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      Millions expected across all 50 US states to march in No Kings protests against Trump

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      Americans across all 50 states will march in protests against the Trump administration on Saturday, aligning behind a message that the country is sliding into authoritarianism and there should be no kings in the US.Millions are expected to turn out for the No Kings protests, the second iteration of a coalition that marched in June in one of the largest days of protest in US history. Events are scheduled for more than 2,700 locations, from small towns to large cities.Donald Trump has cracked down on US cities, attempting to send in federal troops and adding more immigration agents. He is seeking to criminalize dissent, going after left-leaning organizations that he claims are supporting terrorism or political violence. Cities have largely fought back, suing to prevent national guard infusions, and residents have taken to the streets to speak out against the militarization of their communities.Trump’s allies have sought to cast the No Kings protests as anti-American and led by antifa, the decentralized anti-fascist movement, while also claiming that the protests are prolonging the government shutdown. Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has said he will send the state’s national guard to Austin, the state’s capital, in advance of the protests.Some politicians, including Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Chris Murphy, and independent Senator Bernie Sanders, are expected to attend the protests. The No Kings coalition has repeatedly underscored its commitment to nonviolent resistance, and tens of thousands of participants have trained on safety and de-escalation tactics.“What’s most important as a message for people to carry is that the president wants us to be scared, but we will not be bullied into fear and silence,” said Lisa Gilbert, the co-president of Public Citizen, one of the protest organizers. “And it’s incredibly important for people to remain peaceful, to stand proud and to say what they care about, and not to be cowed by that fear.”More than 200 organizations have signed on as partners for the 18 October protests. Organizers have identified several anchor cities: Washington DC, San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta, New York City, Houston, Honolulu, Boston, Kansas City in Missouri, Bozeman in Montana, Chicago and New Orleans.The simple framing of the protests is that the US has no kings, a dig at Trump’s increasing authoritarianism. Among the themes the organizers have pointed to: Trump is using taxpayer money for power grabs, sending in federal forces to take over US cities; Trump has said he wants a third term and “is already acting like a monarch”; the Trump administration has taken its agenda too far, defying the courts and slashing services while deporting people without due process.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe June No Kings protests drew millions to the streets, with the Harvard Crowd Counting Consortium estimating that between 2 and 4.8 million people attended protests across the more than 2,000 locations in what was “probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Trump first took office in January 2017”, second to the Women’s March in 2017. More

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      Trump says he has commuted sentence of George Santos in federal fraud case

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      Donald Trump announced on Friday he had commuted the sentence of George Santos, the disgraced former New York representative and serial fabulist who had been sentenced to more than seven years in prison after a short-lived political career marked by outlandish fabrications and fraudulent scheming.Santos left the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey just hours later and was “on his way home”, his attorney Joseph Murray told Agence France-Presse by phone late on Friday.In a Truth Social post, Trump called Santos “somewhat of a ‘rogue’” but expressed sympathy for the New York Republican. Santos was sentenced in April after pleading guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.“I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump said in the lengthy post. “Good luck George, have a great life!”The United States pardon attorney tweeted a photograph of the signed commutation shortly after Trump’s post, writing that he was “honored” to have “played a small role” Trump granting Santos clemency.“Thank you, Mr. President for making clemency great again,” he wrote.Murray also thanked Trump, posting on Santos’s X account: “God bless President Donald J Trump the greatest President in US history!”Santos reported to a federal prison in New Jersey in July and began serving an 87-month sentence for charges that ultimately led to his expulsion from Congress in 2023. Trump’s post suggested he was moved by a letter penned by Santos that was published in a local Long Island newspaper this week. Santos wrote about his life in solitary confinement and made direct plea to the president for a “chance to rebuild”.Trump issued the commutation after a push from key Republicans allies, most notably Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene, a prominent former House colleague of Santos, had called his conviction a “grave injustice” and urged intervention after the sentence was handed down. She also sent a letter in August asking the justice department for a commutation.Asked at the time whether he might consider clemency for Santos, Trump, who has a history of rewarding supporters with pardons, did not rule it out, but said he had not been asked.