“No Kings” rallies spanned the country in communities big and small earlier this year. (photo: Salwan Georges/WP)
America’s pro-democracy movement is gearing up for what may be its biggest mass-demonstration yet against the increasingly militaristic Trump administration — which has sent armed troops to occupy the nation’s capital and is threatening to do the same in large cities from Chicago to New Orleans.
Popular resistance in Trump’s second term has snowballed, in an organic fashion, from a large President’s Day protest in February, through mass demonstrations in April, to the first “No Kings” protest on Trump’s birthday in June — which drew millions to counter the president’s tin-pot military birthday parade.
After a series of smaller summer protests, the movement will be back in the streets and squares and center cities of America, en masse, in October for No Kings 2 — a sequel organizers are expecting to outshine the original, amid revulsion to Trump’s brutal campaign of mass deportation led by masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and an increasingly lawless president who claims “a lot” of Americans would “like a dictator.”
No Kings 2 is being organized by a big tent of grassroots and advocacy organizations. One of the most prominent players is Invisible, the activist group that sprang to life in the early days of the first Trump administration, and which now counts 2,500 distributed, local chapters nationwide.
Rolling Stone spoke to Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin last week, in advance of No Kings 2 unveiling
on Monday. The protest is planned for October 18 — in the aftermath of
an unpredictable showdown over government funding that could lead to a
partial government shutdown by the end of the month.
Levin says
the stakes of the protests have never been more urgent, and that
organizers are expecting record numbers of protesters to raise their
voices for democracy and against the threats of dictatorship.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the organizing principle of No Kings 2?
The only known solution to creeping authoritarianism is broad-based, peaceful, geographically dispersed mass engagement by everyday Americans. That’s it. That’s what works. We’ve been building the movement to bring in more people, to build a sense that in America, we don’t do kings.
This movement has turned out giant protests, as well as some smaller outcroppings, most recently on Labor Day. What’s your hope for No Kings 2?
I expect No Kings 2 to be the largest protest of the year. We had 5 to 6 million people across 2,169 communities turn out for No Kings 1. It was wildly successful. People who might have been on the sidelines for No Kings 1 probably had some FOMO. And the good news is: We’re doing it again. We’re going to pull out even more people.
Why are mass protests important to blocking Trump’s strongman ambitions?
Experts in authoritarianism tell us, based on research, that you need 3.5 percent of the population engaged, in a sustained way, to successfully push back against an authoritarian regime. In the American context, that’s about 11 or 12 million people. For No Kings 1, we got about halfway there. And we have funneled a lot of those people into our trainings around strategic non-cooperation. But we need to come together again.
Trump has now passed his bill that provides $171 billion for a secret police force and a support structure for that force. And he’s occupying American cities. First it was L.A., then it was D.C. Now we see saber-rattling at Chicago, and he’s threatening other cities. It’s what you would expect to have from an authoritarian.
The question is: Do we stand up and fight back like [Illinois Governor] J.B. Pritzker is doing, or do we welcome the occupiers like [mayor] Muriel Bowser is doing in D.C.?
I hope to see these protests explode on the national scene — and demonstrate that the public is not with this regime, that the public wants free-and-fair elections, that the public wants the overreach of the federal government out of their cities, and that they don’t support terrorizing forces in their communities. It’s not rocket science.
Looking back to No Kings 1, the national situation has become more dire — we’ve gone from a military parade in June to troops in the streets today. We’ve reached the armed occupation phase of Trump’s authoritarian project. Top governors are warning we may find ourselves in a situation where Trump is invoking emergency powers to disrupt state and federal elections.
The first No Kings was scheduled because Trump was staging this military birthday parade, a ridiculous celebration that smacked of authoritarianism. It did not feel like an American event. It felt like something you would see in a dictatorship. We wanted a demonstration to show him that he could have his pathetic parade — but that we would be everywhere else. And we succeeded.
