No Kings Day: A Movement for Active Citizenship in the Age of Trump

Introduction

On October 18, 2025, around seven million Americans participated in No Kings Day. This movement illustrates active citizenship and the refusal of authoritarianism. 

Protesters asserted their collective power, countering the tactics of dominance linked to strongmen and reclaiming public space. This demonstration represented a commitment to democracy’s principles, as highlighted by notable voices on the topic. 

The event urged citizens to move beyond mere protest. They should integrate their activism into civic life. It ensures that democracy remains a shared responsibility. It should not be a relinquished right.

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No Kings Day

There are moments in the life of a democracy. In these times, citizens stop waiting to be governed. They start governing by presence alone. October 18, 2025 — No Kings Day — was one of those moments. Seven million people, in cities and towns across the country, stood beneath the same simple banner: No Kings. It was an act of civic punctuation. It marked the end of an era of indulgence toward strongmen.

From 2015 to 2021, I kept an eye on Trump and his gang of sycophants. I wrote on my blog observations as a record of Trump’s effects on democracy, human rights, science, and public health. I used these observations as the framework for my book, The Trump Files.  

Squashed

This exactly what Trump is doing to citizens of the United States, especially to migrants, many of whom are U.S. citizens. Roving gangs of masked vigilante-type ICE agents are rounding up people. They forcibly arrest them and illegally detain them. Then they deport people to who knows where. Trump and Noem (ICE Barbie) claim they’re arresting dangerous criminals. However, more than 70% of those detained do not have criminal records. Trump and Noem have broken the law thousands of times. They should be impeached. 

The Republican Party has joined Trump’s corrupt hip. Allowing government employees to be fired without cause and standing by with blind eyes shows the depravity of Republicans. They also don’t think the earth is heating up.  They think climate change is a hoax.  Ask a random sample of the 7 million people who turned out on the 18th. Find out if they have been affected by climate change.  Republicans also don’t think that health insurance and human health are important policy issues. What do the people who met up on No Kings Day think about health care in this country?

I read what I can about how Trump is destroying the principles upon which this country was founded.  For 250 years, it has been a struggle for people to be treated equally. They strive to have the same kinds of opportunities as others.  Since 2017, Trump has moved the country in the direction of authoritarianism. 

I documented his first term in The Trump Files. His impeachment for inducing the January 6 attack on the Congress was the most obvious authoritarian action. The day will live in infamy. The House impeached Trump within days of the coup, but the Senate did not convict him. I blame Mitch McConnell for the failure. He induced fellow Republicans to vote against conviction because Trump wasn’t a sitting President. It was the biggest mistake the Senate made in 250 years. Look what we have now. We have a weak authoritarian president. He stays up all night using his little fingers to cry about how his enemies are going after him. 

Fed Up with Trump

More Americans than not are fed up with Trump. We have had enough of his Cabinet too. Those sycophants in the West Wing are always feeding Trump one Project 2025 Executive Order after another to govern. More than 250 Executive orders have been signed using the Trump Sharpie.  They have caused nothing but harm to the American government, the American people, and citizens in other countries. 

The ideas that follow are based on the thinking of several influential figures. These include Thom Hartman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Anne Applebaum, Robert Reich, Lucian Truscott IV, and Heather Cox Richardson. I read their posts regularly, and subscribe to their blogs on the Substack framework.

You can follow them on Substack.com. I’ve linked their Substack sites below. 

I’ve read and studied the work of these active scholars. Here I’ve made comments. These comments explain the perspective of the scholar-activists. They describe how the people who protested on No Kings Day against the Trump regime are viewed by them. 

Thom Hartman

Thom Hartman is a NY Times best selling author of 34 books and the nations #1 progressive radio host. Hartmann might call it democracy’s immune system at work. He has long argued that democracies die not by coup but by neglect. This happens when citizens outsource their vigilance to “leaders.” These leaders promise to simplify life by deciding it for them. The No Kings crowds were in locations from New York to Big Rapids, Michigan. They looked like antibodies. They were ordinary people doing the unglamorous labor of civic health. And they carried signs instead of weapons. They walked instead of marched. The principle was the same as in any revolution of conscience. We are awake, and we are many.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an American history professor and political commentator. She is a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders. Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. She writes on her blog Lucid on the Substack platform.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat would recognize the shadow the protesters were standing against. Her work on authoritarians (Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present) describes a choreography of dominance. It explores the leader’s theater of humiliation and invulnerability. Right after the No Kings marches, Trump’s campaign posted an AI-generated video. The video showed him piloting a fighter jet. He dumped liquid waste on protesters below. It was absurd and grotesque. Yet it was perfectly legible within Ben-Ghiat’s framework. The autocrat appeared as a mythic avenger. The citizen was reduced to spectacle. That video turned democracy’s public square into a battlefield of the imagination. The protests reclaimed it.