“He lied like hell,” Trump told Newsmax, adding: “But he was 100% for Trump.”On Friday, Greene thanked the president for the commutation and said of Santos: “He was unfairly treated and put in solitary confinement, which is torture!!”Elsewhere in his post on Friday, Trump compared Santos with the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. He made reference to the decades-old claims that Blumenthal “made up” aspects of his military record. Blumenthal admitted in 2010 that he misrepresented his military service after saying he had been “in” Vietnam. Blumenthal served as a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but was not deployed in Vietnam.Trump, who never served in the military, has repeatedly attacked Blumenthal. His account of the senator’s past misstatements have even become increasingly exaggerated in recent years.“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump wrote of Blumenthal on Friday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore and after entering Congress, Santos lied prolifically about his biography. Despite making history as the first out LGBTQ+ Republican elected in Congress, his fabulist tendencies caught up with him with the release of a damning report from the House ethics committee. That report detailed how Santos used campaign funds for things like travel, cosmetic treatments and luxury goods and helped fuel his spectacular fall.But Santos, who catapulted from relative anonymity to pop culture sensation almost overnight, shared Trump’s love of the national spotlight – even when trained on his misdeeds.“Well, darlings … The curtain falls, the spotlight dims, and the rhinestones are packed,” Santos wrote in a tweet pinned to the top of his X account. “From the halls of Congress to the chaos of cable news what a ride it’s been! Was it messy? Always. Glamorous? Occasionally. Honest? I tried … most days.”The judge overseeing Santos’s case sided with federal prosecutors, who argued the former congressman ​had failed to show genuine remorse​ despite his legal team’s insistence to the contrary. That lack of contrition, they said, warranted a tougher sentence.​S​antos’s commutation marks the latest in a string of high-profile ​interventions ​by Trump, who has resumed the use of presidential clemency to reward political allies since returning to the White House in January.Trump, in May, issued a pardon to Michael Grimm, a former Republican congressman from New York who admitted to concealing income and wages related to a Manhattan restaurant he owned. Also pardoned was John Rowland, the former Connecticut governor whose political ascent collapsed under the weight of a federal corruption case and two prison terms.​At the same time, Trump has directed his justice department to bring criminal charges against his political enemies, including his former national security adviser turned prominent critic John Bolton, who was indicted this week and has pleaded not guilty.​Trump last year became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes, stemming from a hush money case in New York that he continues to dismiss as a witch hunt. More

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      Alaska governor asks Trump for federal aid after typhoon displaces 1,500 people

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      Mike Dunleavy, the governor of Alaska, has asked Donald Trump to declare a major disaster after a powerful storm devastated villages in the state’s south-west, displacing 1,500 people and prompting large-scale air evacuations.The state’s senators and congressman urged the president to approve the declaration to allow additional federal resources into the region to repair housing and utilities before winter. The scale of the disaster has surpassed the state’s ability to respond, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Nick Begich, the Alaska congressman, wrote.“This significant storm affected thousands of miles of coast, spanning the Aleutian Islands to the North Slope,” the letter to Trump states. “Immediate federal assistance is needed to support Alaskans recovering from the damage of this storm and to mitigate the impact of future severe weather events.”The remnants of Typhoon Halong hit remote Alaska Native communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta over the weekend, battering the area with fierce winds, rain and record-breaking storm surge that sent water into homes and caused some to float off their foundations. At least one person was killed and two others remain missing.The state established makeshift shelters that soon swelled to hold about 1,500 people, an extraordinary number in a sparsely populated region where communities are reachable only by air or water this time of year. Before evacuees were transported to larger shelters, as many as 1,000 people were being housed in just two local schools, Alaska Public Media reported earlier this week. But conditions were challenging, with limited power and bathroom access, and the state began evacuating people via plane to larger shelters in Anchorage, about 500 miles (805km) away.Authorities are still evaluating the full scale of the damage, and destruction was extensive. Residents reported that the storm caused chaos, rocking communities on the south-west like an earthquake and sending waves into their houses.In the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk, Alexie Stone, who was with his brothers and children, said over the weekend he could look outside and see under the water, like an aquarium. A shed drifted toward them, threatening to shatter the glass, but turned away before it hit.The house came to rest just a few feet away from where it previously stood, after another building blocked its path. It remains uninhabitable, along with most of the village.