No Kings 2 is responding to the escalation from the regime. You don’t throw a military parade just because you want a military parade. You don’t occupy cities just because it’s fun. This is all ratcheting up. Ultimately, the goal is to concentrate power in Trump’s hands — maybe not to end elections entirely, but to make elections functionally meaningless.
It’s not that military occupations, or secret police on their own are the end of American democracy. But if you wanted to prevent the public from expressing its views and exercising its constitutional rights through elections, this is how you would set up the fight for next year. By sending the military to blue states and places that are going to have competitive elections, you are setting up the dominoes to fall come election day.
This is why I have such a negative response to politicians who say, “Yeah, this is really bad. That’s why we’ve got to go vote next year.” My response is, “That is 15 months away. If you wait that long to get politically engaged it might be too late. You’ve got to stand up and fight right now!”
This is why it’s important for No Kings 2 to show up. Because if you don’t do that, you might not be able to push back come next November.
The Pritzker example is illuminating. Last week he called for his constituents to “be loud” and he’s even rattled his saber back at Trump and red state governors who might think of invading Illinois. We have seen times where Trump gets punched in the nose, he thinks about a different plan. Suddenly he’s musing about sending National Guard to New Orleans instead of Chicago.
Exactly. We say courage is contagious. Trump is a bully, and bullies often change direction if you stand up to them. And look: The attacks coming from this regime don’t come from a place of strength. Trump does not have popular support for occupying American cities. He doesn’t have popular support for secret police.
Even the issues where he traditionally has the most popular support — immigration and crime and the economy — he’s underwater on all of those issues now. There were very quote, unquote, “smart” Democratic politicians, at the beginning of this year, that said, Well, we shouldn’t talk about immigration; we shouldn’t talk about ICE; we shouldn’t talk about Abrego Garcia or the El Salvadorian gulag. We should just focus on Medicaid. We should just focus on inflation every day.
That is misguided. It’s politics taken from a different era. Trump might maintain some of the same policies, but he isn’t running politics the same way Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich or George W Bush did. It’s an entirely different ecosystem. And Pritzker’s recommendation — get loud — there’s nothing more American than that. It’s baked into our democracy that the population gets loud in response to authoritarian overreach.
Credit to Pritzker. He’s been on the right track since the election. He didn’t wait to join the fight-back faction of the Democratic Party. It’s been inspiring. I would give credit to somebody like [California governor] Gavin Newsom, who has woken up, and is now a leader in the fight, with redistricting. We should be welcoming in politicians who weren’t with us at the beginning, but now are fighting the good fight.
But there’s another category of politician. They woke up to the fact that their constituency wants to see a fight — so they engage in the aesthetics of opposition, but they don’t actually follow through with real action. We saw Adam Schiff the other day posting that Donald Trump is taking billions in crypto money that appear to be bribes. But he is complaining about this a couple months after he voted for a crypto bill that allowed Donald Trump to take in bribes. Or Cory Booker gives a brilliant, inspiring speech on the Senate floor — and then turns around and votes for Trump nominees.
No Kings has never been an arm of the Democratic Party. We expect our leaders to lead. We expect Democrats to be part of the fight-back faction. And I hope one of the outcomes of No Kings is that we send a clear message that there is political opportunity to show up and fight back.
The federal government can’t be everywhere. Trump has to go after specific hot spots and then rely on the media to amplify that into a national story. I saw this in Portland in 2020. We’ve seen it now in L.A. and D.C. and maybe Chicago is next. Can you just talk about the value of Inpisible’s distributed model of organizing — of people showing not just in big cities, but out in the sticks — as a counter to that?
The regime wants you to believe that you are alone, powerless. They do that by puffing out their chest, picking these indivdual, localized fights, and then using their vast media and propaganda operation to nationalize it, and make you feel like their power is overwhelming.
But what they were doing in L.A., what they’ve done in D.C. is relatively small and minuscule in comparison to the opposition that you can build up in those places.
