It’s been a week since an estimated 7 million people across 50 US states and the District of Columbia—and countless others all over the world—took part in the “No Kings” protests to speak up against the Trump administration’s policies and his leadership’s slide into authoritarianism. From Washington, DC, to Oakland, California, protesters proudly waved American flags and declared their love for the country. They spanned generations, and many were dressed in various inflatable costumes—ducks, SpongeBob Squarepants, dinosaurs, and more—borrowing from Portland’s example of defying the rhetoric from Republicans and the administration that vilified anyone who demonstrated as violent, Leftist, “haters” of America. The peaceful October 18 pro-democracy protests, which naturally drew the ire of President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, marked one of the largest single-day demonstrations in US history. Two million more people than the previous “No Kings” gatherings from June showed up across 2,700 events in big Blue cities and, notably, in reliably Republican towns. “Even my small, conservative hometown of Brenham, Texas, held a ‘No Kings’ Rally with at least a hundred people in attendance,” wrote the ACLU Justice Division leader Ellen Flenniken in a post about the protests, “and it was far from being the only small town to show up for our rights and for each other.” In Pella, Iowa, “a town where Trump reigns as king,” as Slate’s Lyz Lenz writes, somewhere between 150 and 200 people showed up to chant, “No kings! No crowns!” > “The current protest movement has already reached deeper into Trump country > than at almost any point during the first Trump administration.” While these may appear to be random anecdotes, in fact, they reflect a meaningful trend described in the findings of a new study from Harvard’s Kennedy School, published just before October 18. Researchers responsible for the study, titled “The Resistance Reaches into Trump Country,” concluded through data analysis that “protest events now occur across a wider range of US counties than we have observed since January 2017.” To conduct this analysis, the researchers matched protest participation data to county-level 2024 presidential election data and county population data from the US Census. What they found is that, although there has been a steady climb in the “cumulative number” of counties hosting an event in recent years, 2025 likely has the “most geographically widespread” protests in US history. The current surge has pushed the “cumulative share of protest-hosting counties well above 60 percent,” surpassing the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, when protests were recorded in almost 40 percent of counties across the country. The recent protests appear to be expanding to parts of the country that had voted for Trump. Between April and August of this year, the researchers noted, “the median protest county in the US sent more votes to Trump in 2024 than [Kamala] Harris.” As an example, the research cites the 2,000 people who joined the June round of “No Kings” protests in Kingsport, a city with a population of about 55,000 in Tennessee’s Sullivan County, where Trump won almost 77 percent of the vote. Last Saturday, Kingsport held a protest once again. “America was founded because we didn’t want a king,” Kristina Runciman, an organizer with East Tennessee Voices, told a local station, “and we don’t want a king now.” During the second Trump administration, researchers have found, the “share of counties hosting at least one anti-Trump protest has risen markedly…surpassing the historic spikes observed during his first term. And the current protest movement has already reached deeper into Trump country than at almost any point during the first Trump administration.”

The first protester I noticed as I approached the No Kings rally Saturday was dressed as a giant yellow duck. All around, demonstrators were converging on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC—one wore a Lincoln-style stovepipe hat and carried a sign that read, “Protect Constitutional Rights” and “I America.” Animal costumes have become an ever-present symbol of the anti-Trump movement—a way to mock the administration’s assertions that protests are overrun with dangerous radicals. In DC, the duck was joined by a smattering of other fauna: a chicken here, a few dinosaurs there. But what struck me most about the event—which House Speaker Mike Johnson predicted would be a “hate America rally”—was how earnestly patriotic the demonstrators were. Jeremy Schulman/Mother Jones American flags were everywhere, carried by people of all races and ages. A few flew upside-down, symbolizing—Alito-style—a nation in distress. Most were waved proudly. Signs declared protesters’ allegiance to the country, the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law. Robin, a DC resident whose flag-adorned sign included the full text of the First Amendment, said she wanted to make clear that “just because we’re liberals doesn’t mean we hate America.” > Robin told me she brought her flag today to show that “just because we’re > liberals doesn’t mean we hate America.” She says her beliefs are closer to the > founding ideals than Trump’s are. Her sign suggests that’s true. > > — Jeremy Schulman (@jeremyschulman.bsky.social) 2025-10-18T16:48:41.497Z There were other flags, too: A lot of Pride flags; some Palestinian, Mexican, and Ukrainian flags; an Irish flag. There were a ton of DC flags—they’ve popped up everywhere in the city since Trump’s militarized takeover. But those were all out numbered, by far, by American flags. The protest organizers made sure of that. Many marchers had clearly brought their own from home, but volunteers were on hand to pass out flags to anyone who wanted one. “I’m trying to protect democracy in this country,” said Neshama, one of those volunteers. “We need to show that the people at the rally are pro-America.” > Neshama is a volunteer with No Kings. She’s passing out free American