Saturday saw massive protests all over the country against Trump. There were an estimated 50,000 people in New York and also in San Francisco. This article gives an overview.
The protests, dubbed “No Kings”, took place at about 2,100 sites nationwide, from big cities to small towns. A coalition of more than 100 groups joined together to plan the protests, which are committed to a principle of nonviolence.
…No Kings organizers estimated the day’s events drew millions of people, with some hundreds still under way in all 50 states and to some cities abroad. These included more than 200,000 in New York and over 100,000 in Philadelphia, plus some small towns with sizable crowds for their populations, including the town of Pentwater, Michigan, which saw 400 people join the protest in their 800-person town, the No Kings coalition said.
…Since the start of his second term, opposition to Trump has grown, manifesting in protests and demonstrations including against Elon Musk at his car company, against deportations, around his retribution agenda and government cuts.
…Harvard University’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks political crowds, found that there had been three times as many protests by the end of March 2025 compared to 2017, during Trump’s first term, and that was before major protests in April and May. The biggest day of protest so far came on 5 April, with “Hands Off”, which the consortium estimated drew as many as 1.5 million people, a lower figure than organizers cited.
“Overall, 2017’s numbers pale in comparison to the scale and scope of mobilization in 2025 – a fact often unnoticed in the public discourse about the response to Trump’s actions,” a new analysis from the consortium said.
The size and numbers of protests should be getting much more media attention that they currently are, according to Margaret Sullivan.
When hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered across the US on 5 April for the “Hands Off” events protesting Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s governmental wrecking ball, much of the news media seemed to yawn.
…A study from a Harvard University political scientist presents a statistic worth remembering: that, around the world, once 3.5% of the population became engaged in sustained and non-violent campaigns of resistance, change has always happened.
Erica Chenoweth, the academic researcher who conducted the study, was surprised by what her team found.
“I was really motivated by some skepticism that non-violent resistance could be an effective method for achieving major transformations in society,” Chenoweth said in a 2019 BBC interview.
But her skepticism was overcome as the study turned up clear results. As one example of many she cites: in 1986, the Marcos regime folded after the fourth day of millions of Filipino citizens taking the streets of Manila.
Non-violent protests, she found, are much more effective – and bring about more lasting change – than armed conflict.
In the US, that 3.5% of the adult population is roughly 9 million people – about the population of New York City. That’s a high bar, many more people than showed up on 5 April.
I wrote about Chenoweth’s research some time ago and it is worth revisiting that post.
Meanwhile Trump had his pathetic military parade.
Yet, for all of it, the parade was somehow neither the totalitarian North Korean spectacle that critics had grimly predicted, nor the triumph of Maga nationalism that Trump’s most diehard fans craved. It was just a parade – and a parade that was, for all its millions of dollars spent, controversy engendered, and exhausting security precautions, a little underwhelming.
…The mood at the actual army parade was cordial enough, in part because the overwhelming majority of attendees seemed to be either Trump supporters, military families or mostly apolitical daytrippers who just wanted to see a parade. Yet the crowd was on the smaller side, given the magnitude of the event.
Similarly, although the army’s marching went smoothly, the larger public event seemed less than well-planned. The garbage cans, few and far between, were overflowing. There weren’t enough exits. The only food source for thousands of people was a handful of food trucks with lines of 40 or 50 people waiting at each. Because the parade closed down blocks and blocks and there was a dearth of signs with clear directions, it was also extraordinarily difficult to find one’s way in or out.
A secret service officer, trying to explain the general confusion, just sighed. “Nobody knows what’s going on.”
…A young man, asked what he thought of the parade, remarked that he was not impressed. He felt that Trump’s close association with the celebration had politicized it and “made a mockery” of the army, though it wasn’t the army’s fault.
More to the point, he added, the event was “just kind of … lame”.
So basically it was a damp squib.
I’ve asked more than once here what it would take before people who can afford it make plans to get out of the US while they still can. Usually the response is ridicule, defiance or, quite often, dull-witted whataboutism from people who didnt comprehend or chose to ignore the bit that said “who can afford it”.
Interesting article in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/why-a-professor-of-fascism-left-the-us-the-lesson-of-1933-is-you-get-out
The URL sums it up nicely.
Trump does military salutes while wearing civilian clothes. That’s a faux pas. Even generals do handshakes when not in uniform.
Trump tried to look like Mussolini, but the result was a second rate Benny Hill.
Temu Mussolini.
Also, he saluted Saudi generals when travelling in the Middle East. Double Faux Pas.
It seemed like even the soldiers in the parade were protesting. They weren’t in neat lines, they were walking out of step, some had their hats off, looking around. Apparently at some point the song “Fortunate Son” was played, a song about rich people avoiding the draft.Donny was too dimwitted to pick up on what was happening. He looked like a bovine in a field, not even ruminating, just staring off into nothing.
I haven’t seen the parade, but if the description @4 is accurate, he doesn’t have the respect of the troops under his command. I’m amazed they’re comfortable so visibly, *publicly* demonstrating that disrespect.
Say what you like about the US Army, but in a parade situation they’re not *accidentally* sloppy.
Being improperly dressed for a parade is an offence that their NCOs allowed to happen. Marching out of step is *harder* than marching in step, if that’s what you’ve trained to do. I can only assume they were ordered to behave in this way. *Someone* (not Trump) will have got the message.
Interesting times…
There is A LOT happening now, but I assume the three comments maximum rule also applies to the open thread?
It is accurate. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, and there is no possible way that it wasn’t entirely deliberate. I’m actually impressed -- I didn’t think it was possible to have that many people walking (I wouldn’t call it marching) together and none of them be in step. It looked more like a crowd leaving a large sporting event (probably one where alcohol was available) than a military parade, except for the uniforms. The only way they could have demonstrated less respect would have been by flipping the bird or dropping their trousers.