“In our village, we’d say that we’re Native strong, we have Native pride, and nothing can break us down. But this is the hardest that we went through,” Stone said on Thursday outside a shelter in the Alaska Airlines center in Anchorage. “Everybody’s taking care of everybody in there. We’re all thankful that we’re all alive.”Stone’s mother, Julia Stone, is a village police officer in Kipnuk. She was working last weekend when the winds suddenly picked up and her police cellphone began ringing with calls for help from residents – some who reported that their houses were floating. She tried to reach search and rescue teams and others to determine if there were available boats to help, but the situation was “chaos”, she said.“It’s a nightmare what we went through, but I thank God we are together,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKipnuk and Kwigillingok, the hardest-hit communities, saw water levels of more than 6ft. In Kipnuk, a village of about 700 people and about 121 homes were destroyed and in Kwigillingok, three dozen homes drifted away. In the village of Napaskiak, water, sewer and well systems are inoperable.The disaster has brought renewed attention to Trump administration cuts to grants aimed at helping small, mostly Indigenous villages prepare for storms or mitigate disaster risks.Earlier this year, the administration canceled a $20m US Environmental Protection Agency grant to Kipnuk, which was inundated by floodwaters in this weekend’s storm. The grant was intended to protect the boardwalk residents use to get around the community, as well as 1,400ft (430 metres) of river from erosion, according to a federal website that tracks government spending.In the aftermath of the storm, Alaskans have raised more than $1m to support evacuees. More

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      Trump claims Maduro willing to give ‘everything’ to ease US tensions

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      Donald Trump used an expletive to threaten the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, on Friday, claiming that the leftist autocrat had offered major concessions to appease the US.The US president was speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday during a meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Asked about reports that Maduro offered “everything in his country, all the natural resources” to ease tensions, Trump agreed: “He’s offered everything; you’re right. You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.”Maduro, who came to power in 2013, has recently shored up his security powers and deployed tens of thousands of troops around the country. He also accused Trump of seeking regime change, an allegation the US president has downplayed.Last week the New York Times reported that Maduro offered a stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in recent months to stave off mounting pressure from the US.Meanwhile, Venezuelan government officials are said to have floated a plan in which Maduro would eventually leave office. The Miami Herald newspaper reported that Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, who is president of the national assembly, had funneled proposals through intermediaries in Qatar to present themselves to Washington as a “more acceptable” alternative.The US has acknowledged carrying out at least five strikes on vessels near Venezuela that it says were transporting drugs, killing at least 27 people.A sixth strike targeted a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean on Thursday, and in what is believed to be the first such case, there were survivors among the crew, who were reportedly rescued and are being held on a navy ship.One source told Reuters that the vessel struck on Thursday moved below the water and was possibly a semi-submersible, which is a submarine-like vessel used by drug traffickers to avoid detection.Trump confirmed to reporters: “We attacked a submarine. That was a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs – just so you understand.”He added: “This was not an innocent group of people. I don’t know too many people that have submarines and that was an attack on a drug-carrying loaded-up submarine.”The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who was also present, did not dispute that there were survivors and repeatedly said details would be forthcoming.The US has described some of the victims in the first five strikes as Venezuelans, while the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, has suggested some were from his country. In Trinidad, family members of one man believed killed in a strike this week have demanded proof he was a drug trafficker.Venezuela’s government has said the strikes are illegal, amount to murder and are an aggression against the country.Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the US is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, relying on the same legal authority used by the George W Bush administration when it declared a war on terror after the September 11 attacks.But legal scholars have warned that the president’s use of overwhelming military force to combat the cartels, along with his authorisation of covert action inside Venezuela, possibly to oust Maduro, stretches the bounds of international law.Juanita Goebertus Estrada, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said the attacks violated international human rights law and amounted to extrajudicial executions.