flags > purchased by the organizers (though many protesters clearly came with their > own). “I’m trying to protect democracy in this country,” she told me. > > — Jeremy Schulman (@jeremyschulman.bsky.social) 2025-10-18T17:09:10.840Z I talked to a trio of older protesters sitting on a wall, together holding an American flag as marchers streamed endlessly past. They didn’t want to give their names or have their photo taken; they said they were afraid of being doxxed. “I support democracy and our country,” one of them told me. “It’s not about ideology.” He said that growing up, he’d never imagined that all three branches of government would be “supporting autocracy.” A woman chimed in; she wanted to share what another member of the group had said to her earlier: “I’ve never bought an American flag before, and this is what it’s come to.” We all laughed, and one of them added that “it was important to show that we love America, too.” On my way out, I walked past the Department of Labor, which has been draped since this summer with an enormous image of Donald Trump’s face. In front, a party was going on. Icona Pop’s “I love it” blared as protesters danced with a stegosaurus, a unicorn, and a revolutionary in a tricorne hat. When the music paused, a voice came over the loudspeaker. “We are all American,” he said. “It’s our constitutional right to be here.” Jeremy Schulman/Mother Jones

A joyous, mocking menagerie of frogs, axolotls, and at least one giant pink hippo made its way down Seventh Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday, alongside thousands of others, in a defiant protest that formed part of the nationwide “No Kings” rallies. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by Mother Jones (@motherjonesmag) With limited visibility inside hot inflatable suits, the marchers’ steps were sometimes ginger. Amphibious, reptilian, and fantastical alike were repeatedly stopped by fellow protesters, photographers, and journalists like me—making progress slow and a bit hapless, adding to the general air of absurd exuberance. “Solidarity with Portland!” said Denise Cohen, a 59-year-old dog groomer and podcaster from upstate New York who was peering out from inside a unicorn costume, alongside her husband Marty (in a dinosaur outfit.) “I wanted frogs, but nobody had frogs,” she said, referencing the original protesters who donned the inflatables in Portland in recent months. “I tried to get a Portland frog outfit and they were sold out until November,” said Oscar Hernandez, 58, from Weehawken, New Jersey, dressed in a giant pink rhino costume and shuffling (or perhaps dancing—hard to tell) down the street. “You know, this is fun! This is, this is America. This is not a hate America rally,” he said, referring to how Trump and his team have been representing the mass gatherings. Rather than wearing an inflatable, financial analyst Christopher Hardwick, 46, appeared in hastily constructed drag, clutching a McDonald’s coffee, and adorned with black and yellow accessories “to make it look a little Proud Boy-y.” His goal was to reclaim the word “antifa” from the Trump administration. “I’m a big antifa girl now!” Keith Whitmer, 70, wanted to do the same. “I really don’t want the right-wing Republican Party to take antifa—the word antifa—and make it mean something bad, because it’s actually what we’ve been doing since the 1940s.”

Of the 2,500 No Kings gatherings across America, few were more saturated in American history—in flags and historical costumes—than the one on the Battle Green in Lexington, where the Minutemen fought another king 250 years ago. People streamed by the thousands on to the Green, under a bright sky; they listened cheerfully to speech upon speech, including one from Senator Ed Markey. I had the honor of the last word, and here is what I said: As Sam Adams remarked on the occasion of the Battle of Lexington in 1775, so we can say today: “What a glorious morning for America.” I have spent a lot of time on the Battle Green over the years. Growing up, I was a tour guide here—I passed a strenuous history test, and so was awarded a tricorne hat, and the license to tell the stories of the people who gave their lives in what might well be called the first No Kings protest—men who answered the midnight tolling of the bell in the belfry, and repaired to this Green in the cold and dark to wait for the British to arrive, knowing that they faced the greatest military force in the world. Eight of them died, and in the fashion of our time, let us say those names: John Brown, Samuel Hadley, Caleb Harrington, Isaac Muzzy, Robert Munroe, Asahel Porter,  Jonas Parker. And young Jonathan Harrington who—at least as legend had it—was mortally wounded and crawled across the green towards his wife to die in her arms on the stoop of their house. They believed that they were able to govern themselves. Their King did not, and he dispatched yet more troops to occupy our cities after the events of April 1775. But eventually, with much more sacrifice, their point was made, and democracy gained a foothold on this continent and this earth. Two generations later, just down the road in Concord, Henry David Thoreau began his explorations of nonviolence, the first experiments with a tool the Minutemen did not possess. The development of that tool across the 20th century, from India to Selma, stands alongside the solar cell as last century’s greatest invention. And it too has been used on this Green. In May of 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, led by a young John Kerry, asked permission to bivouac on this Green during a march from Concord to Boston. When permission was denied by the Selectboard, they went ahead anyway, with the support of many Lexingtonians. I was here that night, and I remember it well—small huddles of people illuminated by the blue and red lights on the tops of the police cars. Since I was ten I eventually had to go home; my father stayed, and was arrested, with 457 others; it remains the largest arrest in Massachusetts