WASHINGTON—A record seven million people turned out nationwide October 18 in some 2,600 “No Kings Day” protests against would-be dictator, President Donald Trump, targeting his attacks on democracy, his attacks on immigrants and many of his domestic policies including the trashing of healthcare for millions.
In addition to the 7 million pouring into the streets of the nation’s cities and towns from coast to coast and in Alaska and Hawaii there were hundreds of thousands more marching in solidarity with them around the globe including in cities from Stockholm, Sweden to Sao Paolo Brazil.
Key causes included demands that Trump stop trampling on the U.S. Constitution, especially its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and his ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents’ violent and vicious kidnapping and disappearances of immigrants and others grabbed off the streets and at workplaces. Another major concern of the millions out on the streets was the impact of the Trump-GOP’s megadollar giveaway to billionaires and corporations, to be paid for by massive cuts in health care.
Across the country many thousands are already receiving notices of huge increases in their health care premiums due to refusal of the GOP to come out in support of continuing subsidies that keep down the costs for people.
Large contingents of unionists marched, notably in D.C., where the Government Employees, who have particular reason to do so, urged their 325,000 members nationwide to hit the streets. The union represents—or represented—more than a million federal workers until Trump unilaterally trashed their collective bargaining agreements. He has called federal workers, and AFGE by name, enemies, too.
The marches and rallies were peaceful and positive, giving the lie to GOP leaders who predicted it would be a turnout of people who “hate America.” There were no arrests even in cities where the turnout was well into the hundreds of thousands.
Only in Los Angeles was there a reported arrest of “nearly 100 agitators” according to the police who said those arrested were not at all part of the main demonstration of hundreds of thousands. The LAPD tweeted that the No Kings Day demonstrators “were peaceful people exercising their First Amendment right of free speech.”
The massive peaceful outpouring across the nation contrasted sharply with the violent attack on January 6, 2021 by Trump supporters who trashed the Capitol, tried to kill the Vice President and the House Majority Leader and attacked the police with five people eventually ending up dead.
New York City marshalled its police force for marches which drew, according to MSNBC, at least 400.000. There were no arrests at all.
Trump-supporting Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., activated the National Guard to cover protests in his state’s D.C. suburbs. They had nothing to do.
The more than 200,000 people who jammed D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue from curb to curb and from the White House to the Capitol turned that march into what the Associated Press labeled “a giant block party”—with bands, balloons, air horns and people costumed as Trump “toads” or as the Statue of Liberty.
In Chicago, which has been the site of some of the most vicious attacks by ICE, including landing on top of an apartment building on the South Side with Blackhawk attack helicopters and dragging residents out into the streets in the middle of the night, it seemed that the entire city was involved in the demonstration.
In Hyde Park, which is several miles south of the main rally location at Grant Park, at 8 a.m. in the morning the sidewalks were full of people headed to the Metra Station in the neighborhood in what looked like feeder marches to the main event. Chicagoans young and old, carried their homemade cardboard signs as they poured into the Metra stations already overflowing with people headed to the march.
Immigrants on the South Side from Honduras, Nigeria and the Philippines, living near the apartment building that was raided, went to the demonstration. One immigrant said “I haven’t felt better since Trump took over again, seeing now how many people are turning out to oppose what he is doing to us.”
Hundreds of police benignly looked on at the peaceful crowds in states and locations where National Guard troops were called in. Some National Guards from “red states,” previously provided to the Nation’s Capital by Republican GOP governors, having nothing to do, gave differently abled people rides in golf-cart-like vehicles down a dedicated middle lane reserved for emergency vehicles and police patrols.
In contrast to the prior week, when Trump and other Republicans fumed at the coming rally-goers, calling them “communists” and “antifa” and saying they “hate America,” GOP lawmakers—also a target of many of the protesters—laid low. There are splits in MAGA now as vulnerable Republican legislators become increasingly fearful that their stance against healthcare may endanger their reelection prospects as will the GOP shutdown of the federal government. Millions of demonstrators, most of who are registered voters, does little to reduce the fear of vulnerable Republicans.
Trump himself retreated to his Mar-a-Lago Florida estate, where he hosted a million-dollar-a-plate corporate fundraiser. His staff sarcastically posted an artificial intelligence image on Trump’s social media channel of him wearing a cape and a crown.
The crown predominated among the crowds, the signs and the slogans, and was even spelled out by a human crowd declaring “No Kings” on Ocean Beach in San Francisco.
Like prior anti-Trump protests, some marchers linked Trump to his corporate backers or to the capitalist system he not only symbolizes but is busily enriching through sweetheart deals, rollbacks of regulations, the federal shutdown, intimidation of dissent and a $4.5 trillion 10-year tax cut for the 1%, paid for by the rest of us through losing medical care.
