( Tomdispatch.com ) – How strange. I’ve been going to demonstrations for a long, long while now. I began once upon a distant time in opposition to the nightmarish all-American war in Vietnam. And almost 60 years later, that war, in some sense, has come home. Hence, the other day, I found myself at the “No Kings” demonstration in New York City, one of more than 2,000 (yes, 2,000!) across this country of ours at which millions — yes, again, literally millions! — of Americans reportedly turned out. These days, in New York where I live, such demonstrations are often launched from Bryant Park, right behind the classic 42nd Street library on Fifth Avenue, and the marchers normally walk down Fifth for perhaps 20 blocks. The last time I went to a demonstration there, I didn’t walk myself but stood and watched all the marchers with their signs go past me, and it took perhaps 35 minutes or so for them to slowly, slowly do so. That time, which was then typical of such demonstrations, most of the protesters were, like me, also old and White.
No more. The other day at that No Kings march in New York, I wove my way ever so slowly through the crowd to Fifth Avenue and 40th Street just after the march had begun and started watching the demonstrators, packed into literally every square inch of that wide avenue, ever so slowly crawl by me. That crowd ranged from babies in strollers to old people like me, and looked like it represented a distinct cross-section of everybody in America, whether by race or age. How many of us were there? Who knows? CBS News simply and vaguely said “tens of thousands,” while the local Fox News station, which obviously had no interest in playing up such demonstrations, still claimed that “tens of thousands of people marched in New York City and the Tri-State area.” If I had to guess, I would say that at least a couple of hundred thousand people crept down Fifth Avenue that day (and on that figure the British Guardian agrees, suggesting “over 200,000” in New York and “millions” nationally).
After all, when I finally left, almost two hours later, exhausted from just standing there taking notes in an ongoing drizzle, the last of the crowd hadn’t even made it from 40th Street onto a still utterly packed Fifth Avenue (as it had been from the moment I arrived), with that parade of anti-Trump protestors still just creeping along. To depart, in fact, I had to literally weave my way through a still-impressive crowd of No Kings demonstrators with a typical array of signs still waiting to join the march. In short, that demonstration, just one of thousands across the country, was beyond huge! And signs? I watched what must all too literally have been thousands of homemade signs go by me, while listening to endless periodic chants from the crowd.
It was, I have to say, quite something, even for someone like me who has seen so many protests in my lifetime and, in its size, it seemed to offer a genuine sense of how deeply disturbed so many Americans are by a president, or do I indeed mean a “king,” who wants to be able to do anything he madly desires without opposition from anyone. And that included having his own military parade in Washington on that very day, his birthday (though it evidently turned out to be a distinctly underwhelming affair that many spectators evidently left early).
“No Kings, No Tyrants, No Fascists, No Dictators, Dump Trump”
Let me just start — even days after the event occurred — by saying how striking I think it is that increasingly significant numbers of Americans are visibly ever more deeply disturbed by the man who did indeed get only 49.7% of the popular vote in 2024 and, according to CBS News, won the presidency thanks to a “mere 0.15% of voters nationwide” who proved the difference between victory and defeat. Not that you would know it from his ever more disturbing excesses, including that mega-military birthday parade (for both the 250-year-old U.S. Army and the now-79-year-old Donald Trump) with tanks, artillery vehicles, and paratroopers at the cost of at least $25-$45 million taxpayer dollars (at a time when he’s slashing benefits for military veterans) slated to begin in Washington not long after the “No Kings” demonstration I attended ended.
I must admit I found it moving that so many of us wanted to express ourselves in person and through signs and chants. And New York wasn’t faintly alone in responding, among other things, to the criminal way Donald Trump dealt with the first of the recent demonstrations against his rule in Los Angeles. There were, after all, an estimated 2,100 or more No Kings protests across this country that day, in red states and blue ones, red cities and blue ones.
Let me, in that context, give you a little sense of what I saw in an up-close-and-personal fashion. And remember this took place on the street in my hometown, about which, in 2016, Donald Trump, while campaigning for president in Sioux Center, Iowa, had indeed said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” Well, fortunately, no shots were fired that afternoon in New York, though, of course, they were indeed fired that very day in truly shocking targeted political assassinations in Minnesota, killing Melissa Hortman, a state legislator, and her husband, and wounding state Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife.
Oh, and as is a typical New York thing to do, I took the subway from my neighborhood to the stop nearest the protest site. And the subway car I entered turned out to be full of other protestors heading for 42nd street as well, including a woman giving out little American flags, and a couple of people with homemade signs, one of which said: “Stop bullying and lying to & stealing from the American people”; a second said, “impeach Humpty Trumpty”; and a third, “No kings, no tyrants, no fascists, no dictators, dump Trump.” And mind you, that was just a single subway car.
