Millions of Americans are expected to attend “No Kings” protests during President Donald Trump’s military parade Saturday.
Trump is holding a parade with thousands of soldiers, tanks and warplanes in Washington D.C. to celebrate the Army’s 250th birthday — which also falls on the president’s 79th birthday.
In a show of opposition to Trump and his agenda, including his mass deportations of immigrants, more than 2,000 protests in all 50 states are planned. Notably, no demonstrations against the Trump administration are scheduled for Washington, D.C.
A website made for the mass demonstrations reads: “In America, we don’t do kings. They’ve defied out courts, deported Americans, disappeared people off the streets, attacked our civil rights, and slashed our services,” referring to the Trump administration.
“The corruption has gone too. far. No thrones. No crowns. No kings,” the website read.
An organizer of the protests, Ezra Levin, co-founder of the anti-Trump organization Indivisible, called Saturday an “inflection point” during an interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki.
“ This is an opportunity to send a very clear message that democracy is gonna reassert itself, and that’s a message, not to Donald Trump. He’s the least important figure tomorrow,” Levin said.
He continued: “That’s a message to the marginal figures in our democracy, whether they’re leaders or they’re institutions who are trying to decide how to behave today, and they need to know that the people are gonna reassert democracy.”
While the protests were already in the works before anti-ICE raid demonstrations erupted in Los Angeles last Friday and subsequently in other major cities, Trump’s response to those demonstrations has given Saturday’s protesters even more fuel.
In an unprecedented move, Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops and 700 Marines in Los Angeles to quell the protests. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who sued the Trump administration over the move, called it a “brazen abuse of power.”
When Trump was asked earlier this week about the “No Kings” protests, he said, “I don’t feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get stuff approved.”