Quite reassuring really -- I’m now confident that there is absolutely no danger those guys will be firing on civilians on Trump’s orders. Hell, they won’t even be picking up pizza on Trumps orders -- not without spitting on it, anyway.
re #1: sonofrojblake
I am an old man and my wife and I do not have the resources to leave. Were I/we younger we would definitely do our best to escape to Canada, which is only a couple of hours north of us. It is difficult to fathom how far our country has fallen in such a short time. Our system is badly flawed -- it always depended upon the people in power acting with at least a modicum of decency. We now know (too late!) that people like the MN (malignant narcissist) who have zero conscience or decency can destroy the system in a short time.
I would have participated in the local protests if I had not bought expensive concert tickets back in December. However, the concert I saw felt like a protest. I saw Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (JRAD) who are known for performing Grateful Dead covers. Their set included “Estimated Prophet” which was I think a nod to what is going in LA. If you are not familiar with it, it includes a chorus that starts with “California!” and EVERYBODY was singing that part, thousands of people. They went on to play “Fortunate Son” by CCR and then “Street Fighting Man” by the Rolling Stones, which includes the line “the time is right for a palace revolution”. They played the Dead song “Jack Straw” which is not exactly a protest song but does talk about America being beautiful. They also played “Pigs” by Pink Floyd. One verse starts “Hey you, Whitehouse, Ha, ha, charade you are.” I think Roger Waters plays this song at his shows and shows pictures of Trump during it. Overall the show was one of the best I have seen and it felt good to be there.
I have read estimates of the total numbers of demonstrators that vary by a factor of two.
(BTW demonstrators who came out despite rain should count as twice the nominal number -- these are the really comitted ones)
The Wikipedia page, list of protests and demonstrations in the United States by size, quotes PBS Newshour and ACLU that the number of protesters at the No Kings demonstrations was 15 million. Perhaps things will change.
Off by a factor of two hardly seems to matter. The No Kings participants outnumbered the folks attending Trump’s birthday parade by an order of magnitude or more, right?
@#11
Heidi, I don’t know where you got that 15 million number. I just looked at the Wikipedia page and it says:
“A crowdsourcing effort to tally participation was led by data journalist G. Elliott Morris, who wrote on June 15 that “back-of-the-envelope math” put total attendance “somewhere in the 4–6 million people range.”
Wikipedia has chosen 5 million as its number for now.
Bill Seymour, Wikipedia is apparently not trying to incur the wrath of MAGA by providing any crowd estimate for the Squeaky Tank Parade, but pics and vids I have seen showed a lot of empty space. Admittedly I watch pretty much exclusively anti-Trump sources, but I think they more or less agreed that the MAGA estimate of 250,000 was way too high, with several estimates around the 25,000 mark. Even if you double that, it becomes 50,000 vs. 5,000,000, TWO orders of magnitude.
None of the TV news shows I watch mentioned the No Kings protest at all today. The capture of Vance Boelter seems to have totally replaced that story. We probably won’t see the crowd size comparison widely disseminated.
There has been lots of coverage of TACO Trump halting immigration raids on farms, restaurants and hotels. It turns out that the raids weren’t good for business after all (which everybody else already knew).
There’s some propaganda on the Right which states that not only did people show up for Trump’s birthday bash in overwhelming numbers, but also that “No Kings Day” was a damp squib. A quarter mil versus a tenth of a mil is common, and I saw somewhere claiming that NKD was only “tens of thousands”. On the left there are a bunch of numbers being thrown around for No Kings, from 5 million to 7-8 million to 11 million to 12.5 million to 15 million and even 20 million, but none of those is any more than an extremely rough estimate. Regardless, people will pick whatever stat “feels right”, it will be largely forgotten soon, and when fairly accurate estimates finally come in, few will notice and fewer will update their long-term memories of the real numbers.
That doesn’t change the fact that the right-wing version is laughably wrong, just pointing out that early impressions (even those gained secondhand) count for a lot and are resistant to change.
“All lies in jest / Until a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest”
I’m coming to the view that the real problem in America today is not so much one of politics, but rather one of basic epistemology.
A study that is taken much more seriously than it merits. There was a good deal of cherry-picking, over-simplification, and dubious categorisation of campaigns as “violent” or “non-violent”, see for example here, and here. For example, the South African campaign against apartheid was counted as “non-violent”, despite the decades-long violent campaign of the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”) as well as the context of the successive military defeats of first Portuguese colonialism and then the Smith regime in Rhodesia/Zimbabvwe which left the apartheid regime without its buffer zone; as was the East Timor independence campaign, when armed international intervention was needed to stop Indonesian forces slaughtering the non-violent protestors. Erica Chenoweth and Marie Stephan undertook their research primarily for the benefit of US foreign policy (with particular reference to the various “colour revolutions” in Eastern Europe) -- Stephan was actually working for the State Department. Even Chenoweth herself has to some extent backed off her original conclusions.
I’m seeing this 3.5% thing everywhere at the minute… It’s clearly bullshit, just on the basis of spurious precision. The idea that you can pinpoint the percentage of the population required down to 1 decimal place, and that it would be the same percentage, to 1 decimal place, at all times and in all places, is obviously ridiculous if you think about it for even a moment.
If they’d said “generally somewhere between 3% and 5%” I might just about consider buying it, at least long enough to bother looking at the details, but 3.5%? No, get lost, don’t waste my time.
I can only assume somebody did some research and found that people think more precise made-up numbers are more convincing.
Yes, I’m 55.71% sure that I saw somewhere that 63.824% of people find precise made-up numbers more convincing :-p