the nation’s capital Saturday amid an 18-day government shutdown that has no end in sight.
The demonstrations are part of the second national day of action, organized by dozens of liberal advocacy groups to protest what they call “authoritarian power grabs” on the part of President Donald Trump.
Organizers said they expected the more than 2,600 events across all 50 states to surpass the more than 5 million people who attended the first wave of “No Kings” rallies in June. The marches come amid heightened criticism from Republicans about this weekend’s rallies.
“They might try to paint this weekend’s events as something dangerous to our society, but the reality is there is nothing unlawful or unsafe about organizing and attending peaceful protests,” said Deirdre Schifeling of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s the most patriotic and American thing you can do, and we have a 250-year-old history of disagreeing in public.”
Amid the heightened tensions of the shutdown, Republicans have repeatedly sought to vilify the planned protests. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other leading Republicans have referred to the protests as a “hate America rally” and sought to tie it to Hamas and antifa. And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also announced Thursday that he would be sending members of the state’s National Guard — as well as state troopers, Texas Rangers and Department of Public Safety personnel — to Austin on Saturday in response to the planned demonstrations.
In an interview with Fox News earlier this week, Trump said “some people say [Democrats] want to delay” ending the government shutdown because of the rallies.
“They’re referring to me as a king. I’m not a king,” Trump said in the interview. But on Saturday morning, shortly before the Washington rally was set to kick off, the Trump War Room account posted an image of a smirking Trump wearing a crown.
Organizers and Democratic politicians remain undeterred by the response, though. Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), who was set to appear at rallies in his district, said Democrats were intentionally trying to paint Saturday’s rallies in fundamentally patriotic terms in response to Republicans’ attacks.
“We knew they’d try to do what they’re now doing,” he told POLITICO Playbook. “So we thought it was really important to make clear that there’s literally nothing more patriotic and more American than exercising your First Amendment rights when you disagree with the direction of your country.”
Ryan said he and other members of Congress with a background in the military and national security now talk regularly to chart a response as “Trump has ratcheted up the politicization of the military.”
Leah Greenberg, progressive advocacy organization Indivisible co-executive director, called it “part of a broader effort to create a permission structure to crack down” on peaceful protests.
“They are panicking and they are flailing and they are searching for anything — literally anything — to distract from their own governing failures,” Greenberg said of Republicans at a press conference. “And in their desperation, they have decided to go with smearing millions of Americans who are coming out to peacefully, joyfully assert our rights.”
The first wave of rallies that took place on June 14 — the same day as Trump’s military parade in Washington, which coincided with the army’s 250th anniversary and Trump’s 79th birthday — were overwhelmingly peaceful, and organizers said then that they intentionally avoided a counterprotest in Washington to avoid the military parade.
The events went off almost entirely without incident, save for one notable exception of volunteer rally “peacekeepers” shooting and killing a bystander at a Utah march because they believed another man with a gun was about to fire on the crowd.
Republicans’ efforts to demonize the rally comes amid a White House push to target left-leaning nonprofits perceived as hostile to the administration’s agenda.
At an early rally, about 150 people have gathered at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to protest the dismissal of thousands of federal employees.
“People are hurting and some people are dying because of the actions of President Trump,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who pointed toward the Trump administration’s disruption of clinical cancer trials. “Part of having a healthy America is making sure we protect our democracy and our rights. That is a healthy America.”
As NIH employees who were speaking urged crowd members to sign petitions to protect university research, protesters raised their signs in agreement: “Enough is enough,” they shouted back.
Unlike the June protests, the Saturday slate of events also included a rally in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Organizers said Saturday that over 200,000 people participated in D.C. When asked for comment ahead of Saturday’s rallies, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded: “Who cares?”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), one of the first speakers at the demonstration in Washington, earlier this week criticized the push as an effort to “suppress turnout.”
“They’re showing us how much they hate free speech,” he said in a Wednesday social media video. “The rhetoric has ramped up from Republican leaders in the last few days.”
The speaker list in D.C. also included Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Karen Attiah, a former Washington Post columnist who was fired last month after attracting criticism for several social media posts in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder.
Several of the speakers at the Washington rally focused their remarks on the Trump administration’s attempts to ramp up immigration enforcement and deploy military troops into American cities.
Sanders capped off the rally with an impassioned address about the series of dangers he said Trump posed to democracy, decrying the president’s attacks on the media and higher education and his attempts to prosecute his political enemies.
The senator also lambasted Republicans for supporting Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which could contribute to more than 10 million people losing health care coverage, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“When he was sworn in as the nation’s first president, George Washington called this attempt at self-government ‘an experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.’ My fellow Americans, in an unprecedented way, that experiment is now in danger,” Sanders said.
Ben Johansen contributed to this report.