This hits at the soul of how Invisible started. Under representative democracy, we parcel out power geographically. Cities and counties and congressional districts and states have little parcels of power. You as an individual have very little power on your own.
But you, combined with a lot of folks in your community, can actually move mountains if you do your part. And if folks in rural communities do their part. And if folks in the suburbs do their part. If we all organize the mass of pro-democracy Americans, it’s very difficult for the regime to maintain control.
Fundamentally that means: If you are not physically joining together with other people in your community — in large rooms or on street corners — you’re not doing the real work. This is why we are a group-based movement. We are made up of 2,500 local, Indivisible groups.
The No Kings 2 events will not just be in the deep-blue areas of the country, but also rural and red areas. Tiny, little towns as well as big cities. It sends a strong message to the regime that this is something big — and not limited to traditional hot spots of activism.
I would highly recommend to folks looking to participate in No Kings: Don’t travel more than an hour. If you’re having to travel more than an hour to get to your local No Kings protest, start your own.
This summer you guys organized a series of activist trainings. Can you talk about how that process is working?
Our democracy is not just made up of Congress and the courts, it’s also made up of institutions that either can support — or decline to support — democratic norms. These are big institutions like the media or universities or law firms or businesses.
If those institutions push back against authoritarian overreach, the authoritarian regime has a hard time implementing its policies and concentrating power. The point is to have our movement push those pillars to stand strong.
We’re currently running a campaign to push Avelo Airlines to stop working with ICE. Businesses are not used to this kind of organized public pressure.
We’re also working with groups to build community-level pushback against ICE. You can do that by working with local businesses to make clear that ICE is not welcome, but that immigrants are welcome. The idea is to make people who aren’t watching politics every day aware there is a fight going on, that there is growing opposition, and that other people share their concerns about members of their community being disappeared.
Part of the challenge of leading a mass movement is just capturing and channeling its energy. Can you talk about how ideas are bubbling up from the grassroots?
We are encouraging Inpisible groups to experiment — try new advocacy, protest, and organizing tactics, and see what catches fire. A lot of the best ideas are going to come from local folks. In fact, “No Kings” itself is a great example of that. We didn’t dream up the No Kings slogan. We saw it on signs, in the streets, in the early part of the year. And we thought: “That is really smart. That is a great, simple message that everybody can get around. That should be the banner.”
This protest is more than a month away. Do you have thoughts about the political context you’ll be engaging in?
One reason No Kings Day 2 is in October is because we know that there’s going to be a big funding fight this month. Back in March, the Democrats completely caved to the Republicans on their funding bill. The Republicans were threatening to shut down the government, and Chuck Schumer led a sufficient number of Democrats to surrender on it, and there was no shutdown. That was a six-month funding bill, and that ends at the end of this month.
The last funding battle added definition to the struggle within the party, between Democrats that were treating this as a politics-as-usual moment and those looking to fight back. The backlash after Democrats caved was massive. It significantly drove down the approval ratings of Democrats who led that surrender.
Democrats are in the minority, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities where they have real leverage. So it’s often hard to identify who is really fighting — and who is just giving speeches. This new funding fight is a rare, big opportunity for them to actually use the power that they’ve got — because Democratic votes are going to be necessary to keep the government running.
I don’t know how the Democrats are going to fight. They currently are talking a big game, but they did that last time as well. It’s conceivable that the Republicans will shut down the government and No Kings 2 will happen in the middle of that.
That probably means that the Democrats are unified in opposition, and what they will see are millions of people coming out in historic protests. And a big flavor of that protest is going to be: “Hell yeah. Keep fighting. We’re with you.”
It’s also conceivable that Democrats will cave and No Kings 2 will happen in the wake of that surrender — and there will be a lot of negative political ramifications for those Democrats who did. Either way, the people coming out to No Kings 2 will not be there to cheer-lead Democrats because they’re not Donald Trump, or because they say mean things about Donald Trump. They will be showing up because they want to find leaders who are going to fight back.