“The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, or with alleged criminal groups involved. Under human rights law standards, officials engaging in law enforcement must seek to minimize injury and preserve human life. They may use lethal force only when strictly unavoidable to protect against an imminent threat of death or serious injury,” she said.The strikes have caused unease among Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, with some Republicans saying they had not received sufficient information on how the strikes were being conducted.Friday’s outburst was not the first that Trump has peppered the language of diplomacy with profanities. In June, frustrated with Israel and Iran attacking each other after a ceasefire, he told a group of reporters that the countries had “been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”. More

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      Trump administration freezes $11bn for infrastructure in Democratic states

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      The White House budget director, Russell Vought, said on Friday that the Trump administration will freeze another $11bn worth of infrastructure projects in Democratic states due to the ongoing government shutdown.Vought said on social media the US army corps of engineers would pause work on “low priority” projects in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore. He said the projects could eventually be canceled.The White House office of management and budget (OMB) said Donald Trump “wants to reorient how the federal government prioritizes Army Corps projects”.The Trump administration has already frozen at least $28bn meant for transportation and energy projects in Democratic-controlled cities and states, as the president pressures his opponents in Congress to end the shutdown, which began on 1 October.Trump has also vowed to cut “Democrat agencies” and has sought to eliminate 4,100 federal jobs as he looks to inflict pain on his political opposition.The army corps of engineers projects include a waterfront park in San Francisco, bridge expansions in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and water and wastewater systems in New York City, the OMB said. New York projects account for $7bn of the total.Other affected projects are in Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Delaware, the OMB said.All of these states voted against Trump in the 2024 presidential election.The OMB said many of the projects sit in “sanctuary jurisdictions” that have resisted the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.The army corps of engineers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Donald Trump claims to be the president of peace, but at home he is fomenting civil war | Jonathan Freedland

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      Donald Trump had better hope the members of the Nobel committee are not paying attention to what’s happening inside the United States. If they did take a look, they’d notice a jarring pattern. While the US president likes to play the peacemaker abroad, at home he is Trump, bringer of war.It’s easy for the first fact to conceal, or divert our attention away from, the second. This week was a case in point. It began with Trump travelling to Israel, where he was hailed as a latter-day Cyrus, a mighty ruler whose name would be spoken of for millennia to come, the man who had brokered what he himself boasts is an “everlasting” peace.Never mind that Trump’s success, for which he certainly deserves some credit, was in pushing Hamas and Israel to agree a ceasefire and release of hostages and prisoners, a fragile arrangement that does not address, let alone solve, the underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He presented it as a triumph of the ages and one more notch on his peacemaker’s bedpost, taking the tally of wars he claims to have ended to eight.Indeed, buoyed up by his success, he is having another go at the one he thought would be easy but which, to his irritation, has proved as complex as all the hated experts and deep state naysayers warned it would be: Russia’s war on Ukraine. On Thursday he announced his plan to meet yet again with Vladimir Putin, this time hosted by Viktor Orbán in Budapest (which has the happy side-benefit of trolling the EU).Unfazed by the failure of their last meeting in Alaska, and by his own failure ever to stand up to Putin, Trump clearly believes he has pacific momentum and that the healing magic his touch brought to Gaza will similarly unite Moscow and Kyiv.But what undermines this new, Nobel-ready look of Trump’s is not only the absurd braggadocio, or even the confusion of the style and optics of peacemaking for the substance and hard graft it requires. It is the fact that he is fomenting war at home on his own citizens. I am not speaking metaphorically. Increasingly, serious analysts not prone to hyperbole are warning that Trump seems bent on provoking a second American civil war. The evidence is piling up.The most obvious is Trump’s deployment of US troops on the streets of America’s cities. He claims that his original decisions to send in the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, Portland and Memphis were motivated solely by concern over crime. In his telling, these places were “overrun” by violence and local police needed his help. But that doesn’t stack up.The data shows that most of the cities Trump has targeted have lower rates of violent crime than other large cities that have remained untouched. (Of the 10 major US cities with