From Maine to the Marianas, Americans Will Cry: “No Kings!”

In Lubec, Maine, the easternmost municipality of the United States, a good number of the community’s 1,237 residents will gather at 11 am Saturday to deliver a message from just this side of the border with Canada that, despite what an obsessive fan of the British monarchy named Donald Trump may think, “this country does not belong to kings, dictators, or tyrants.”

Multiple time zones away, activists from Saipan will raise a cry of protest from the Northern Marianas Islands in the western Pacific against the current administration’s abuses of power, joining their voices to a national declaration that says, “The president thinks his rule is absolute. But in America, we don’t have kings, and we won’t back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty.”

Taking their cue from a Constitution that empowers the people of these United States to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances, Americans will also gather 26 miles above the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska, and 90 miles from Cuba in Key West, Florida. They’ll rally in Massachusetts on the Lexington Battle Green, where the opening shots of the American Revolutionary War were fired, and just a short distance from the Civil War battlefields of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. They’ll be on the loop in the last frontier town of Polebridge, Montana, estimated population 31, and on the corner of Broadway and 47th Street in Manhattan.

From the reddest villages to the bluest cities, the true believers in the American experiment of Thomas Paine and Frederick Douglass, of Alice Paul and Rosa Parks, of Harvey Milk and Dolores Huerta, will on Saturday, October 18, raise the oldest and most patriotic of American cries: “No Kings!”

They will laugh at the pathetic attempts of the quisling Republicans of the Trump interregnum to label nonviolent dissenters as “unhinged” and “anti-American.” And they will embrace the message of a Republican president from another time, Teddy Roosevelt, who warned, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

In the spirit of the best of this country’s founders, above all Paine—who preached that “as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king”—millions of Americans will join Saturday’s national “No Kings Day of Action.” They will do so at a time when Trump and his accommodationists have attacked freedom of speech and freedom of the press; when they have sent masked men and armed troops into American cities; when they have threatened to jail political Democratic governors, mayors, and attorneys general; and when scholars of totalitarianism warn that American democracy is in peril.

“If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention,” Ezra Levin, a cofounder and co–executive director of Indivisible, a key convenor of the No Kings movement, says of the increasingly authoritarian tenor of Trump’s pronouncements. “These folks are serious. They are actively trying to take away your constitutional right to peaceful protest, and that is how authoritarian regimes work. They fear more than anything one thing, which is the mass, peaceful, organized population pushing back against their unpopular designs on the system.”

With support from religious and civil rights groups, unions, and community organizations nationwide, organizers drew an estimated 3 million people nationwide to “Hands Off” protests in April, and an estimated 5 million to No Kings protests in June. On Saturday, with more than 2,500 rallies and marches planned for Saturday, Levin says, “The cavalry is coming in.… We are looking at the largest protest in modern American history on Oct. 18.”

The very prospect that farmers and factory workers, teachers and nurses, students and retirees, public employees and small business owners nationwide will gather in enormous numbers to echo the words of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in defense of the Constitution, and in support of the full promise of the American experiment, has unsettled the apologists for authoritarianism.

Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who keeps rejecting credible proposals to call Congress into action and end the federal government shutdown, tried to blame the No Kings movement for the delay. It was a bizarre claim, even by the warped standard that Johnson has established in his desperate efforts to protect Trump from accountability—and to shift blame for a shutdown that Republican congressional leaders have facilitated from day one.

The Louisiana Republican tried to dismiss the millions of Americans who will be waving flags and quoting from the Declaration of Independence on Saturday as the “rabid base” of the left gathering for “Hate America” rallies. Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy falsely asserts that the crowds will be made up of “paid protesters.”

Even from two of the most ridiculous men ever to join the presidential line of succession, these are comic claims—especially considering the fact that No Kings demonstrations will be held Saturday in Johnson’s hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, and on Democracy Corner in Duffy’s hometown of Hayward, Wisconsin. Members of the No Kings coalition, which includes groups such as well as the League of Women Voters, the Interfaith Alliance and Veterans for Responsible Leadership—as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of Government Employees, MoveOn and groups such as 50501—took the wrongheaded Republican rants in stride. “Speaker Johnson is running out of excuses for keeping the government shut down,” declared the organizers. “Instead of reopening the government, preserving affordable health care, or lowering costs for working families, he’s attacking millions of Americans who are peacefully coming together to say that America belongs to its people, not to kings.”