When millions of Americans take to the streets of more than three thousand cities and towns today, they will be exercising the foundational prerogative of a free people — the right of assembly, the right of petition, the right to say to their government: we are watching. Whether one shares the protesters’ grievances, dismisses them, or views them with the ambivalence of a nation engaged in war abroad and fiscal dysfunction at home, this much is beyond dispute: a republic in which citizens march by the millions is a republic still breathing.
The scale of what is being attempted today has no precise American precedent. According to the Associated Press, more than 3,100 events are organized across all fifty states, with organizers projecting more than nine million participants nationwide. FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul reports that the flagship rally at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul alone is expected to draw upwards of 100,000 attendees, with speakers including Senator Bernie Sanders, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and Jane Fonda. CBS Minnesota reports that St. Paul police are anticipating as many as 150,000 demonstrators, a figure that would surpass the numbers achieved by the 2017 Women’s March. Law enforcement from across the region — some 300 officers from multiple agencies — will be deployed around the Capitol complex, according to CBS Minnesota, and Metro Transit is running maximum train capacity to accommodate the crowds.
This is the third iteration of the No Kings movement, which emerged on June 14, 2025 — President Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday — as a counter-demonstration to the administration’s military parade celebrating the Army’s 250th anniversary. That first mobilization drew an estimated five million participants across more than 2,100 events, according to FOX 29 Philadelphia, citing ACLU estimates. The October 2025 follow-up expanded further, with organizers claiming seven million participants in 2,700 events in all fifty states, as reported by WABE Atlanta and corroborated by multiple outlets, though the New York Times noted it could not independently confirm those figures. If today’s demonstrations approach the nine million figure cited by the Associated Press, they would constitute, by any credible measure, the largest single day of protest in American history.
The movement is organized primarily by Indivisible, the grassroots network co-founded by Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, in coalition with more than 300 partner organizations including the ACLU, SEIU, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the NAACP, the American Federation of Teachers, and the League of Women Voters, according to Ms. Magazine. The NAACP Middletown, New York branch confirmed that NAACP chapters from across the country are participating. Indivisible co-executive director Leah Greenberg told Democracy Now! that the number of confirmed events had reached 3,200 as of Thursday morning, spanning every congressional district and extending to six of seven continents.
The protests unfold against a backdrop of cascading national crises that, taken together, constitute the most volatile domestic and foreign policy environment since the early years of the Iraq War. As WHYY Philadelphia reports, today’s demonstrations are being organized against the twin backdrops of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran and an ongoing partial government shutdown. The DHS funding lapse, which began on February 14 and has now exceeded forty-one days — making it the longest partial government shutdown on record, according to the National League of Cities — has left tens of thousands of federal employees without pay. CBS News reports that more than 510 TSA officers have quit during the shutdown, with callout rates exceeding 40 percent at some airports, producing wait times exceeding four and a half hours at their worst. The Senate approved a measure early Friday to fund most of DHS except ICE and Customs and Border Protection, but House Speaker Mike Johnson rejected it, and NBC News reports that House Republicans instead passed a sixty-day continuing resolution that Senate Democrats have declared dead on arrival. The shutdown, in short, will grind on — and the protesters marching today count it among their grievances.
The other galvanizing force behind today’s demonstrations is the legacy of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. According to Britannica and the Minnesota Reformer, the Department of Homeland Security deployed approximately 3,000 federal immigration agents to the Twin Cities beginning in December 2025 in what DHS called the largest immigration enforcement operation in its history. Two American citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were fatally shot by federal officers in Minneapolis in January 2026, deaths captured on video that ignited weeks of protests. The Associated Press reports that the killings prompted the No Kings coalition to designate Minnesota as Saturday’s flagship location, with Indivisible’s Levin stating that the state had endured “some of the most horrific, sadistic behavior you can imagine” from the administration while also demonstrating “some of the most inspiring, neighborly, brave organizing.” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz confirmed Thursday that he would attend the St. Paul rally, telling The Hill that Minnesota had “provided the template here for pushing back.”
What, then, should a serious newspaper of the United States make of all this? The answer requires disciplined clarity about several distinct questions that the partisans on both sides have collapsed into a single tribal roar.
First, the right of Americans to assemble in protest is not merely tolerable — it is constitutive. It is the mechanism by which a self-governing people communicate to their elected representatives that the present course is unsatisfactory. This newspaper will never characterize peaceful, lawful assembly as anti-American, as some Republican officials have done. The White House spokesperson’s dismissal of the protests as “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions,” as reported by NPR and Newsweek, is beneath the dignity of the office from which it issued. When millions of your citizens march, the presidential response should be to hear them, not to demean them. The protesters are not combatants. They are constituents.
Second, the substantive grievances driving today’s marches are not frivolous. The DHS shutdown is an act of governance malpractice by both parties — TSA officers losing their homes while Congress plays procedural chess is a failure of the most basic obligation of a functioning state. The deaths of two American citizens at the hands of federal immigration officers in Minneapolis — whatever the contested circumstances of those encounters — demand thorough, transparent, and credible investigation. The war with Iran, launched in concert with Israel on February 28 according to the Associated Press, is consuming American blood and treasure while Congress has yet to exercise its constitutional war-making authority. These are not hallucinations of the politically unhinged. They are legitimate matters of national concern.
Third — and this is where the organizers’ rhetoric demands scrutiny — the framing of the current administration as a monarchy or tyranny is overdrawn to the point of strategic self-sabotage. President Trump is the duly elected President of the United States, serving a second term secured through the constitutional process. His policies may be aggressive, his rhetoric abrasive, his executive actions expansive — but the courts are functioning, Congress is in session, the states are asserting their authority, and nine million Americans are marching in the streets without hindrance. This is not the behavior of a tyranny. A republic in which the opposition can flood every congressional district with demonstrators is a republic whose institutions, however strained, are holding. To call it a kingship is to cheapen the word and to obscure the more precise and productive critiques available.
The harder truth that today’s protests illuminate is this: the American system of governance is undergoing a stress test for which neither party has shown adequate seriousness. The executive branch has expanded its operational tempo — in immigration enforcement, in military action abroad, in the assertion of spending authority during shutdowns — faster than the legislative branch has been willing to check it. This is not unique to any one administration; it is a generational erosion that accelerates in periods of crisis. What the No Kings movement reflects, at its most genuine, is a citizenry alarmed that the pace of executive action has outstripped the pace of democratic accountability.
A notable dimension of this third mobilization is its geographic spread. According to ABC7 Los Angeles and WABE Atlanta, Indivisible reports that roughly two-thirds of the more than 3,000 planned demonstrations are located outside major urban centers. The Advocate reports that organizers in the suburbs and exurbs are driving the expansion. Indivisible co-executive director Greenberg told Democracy Now! that resistance to the administration “is reaching farther and deeper and more significantly into red and rural areas than it ever has.” If this claim bears out in today’s turnout figures, it will carry political consequences that extend well beyond the protest itself — particularly with the 2026 midterm elections now firmly on the horizon.
The nation’s interest is served neither by dismissing these protests nor by romanticizing them. It is served by listening to what they are actually saying — and then demanding of both the administration and its opposition the kind of governance that makes protest unnecessary. The republic does not need kings. But it does need leaders. And today, as millions of Americans march, the deficit of leadership is the truest grievance on the street.