the biggest crime problems, Trump has hit only one: Memphis.) So why would Trump be sending in the troops?One explanation is that he lives in such a closed filter bubble, his sources of information so narrow, that he is not in possession of the actual facts. Earlier this month, he described Portland, Oregon as a “burning hellhole”, adding that “You see fires all over the place. You see fights, and I mean just violence. It’s just so crazy.” The people of Portland – cycling or taking their kids to the park, as normal – were bemused. It seemed Trump had been watching Fox News, confusing footage from the riots of 2020 with today.But none of this is a mistake. For what the likes of Chicago, LA and Portland have in common is not imagined rates of runaway crime but something that angers Trump much more: they are Democrat-run cities in Democrat-led states. (The giveaway is that Cleveland, Ohio and Kansas City, Missouri have higher rates of violent crime but are under Republican governors. So they have been left alone.)This is a political act by Trump, designed to intimidate potential strongholds of opposition. Some critics suspect the administration hopes to provoke violence from those whose cities now feel like occupied territory. Perhaps a riot or an attack on the military that can be instantly spun, as the assassination of Charlie Kirk was, as an act of leftist terrorism that merits a further crackdown, seizure of emergency powers or suspension of liberties.Others believe this is about normalising the presence of troops on the streets before next year’s midterm elections, a crucial contest that could see Republicans lose the House of Representatives, handing Democrats a serious check on Trump’s power. In this view, troops will be in place either to scare away minorities and others who might usually vote for the Democratic party, or for the battle after polling day, to enforce an attempt by the White House to void results that don’t go their way. Think of a re-run of 6 January 2021 – except this time with the armed forces on hand to ensure Trump’s will is done.The obvious objection to this scenario is that the US military would surely refuse to let itself be used as a partisan political instrument. But that is to miss what Trump and Pete Hegseth – now rebranded not as secretary of defence, but as secretary of war – are doing to the US military. Witness last month’s jawdropping meeting of hundreds of top US admirals and generals, gathered from across the globe. Trump could not have been clearer, instructing them that they now faced an “enemy from within”, that their job was to deal with “civil disturbances” and that they should regard America’s “dangerous cities as training grounds”. At one point, Hegseth said that any officer who disagreed with the new, Trumpian conception of the US military should “do the honorable thing and resign”.All of this comes in the context of a president who is nakedly using the justice system to punish his critics – note the indictment issued on Thursday against his former national security adviser John Bolton – whose chief adviser called the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation” even before the Kirk killing; that sends masked agents to snatch people, including US citizens, off the streets; that is using the government shutdown to eliminate “Democrat agencies”, meaning those pockets of the independent civil service that might act as a restraint on presidential whim, while cutting funds to institutions, from the universities to public broadcasting, that might do the same; and that is imposing ideological orthodoxy on the entire federal bureaucracy, with the FBI’s firing of an employee who had displayed the pride flag only the latest example.Trump likes talking the peace talk when it comes to Palestinians and Israelis or Russians and Ukrainians. But inside the US, where red meets blue, he does not see a contest between rivals but rather a conflict with an enemy he admits he hates – one that has to be fought by any means necessary, even to the very end.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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      Maga is painting Saturday’s protests as violent treason. Prove them wrong | Judith Levine

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      “They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on Fox News on Friday. “It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people. They’re all coming out.”The Republican Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer said the party’s “terrorist wing” was holding the “Hate America” rally. “Democrats want to keep the government shut down to show all those people that are going to come here and express their hatred towards this country that they’re fighting President Trump,” said the House majority leader, Steve Scalise. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, embellished the story on Fox, referring to the demonstrations’ “paid protesters” and adding: “It begs the question who’s funding it.”These people are, of course, slandering the second round of No Kings marches, following those on 14 June, which dwarfed Trump’s pitiful birthday party military parade. This time the events – more than 2,500 of them, according to organizers, planned for every state – promise to be even larger.Trump’s allies are trying to overwrite the patriotic, historically resonant words “No Kings” with insinuations of treasonous violence.Everyone participating in the protests must prove them wrong. Nonviolence, both rigorously disciplined and open-hearted, must define 18 October.The stakes are bigger than anything that happens tomorrow. Because these politicians are not just talking. This smear campaign is one skirmish in the all-fronts war on a vaguely defined leftwing entity the administration calls “antifa”. This war – declared in the 25 September national security presidential memorandum, Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence – is not just supported by propaganda. Disinformation is its essence.The national security reporter Ken Klippenstein published a restricted-circulation FBI/homeland security bulletin on “domestic violence extremists” (DVE), released on 1 October, that links attacks on Ice buildings to peaceful anti-Ice demonstrations. Since June, it says, “small groups of threat actors, some of whom are DVEs, have leveraged large, lawful protests” in California and Oregon “to engage in violent activity” against Ice facilities and “violent confrontations with law enforcement”.Last week, at a White House “antifa roundtable”, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, claimed: “Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as [Tren de Aragua], as Isis, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.” The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, thanked the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, “for getting to the bottom of these funding mechanisms and individuals who are perpetuating [sic] this violence on our American cities”.Commentators on the “Hate America” blitz, including some of the events’ organizers, have called it an attempt to silence dissent by scaring would-be marchers into staying home. My hunch is that diminishing the crowds is just half of the strategy. The other half is more pernicious. With Ice and the military already dispatched to terrorize Black and blue cities, such language may inspire civilian paramilitaries – many of them armed, organized and trained – to go into the streets and cause mayhem.These militias took action on 6 January 2021. They are itching for another opportunity to attack the “enemy within”, and they don’t need explicit orders to do so. “Hate America” is the phrase that could impel them to act.In larger cities like New York and San Francisco, the marchers will far outnumber any counter-protesters. In the cities occupied by federal troops, where local police don’t relish the optics of teargas wafting through crowds of elderly baby boomers and babies in strollers, there’s no guarantee the feds will restrain themselves. The national guard and Ice have already gassed and pepper-sprayed demonstrators apparently doing nothing more aggressive than standing around and yelling, or, like the Chicago pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball canister, nothing aggressive at all.Enter the freelance enforcers. And it’s in the red states, where gun laws are lax and progressives constitute a small minority, that the odds of aggression and goading to aggression by Maga loyalists are highest.Maga wants nothing more than violence at the marches. Any violent clash, no matter who starts it, will be a green light to the administration to step up the policing crackdown, including on Saturday. The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has been tossing around the word “insurrection” to describe peaceful opposition to the Trump agenda. The president could use anything construable as chaos to invoke the Insurrection Act.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNonviolence is not the same as passivity; it’s the antithesis of surrender. It is not mild, not even friendly. Contradictory as it sounds, steadfast nonviolent resistance against a violent state is the most righteous expression of rage.It’s reassuring that the national non-profit Indivisible, which is also reportedly in Trump’s sights, is among the groups at the helm of the No Kings events. Since its founding in 2016, the organization has been committed to nonviolence. “We reject all forms of political violence and intimidation, no matter the source or the target,” reads its website. “That’s not just a moral stance – it’s a strategic one. Movements that create lasting change do so by building trust, forging solidarity and demonstrating discipline, even in the face of threats or attacks.”Almost all of the 250 partner organizations that appear on NoKings.org are as politically vanilla as progressives can get: the ACLU, Faithful America, the Sierra Club, the Feminist Majority.Alert to the administration’s provocations, Indivisible provides detailed information on running legal, safe and peaceful events. “We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values,” it says. Weapons of any kind are always prohibited.The good news is that nonviolence is the 21st-century US left’s default behavior. With few exceptions, it is not just nonviolent; it is anti-violence. Prison abolition, disarmament, the feminist politics of care, pacifism – these are leftwing movements. By contrast, extreme-right causes, institutions and tropes – gun rights, the carceral state, the “warrior ethos” – spell out a politics of coercion, cruelty and punishment.On 18 October, tens of millions of people in the streets, peacefully exercising the democratic rights that the Trump regime is laboring to eliminate, will give the lie to Maga’s hallucinatory network of bomb-throwing traitors. No Kings will show America who the real haters are.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      US cities to resist Trump’s crackdown on dissent with No Kings protests: ‘We will not be bullied’