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist, Atlantic staff writer, and historian. She has written about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She became a Polish citizen in 2013. 

Anne Applebaum reminds us that authoritarianism isn’t sustained by monsters. It is sustained by accommodators— the intellectuals, pundits, and bureaucrats who find reasons to go along. Her warning is less about coups than about corrosion: how a thousand small justifications can hollow out a republic. The people who took to the streets weren’t only rejecting one man’s ambitions. They were also rejecting the habits of surrender. These habits allow power to metastasize. They were saying, in effect, do not make peace with degradation. Her most recent article in The Atlantic is, “Why Trump Turned to the Sewer.” Applebaum explains why Trump dumped excrement on No Kings supporters. She writes:

Trump wanted to mock and smear millions of Americans. He literally depicted them covered in excrement. He did this precisely so that none of his own supporters would want to join them. Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, October 20, 2025.

Robert Reich

Robert Reich is a Professor and writer. He is a former Secretary of Labor. He has written several books. These include The System, The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, Aftershock, Supercapitalism, and The Work of Nations. Co-creator of “Inequality for All” and “Saving Capitalism.” Co-founder of Inequality Media

Reich, ever the diagnostician of inequality, would see the protests as a struggle over who gets to own democracy. When wealth, media, and politics fuse into a single ruling ecosystem, dissent becomes the only remaining public square. The protesters, he would say, were rebuilding the commons of democracy with their bodies. They were interrupting the algorithmic flow of distraction with the analog fact of presence. “No Kings” was less slogan than sentence structure: the rediscovery of a collective topic, we, reclaiming a verb, govern.

Lucian Truscott IV

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories like Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Truscott writes from the lineage of soldiers who learned that obedience without conscience is servitude. His essays on moral dissent make clear that democracy depends on people willing to “stand outside the formation.” That’s what happened on October 18. The protesters weren’t rejecting America. They were reenlisting in its defense. They practiced the old military virtue of loyalty to principle over command. In a republic, Truscott reminds us, the only uniform that matters is conscience.

Heather Cox Richardson

Richardson is a history professor interested in the contrast between image and reality in American politics. I believe in American democracy, despite its frequent failures.

Richardson sees history not as progress or decline. Instead, she views it as repetition with a chance for improvement. To her, No Kings Day fits into the long American story of confrontation between oligarchy and democracy. The Reconstruction era was undone by white reaction. The New Deal expanded and was then trimmed by wealth’s revenge. The civil-rights movement was followed by backlash. Each generation must choose whether to continue that struggle or to declare it finished. The protesters were, in Richardson’s language, the latest keepers of the “republican experiment” — not perfect, but persevering.

Takeaways

Taken together, these voices outline a grammar of democratic survival. Hartmann supplies the topic— an active citizenry. Ben-Ghiat names the antagonist — the authoritarian spectacle. Applebaum identifies the verb — refusal. Reich gives the object — the common good. Truscott adds the moral clause — conscience. Richardson provides the tense — continuity, the long arc of struggle. 

Seen through that lens, No Kings Day was not a protest against a man. It was a rehearsal for the next stage of citizenship. It was democracy reminding itself of its syntax after years of disinformation and fatigue. In the chant “No Kings!” one hears not rage but reclamation. It is the sound of a people restating their foundational grammar: We hold these truths. We consent. We dissent. And, we start again.

The question now is whether the movement can mature from symbol to structure. Every one of those writers would warn about this. Authoritarian drift thrives on amnesia. The immune response must become muscle memory — voting, organizing, legislating, teaching. Dissent must move from the streets into the systems it defends.

The outcome of democracy not depend on who wins the next election. Instead, it relies on whether millions of people remember how it felt to stand together. They must recall saying: We are not subjects. We are stewards. That is the meaning of No Kings Day. It serves as a reminder that democracy’s true inheritance is not the crown but the courage to refuse one.

Next

In a day or two, I will publish the latest letter I have received from Skyler Fusaro. This is a voice I hear from the future, circa 2060. She writes about how people in her time still recall No Kings Days.