Keynote speaker Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., addressing the D.C. crowd, emphasized all those things.
“This is about a handful of the wealthiest people on earth, who by their insatiable greed have hijacked our economy and our political system. These are the same billionaires who funded his [Trump’s] campaign,” the senator said.
“Billionaires are the minority destroying America,” one member of the Baltimore Teachers Union/AFT told People’s World. Her union enthusiastically co-sponsored the march. Union President Randi Weingarten, a New York City civics teacher, was one of its prime advocates.
“There was ICE in our school in Highlandtown,” the Baltimore fourth-grade teacher continued. “Two masked men attempted to grab a couple of my kids. They [the kids] got away.” Added her companion, another fourth-grade teacher, but of the Washington, D.C., Teachers Union/AFT Local 6: “Teaching with ICE” in the city “is emotionally wrenching.
“The kids are coming with a lot of horror stories at home. They’ve lost their parents.”
“You have patients” in health care facilities, notably nursing homes, “who don’t have families and who get Medicaid” to pay for their care, a Service Employees 1199NE member named Reeba said in an interview. When they lose Medicaid, because of that tax cut for the rich, “What happens?” she asks.
“Who will take them in? They’re thinking about money,” she said of Trump and the Republicans, who jammed that Medicaid cut through on party-line votes in Congress. “We’re thinking about our patients.”
Individual marchers and a top Los Angeles union leader had their own takes on Trump and the carnage he’s caused, to the Constitution and the country, since he reoccupied the White House on January 20.
“America has no kings and working Americans will not stand by as a wannabe dictator wages war on our rights and our democracy,” David Green, president and executive director of L.A.’s Service Employees Local 721, told local media.
“Enough is enough. We will stop this authoritarianism in its tracks and work to revitalize and enhance our democracy, our rights, and our nation. We will not accept a regime that aims to put the interests of billionaires ahead of our families, workers and communities.”
“Where do we begin?” asked one D.C. marcher named Ken, who toted the Communications Workers’ banner during the D.C. march. “The whole immigration thing and the human rights umbrella. Just today, a man was abducted” by ICE “in front of his three kids.
“He had his green card on him,” showing he’s a permanent U.S. resident. “But he was thrown to the ground and was going to be sent to a San Francisco detention center.”
And Trump and his MAGA backers turn “the bathroom issue”—which bathrooms transgender people can use—into making them into traitors, Ken added. That’s led Pride At Work and the AFL-CIO, among many unions which endorsed the march, “to train people on what to do if they’re detained.”
Under Trump, “Families are told how to parent their children, doctors are forced to ignore their oaths, and the government is ripping apart families and hurting our people,” Jay Brown, a transgender person and deputy director of the Human Rights Campaign, told the D.C. crowd. Trump and the Republicans are “cutting funding for HIV treatment, banning our books, and firing teachers who use a student’s nickname.”
Chants were common and often repeated: “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist U.S.A” “This is what Democracy looks like” “Free DC No ICE” and so on. Many of the signs were individual and inventive in their criticism of Trump, his GOP henchmen and his government. One D.C. march, which came down from uptown to join the main march, was themed “Replace the regime.”
Celia, a 10th grader from Yorktown High School in suburban Arlington, Va., summed up all the damage Trump has done to the country in just nine months with her sign: “Nuclear waste is more stable than America under Trump,” it read.
Celia got the idea while doing her chemistry homework, where the students learned about the impact—and the longevity—of radioactive waste.
“It’s so unstable, and it’s just like Trump. We don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said,
Signs and marchers drew pointed comparisons, especially when discussing ICE.
“Snatching people off the street is un-American,” said one marcher, referring to Trump’s ICE agents and their violent seizures of people—migrant or not, citizen or not. Her sign read: “Immigrants—we get the job done. No to ICE.”
“1776, 1865, 1945 No Kings, No Confederates, No Fascists,” read one sign, referring to the Declaration of Independence, the Union victory in the U.S. Civil War and the joint Soviet-U.S.-U.K. victory over Hitler’s Germany and militaristic Japan in World War II.
Jenny, a New Zealand native who’s been in the U.S., since she was 11 in 1971, captured the ethos of the crowds, prefacing it by telling People’s World she still holds a New Zealand passport.
“We were able to vote and have freedom of choice for our bodies,” she said, highlighting two of the issues that brought the crowds into the streets: Trump-GOP plans to restrict and outlaw abortion and to impose massive restrictions, in law, in intimidation and in practice, against voting rights.
“I have watched this country from the first Trump administration. It’s ugly. It’s a rollback to the 1950s.” Trump cares “only about skin color,” she added, referring to his ICE agents/thugs and their targeted arrests of brown-skinned people. “I’m glad I have an escape hatch” to return to her homeland.