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      Donald Trump has promised to crack down on dissent and sent troops into US cities. His allies are claiming antifa, the decentralized antifascist movement, is behind plans to protest. He is looking for any pretext to go after his opponents.Still, this Saturday, even in cities with troops on the ground, millions of people are expected to march against the president as part of a second “No Kings” protest. The last No Kings protest in June drew several million people across more than 2,000 locations. This time, more than 2,500 cities and towns nationwide are hosting protests.Organizers expect this Saturday’s protests to draw more people than the June events as the American public sees the excesses of the Trump administration more clearly.“Their goal is to dissuade you from participating,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US that is a main organizer of No Kings. “That doesn’t mean that everybody has the same threat level. It doesn’t mean that people should ignore what the threats are, but it does mean we’re going to need to see a lot of courage out there on Saturday.”More than 200 organizations are signed on as partners for the 18 October protests; none have dropped off for fear of a Trump backlash, Levin said. The American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights group, is a partner, as is the advocacy group Public Citizen. Unions including the American Federation of Teachers and SEIU are in the coalition. The new protest movement 50501, which began earlier this year as a call for protests in all 50 states on a single day, is also a partner. Other partners include the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn, United We Dream, the League of Conservation Voters, Common Defense and more.Resistance to Trump continues to grow. The Harvard Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks political crowds, noted that 2025 had seen “far more protests” than during the same time period in 2017. The June No Kings protests were “probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017”, second to the Women’s March in 2017, the consortium said.In June, on the same day a man shot and killed a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, tens of thousands of people still turned out for No Kings in St Paul while the shooter was on the loose, with attenders saying they didn’t want to back down in the face of political violence.The messages behind the No Kings protests are simple: Trump is acting like a king, and the US rejects kings. The No Kings coalition has cited Trump’s “increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption” as motivation for the protests, including ramping up of deportations, gutting healthcare, gerrymandering maps and selling out families for billionaires.In the months since the first No Kings protests, Trump’s menace against the opposition has only grown, particularly after the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk was murdered. Trump declared antifa to be a terrorist organization and has promised to investigate and take action against any leftwing groups he deems support terrorism.Amid this backdrop, tens of thousands of people have joined calls in recent weeks to prepare safety plans, train on how to serve as marshals for the protests and learn de-escalation tactics.Still, some people may decide to stay home because the threats against them are too great, including the fear of deportation for participating in peaceful protest.“They’re making choices like that every day when they decide whether to go to school or whether to go to work or whether it’s safe to go grocery shopping,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “Unfortunately, that’s the climate that the Trump administration is engendering aside from this particular day of activation, so I assume that people will make that calculus on this day as well. But I also think that the fact that people have to make that calculus is part of the reason for our protest.”Cities under occupation prepare for protestsTrump has declared war on Chicago, one of the several Democratic-run cities that have seen infusions of federal forces and increasingly militarized immigration agents on the ground. A judge last week blocked the deployment of national guard troops to the Chicago area for at least two weeks, but ramped up immigration enforcement has continued and Chicago is one of several cities that will have protests on Saturday despite the federal presence on the ground.It’s not clear what posture federal agents and military troops will take for the event. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott said he will deploy national guard troops to Austin, the capital city, though there will be protests in cities and towns throughout the state.In response to questions about whether immigration enforcement officials will be at protest sites, the Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “As it does every day, DHS law enforcement will enforce the laws of our nation.”In Portland, Oregon, where Trump sought to send in national guard troops but was blocked by the courts, protesters in recent days have leaned into the absurd, showing up naked on bikes, or in inflatable costumes. The Washington Post declared “inflatable frog suits” the “protest fashion statement of the year”.Portland organizers are planning Saturday events they have called joyful and family-friendly, including music and speakers. “Trump is sending militarized agents into our cities, muzzling voters and showering billionaires with handouts. Hard-working American families are left behind,” Dannelle D Stevens, who helps run Miller Street Indivisible, said in a statement. “That’s not democracy. That’s tyranny. And we will not meet it with silence. We refuse to give up.”Chicago, too, is fighting