history. And that was a small part of a successful movement that ended a war that had killed millions in the jungles of Southeast Asia—a nonviolent victory. Now we stand here at another remarkable turning point in American history. We have a president who, though duly elected, has decided to govern as a ruler. With the aid of a cowed Congress and a corrupted Supreme Court, he has ordered troops into peaceful cities, used masked secret police to arrest our neighbors on pretexts, upended the orderly work of Congress by cancelling projects they had funded, favored cronies and their businesses to line his pockets, reduced our standing in the community of nations by imposing scattershot tariffs, and all but ended the scientific progress that has marked this nation since Benjamin Franklin. When our forebears rose against King George, they presented their list of complaints to the world, and too many of them sound familiar. In the words of the Declaration, the colonies arose to rebuke the crown for, among other things: > “affect(ing) to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil > power.” > > “Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”: > > And for “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and > altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” We can add new ones: our new king has decided that half his subjects are worthless. As his spokeswoman declared on Thursday, the opposition party in this country’s “main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.” As his lickspittle speaker of the House said earlier this week, our gathering today is part of a “Hate America Rally.” “Let’s see who will show up for that,” he said. “I bet you you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists on full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.” Sadly, for Mike Johnson and Karoline Leavitt and Donald Trump, what we actually have here today are people who believe far more deeply than they in the “foundational truths of this republic.” We believe that the president is not a monarch, but instead a person elected to protect the constitutional arrangements under which we live. We believe he has no more business dispatching troops to Portland or Chicago or Los Angeles than King George had dispatching troops to Lexington—less, in fact, for at least King George was working under the established rules of his day, rules overturned by the Revolution. We believe that the racism and xenophobia lurking in every pronouncement of this president goes against the work of Americans across 250 years to broaden our democracy past its stunted beginnings. > “If our ancestors could do without tea, then we can do without a new Tesla. We > might even be able to do without Amazon Prime.” And so we will fight—nonviolently, but without cease. We will continue to gather in the streets and on the town commons. We will do what we can to protect the right to vote, and we will exercise that franchise as long as it is granted us, and we will seize it back if it is taken away. We will come to the aid of our great colleges and universities—some of them just at the other end of Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge—as long as they stand up to the regime. We will favor those companies and institutions that defy this new monarch, and we will boycott those who don’t—if our ancestors could do without tea, then we can do without a new Tesla. We might even be able to do without Amazon Prime. We will try to raise each other’s courage, and to support the families of those who are sent to jail, and we will honor those who lead us in this work. And we will do it in the best humor we can muster: Inflatable Frogs to the fore! We do not know how this fight will come out. Donald Trump has seized vast powers, and clearly he has no hesitation in using them. His ego, badly bruised by having to sit in court to answer for his crimes, demands retribution, and he is now hunting down the enemies of his lawless rule. He and his rooster of a Defense Secretary are attempting to remake the military—descendants of the Minutemen—in their own pathetic image. So this could be a long battle. But then the colonials had no idea how their fight would wind up either. They could not have foreseen Bunker Hill and Breeds Hill, Saratoga and Valley Forge, Brandywine and Yorktown. They could not have imagined the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution.  They just knew some basic truths that we also know. For instance, they knew that humans are able to govern ourselves; they don’t need a ruler who declares, “Only I can fix it.”  And they knew that with too much power comes corruption, which we’re now seeing on a scale that America has never known before. And above all they knew that those who would divide our people instead of unite them are not fit to take part in our government. The British came this way on April 19 in 1775 to seize arms at Concord, but they wouldn’t have minded capturing John Hancock and Sam Adams, who had been spending the night at the parsonage on the Green. And so perhaps we should let Sam Adams—absolutely resolute patriot—have the final words. He understood the kind of people who have now seized power in our country, and those who enable them. “If you love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” And he understood the task before us all: > “The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are > worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all > attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy > ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of > treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present > generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested > from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the > artifices of designing men.” Let us act with the courage of our forebears, peacefully but resolutely. We did not ask for this moment to come upon us, but we must rise to the occasion. This hallowed ground is as good a place as any to make that pledge.