And simply walking the few blocks from the subway stop to the area where the demonstration was to take place, I found myself almost instantly on ever more crowded streets surrounded by people carrying homemade signs and already starting to scribble them down in the little notebook I was carrying with me (along with an umbrella on that distinctly drizzly day). As I was heading there, I even passed a woman who had decorated her umbrella with the words “No Dick… Tator, No Fascists,” and a man with a sign that had an image of George Washington and the words “Democracy, yes, Kleptocracy, no.”
“Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus”
Now, consider what follows my portrait of the mood of that moment. There were literally thousands of signs I watched go past me that day — and mind you, we’re talking about an afternoon when it was lightly raining and not a faintly comfortable moment to demonstrate. So, here’s just a little potpourri of some of the ones I scribbled down. Probably the single most prominent word on so many of them on that No Kings day was indeed “king” and it gave you a sense of the greatest fear of all too many Americans that Donald Trump is turning what was once our democracy into his — yes! — perverse kingdom.
Most of the signs I saw had clearly been written or drawn by hand, sometimes with images added. Here are just a few of the ones that caught my eye (or were short enough that I could scribble them down before they passed me by): “King Trump, you’re fired!”; “Immigrants belong, Kings be gone!”; “ICE is the new SS” (a reference, of course, to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi paramilitary outfit); “Deportation without due process is tyranny”; “King Tut, King Coal, Carole King, Not a king” (with an image of Trump, of course); “No kings since 1776”; “Yes, masks, no kings” (a sign held by a man wearing an N-95 Covid-era mask of the sort that I still often wear myself); “When cruelty becomes normal, compassion looks radical”; “The real criminal is in the White House”; “Elect a clown, expect a circus”; “Not my dictator”; “This American girl says no to kings”; “No kings for these old queens” (signs held by two men); “ICE burn in hell”; “Where is Melania from?”; one with no words, just Trump holding a bloody knife in one hand and the cut off, bleeding head of the Statue of Liberty in the other; “Your only throne is a golden toilet”; “Don’t be a chicken in a coup!” (with a yellow chicken doll hanging on the sign); “If she was president, we’d all be at brunch right now” (with a photo of Kamala Harris); “Trump lies while America dies”; “It’s really bad, even I’m out here”; “Two paths and America chooses the psychopath”; “Rebelling against tyrants since 1776”; “Without immigrants, Trump would have no wives”; “The cruelty is the point”; “Elect an ass, expect shit”; “Deport Trump!”; “ICE belongs in Margueritas, not schools”; “Preserve PBS”; “Impeach diaper Don”; “Not a king, just a taco” (a reference to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out”); “America wasn’t great in 1768” (with an image of British King George III); “The Mayflower was full of immigrants”; “Trump cut my social security and went golfing”; “Heil, no!”; “Immigrants make America great!”; “Faux-King joke” (with a ludicrous crowned Trump image); “The greatest threat we face is not simply their actions. But our silence — Cory Booker”; “Trump lies while America dies”; and, of course, tons of “No Kings!”
And here were some of the things that parts of the crowd began chanting in unison as they walked by me: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go!”; “Money for education, not deportation!”; “No KKK, No fascist USA, No ICE!”; “Say it loud, say it clear, ICE is not welcome here!”; “Our streets! Our streets!”; “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!”; “This is not what democracy looks like!”; “No ICE, no ICE, no KKK, no Fascist USA!”; “Tell me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”; “Whose street? Our street!”
Yes, in the city that Donald Trump once considered his own, it couldn’t have been clearer that it truly wasn’t faintly his anymore.
And despite what had happened in Los Angeles, though the police were there in significant numbers (as they always are at such demonstrations), they in no way took center stage. Yes, Mayor Eric Adams claimed that more than 34,000 police had been mobilized for the demonstrations in New York. Still, I saw just a couple of police cars with their red lights flashing as I first approached Fifth Avenue and 40th Street and then a group of perhaps 20 policemen (and at least one policewoman) as I was heading back down that street on my way home. Otherwise, at least as far as I could see, they weren’t overly evident. And, again, it was New York City, so no local official had just been assassinated (as in Minnesota that day) and, unlike in San Francisco or Culpeper, Virginia, no car tried to hit any protestors in that march; nor, as in Austin, Texas, had the police told local officials not to attend such a protest because of a threat to them related to the Minnesota assassinations.
So, at least for me, and possibly millions of other Americans, No Kings Day proved an event to remember. Yes, in truth, I still find it hard to believe that we have three and a half more years of King Donald to go (and when, like me, you’re 80 years old, it becomes ever harder to imagine living through those years to another, possibly better future). Still, being at that demonstration was a good reminder that those of us who see in Donald Trump’s version of America an increasingly menacing threat to freedom are anything but alone.
Copyright 2025 Tom Engelhardt
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