back, both in the courts and on the streets. People have sought to run immigration agents out of their neighborhoods. Some are using whistles to warn their neighbors when agents are nearby. Protests at detention facilities are ongoing, and agents have used teargas and pepper balls to deter protesters.On Saturday, the city is one of several sites serving as anchor protests, expected to be some of the day’s most attended.In June, more than 70,000 people attended Chicago’s main protest, overflowing Daley Plaza, said Denise Poloyac of Indivisible Chicago. On Saturday, the protest will be in the larger Grant Park, with a march planned to begin and end at the park’s Butler Field. It’s hard to predict turnout for a protest, but Poloyac said there had been a surge of interest and engagement in the event.Trump is “using our tax dollars to attack and declare war on our city and on the people that live here,” and locals should make it clear in large numbers that they don’t agree with it, Poloyac said. “We’re asking people to lean into their courage.”Organizers will have more than 150 safety marshals along the route and in the rally location, she said. The idea is that “we keep us safe.” Marshals from Indivisible Chicago and other organizations helped serve at other events, like Mexican Independence Day parades, to protect their community, she noted.People are “already taking risks” just by going about their daily tasks in the city now, Poloyac said. There’s also a sense of strength in numbers at a protest; when there are tens of thousands of people, it’s harder to single someone out, she said.“We’re hoping that people who didn’t come out in June are really angry now and upset and see what’s happening,” Poloyac said. “Those of us who do have more privilege need to come out and especially use that privilege to make our voices heard and to make it clear how unacceptable this is, what Trump and his agents are doing.”Republicans seek to undermineTrump’s allies, including members of Trump’s cabinet, have pre-emptively blamed No Kings for the government shutdown and smeared them as anti-American or paid protests, a common refrain against street protests.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said the protests would be filled with the “pro-Hamas wing” of the Democrats and the “antifa people”. Tom Emmer, a Minnesota congressman, called the protests the “hate America rally” and said Democrats were beholden to the “terrorist wing of their party”. By claiming the protesters are part of antifa, the Trump administration could seek to go after people as domestic terrorists because of Trump’s recent executive order.Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said: “You’re seeing people out there with thousands of signs that all match, pre-bought, pre-put together. They are organized, and someone is funding it. We are going to get to the funding of antifa. We are going to get to the root of antifa, and we are going to find and charge all of those people who are causing this chaos.”Levin, of Indivisible, said the Trump administration was nervous about demonstrations that threaten its power, “so, in a weird way, it’s a compliment of our relevance and power.” These mass days of protest were often filled with “moms and grandmas and kids and dogs” and a joyful atmosphere, he said.The No Kings coalition affirms a commitment to non-violent action on all of its marketing materials, and organizers emphasize that their groups are all trained in tactics that enforce non-violence.“The violence is coming from the administration through their militarized crackdowns and through masked agents roaming our streets terrorizing communities, not coming from protesters,” Gilbert said. “The president wants us to be scared, but we will not be bullied into fear and silence, and it’s incredibly important for people to remain peaceful, to stand proud and to say what they care about, and not to be cowed by that fear.”What comes nextMass distributed protests help show that opposition is large and growing, in all corners of the country. They can help people find organizations or like-minded neighbors to work with on future actions, and they let people know that they aren’t alone in their dissatisfaction.But street protests alone are just one tool to counter the presidency. Other non-cooperation tactics, like economic boycotts or pressure campaigns, can help protesters achieve policy changes or get companies and pillars of civil society to stiffen their spines instead of caving to Trump.Levin cited the recent Disney boycott campaign after the company temporarily took Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show off the air as a successful model. This year’s Tesla Takedown boycotts and protests led to lower stock prices and reputational damage for Elon Musk’s company.The president of the Communications Workers of America union, Claude Cummings Jr, called on protesters to use No Kings to spread the word about a boycott of T-Mobile for its alignment with Trump, calling the phone company “some of the worst union busters in America”.“We know boycotts can work,” Cummings wrote in email this week.“We need to keep showing these companies that there’s a cost for embracing Trump’s un-American actions.”Gilbert, of Public Citizen, said protesters should think about how to take it one step further: “If you’ve never called your senator before, you do that. If you’ve never thought to boycott because of political issues, you do that. If you’ve never thought to post on social media about how you feel about militarization of your city, you do that. It’s really asking everyone to activate just a little bit more and to stay engaged.” More