“’I’ve been protesting for 20 years,” said D.C. resident, Maggie, one of many who carried a “Sic Semper Tyrannis” sign. That’s the Latin motto of the Virginia state seal, “Thus always to tyrants.”
“This government is overreaching and infringing on our rights, and I’m always going to stand up to faceless agents of the state,” Maggie said. Trump’s ICE agents wear masks to conceal their identities.
“Sic Semper Tyrannis” was also what pro-Confederate actor John Wilkes Booth shouted from the Ford’s Theater stage after murdering “the tyrant” President Abraham Lincoln 160 years ago. For the marchers, Trump is the tyrant.
Unlike past marches, this No Kings Day protest also drew significant political support, even from prior reluctant lawmakers, notably Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. He marched in the Big Apple—a turnaround from May when he drew sharp and justified criticism from the Democratic left wing for caving in to Trump on a key law to keep the government running.
This time, Schumer and other Senate Democrats are holding out, and the money’s run out. Their price is restoring all the health care cuts. “Essential workers” such as airport screeners, are toiling without pay. Others have been sent home.
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, a notorious union hater, has already fired 4,000 of that group without cause and in defiance of court orders. He schemes to fire thousands more, with Trump’s blessing, during and after the closure.
Sen. Sanders keynoted the addresses to the D.C. marchers and he was the sole prominent speaker to link Trump to income inequality, class divisions and forcing people to live paycheck to paycheck. “They’re the worst government in modern history,” Sanders told the D.C. crowd. To chants of “No More Kings!” he responded “President Trump, we don’t want you or any other king to rule us.
“It is dangerous to have more power in his hands and in the hands of his fellow oligarchs. We have a president who threatens to arrest mayors and governors” who speak against him, Sanders continued.
“And we have a president who wants no criticism of him and who undermines the 1st Amendment to the Constitution—the very foundation of our democracy.” That amendment includes freedom of speech and “the right of the people to peaceably assemble and address the government for redress of their grievances,” which the seven million marchers nationwide did.
Trump threatens to arrest Govs. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., and J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill., and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. All reiterated slams at Trump at marches in California and Chicago. Trump’s ICE agents previously arrested Newark, N.J., Mayor Raz Baraka, Rep. Lamonica McIver, D-N.J. and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif.
The Chicago protests were peaceful, too, even at the ICE detention center in suburban Broadview, scene of raucous but peaceful demonstrations in recent weeks, and ICE arrests there of protesters and even reporters—now stopped by a federal court injunction.
“History will judge us by where we choose to stand right now, today,” Pritzker declared to people gathered in Grant Park downtown. “Future generations will ask: ‘What did we do when fellow human beings face persecution? When our rights were being abridged? When our Constitution was under attack?’ They’ll want to know whether we stood up or we stayed silent. Resistance starts with refusing to normalize cruelty.
“An attack on free speech, on immigrants’ rights, on due process is an attack on everyone’s rights,” Pritzker said. “It means understanding that we’re either building a society based on human dignity or one based on domination.”
Gesturing to the large crowd he addressed in Atlanta, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., told CNN: “In this moment, in which we are seeing a president and an administration arrogating to himself power that doesn’t belong to him, our message is very clear. This is not about the people in power, it’s about the power in the people.”
The senator said Trump tries to “weaponize despair,” but is “getting his answer today.”
Many progressive demonstrators in downtown D.C. didn’t let the Democrats off the hook either. They faulted the party for failing to oppose Trump’s tyranny early enough and strongly enough, singling out Schumer in particular for blame for caving in to an earlier Trump-GOP temporary money bill that kept the government going through midnight on September 30, when the partial shutdown began.
Some of those interviewed said the party needs new blood and tough leadership, calling for senior Dems—Sanders excepted—to step aside and let younger and tougher leaders take over.
Some mentioned specific races where the Democratic establishment pushes an older candidate, such as Maine Gov. Janet Mills, 77—who has stood up to Trump—over the younger progressive military veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner. Both want to unseat “moderate” veteran GOP Sen. Susan Collins.
Scott, a D.C. resident, discussed that Maine race and Schumer’s refusal to endorse New York City Democratic Mayoral nominee Zohran Momdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist running on an extremely progressive platform. Mamdani faces disgraced pro-corporate ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, 67. Cuomo lost the primary and now runs as an independent—backed by millions of dollars in campaign cash, including from Wall Street Republicans. GOP President Trump all but openly backs Cuomo.
“By and large, the Democratic Party is also bought by corporate interests, and they fail to stand up for the average working people,” Scott told NBC, referring to Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
