ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Organizers of Saturday's “No Kings” rallies across the country are predicting that the protests against the actions of President Donald Trump and his administration could add up to one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history, with Minnesota taking center stage.
Organizers say more than 3,100 events
have been registered in all 50 states, with more than 9 million people expected to participate.In Washington, hundreds of marchers
moved through the streets, past the Lincoln Memorial and into the National Mall, holding signs that read “Put down the crown, clown” and “Regime change beings at home.” Demonstrators rang bells, played drums and chanted “No kings.”
“Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Donald Trump has got to go!” they chanted.
The White House dismissed the rallies. Spokesperson Abigail Jackson described the protests as the product of “leftist funding networks” with little real public support.
Jackson said in a statement that the “only people who care about these Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee was also sharply critical.
“These Hate America Rallies are where the far-left’s most violent, deranged fantasies get a microphone," said Maureen O'Toole, spokesperson for the NRCC.
Organizers have designated the rally at the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul as the national flagship event, in recognition of how the state where federal agents fatally shot two people who were monitoring Trump's immigration crackdown became an epicenter of resistance.
Headlining that observance will be Bruce Springsteen, performing “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote in response to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and in tribute to the thousands of Minnesotans who took to the streets over the winter. Springsteen's Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour, which has a “No Kings” theme, kicks off Tuesday in Minneapolis.
Minnesota organizers have told state officials they expect 100,000 people could converge on the Capitol grounds, where last June’s event drew an estimated 80,000 people.
The St. Paul rally will also feature singer Joan Baez, actor Jane Fonda,Sen. Bernie Sanders and a long list of other activists, labor leaders and elected officials.
Rallies are also planned in more than a dozen other countries, from Europe to Latin America to Australia, Ezra Levin, a co-executive director of Indivisible, a group spearheading the events, said in an interview. Countries with constitutional monarchies call the protests “No Tyrants,” he said.
For those unable to attend in person, another activist group, Stand Up For Science, is hosting a “virtual and accessible” event online.
On Saturday morning in Paris, several hundred people, mostly Americans living in France, along with French labor unions and human rights organizations, gathered at the Bastille.
“I protest all of Trump’s illegal, immoral, reckless, and feckless, endless wars,” Ada Shen, the Paris No Kings organizer, said. “It is clear he doesn’t really have a plan. It is clearly that the abuse of power is the point. It is very clear that he is a strong man who is abusing the authority vested in him by the American people as our elected president.”
In Rome, thousands of people marched with defiant chants aimed at Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose right-wing government saw its referendum for streamlining Italy's judiciary badly fail earlier this week amid criticism that it was a threat to the courts' independence. Protesters waved banners protesting the Israeli and US attacks on Iran, calling for “A world free from wars.”
In London, people protesting the war in Iran held banners that said, “Stop the far right” and “Stand up to Racism.”
U.S. organizers told reporters in an online news conference Thursday that they expect Saturday's protests to be larger than the first two rounds of No Kings rallies, which they estimate drew more than 5 million people in June and more than 7 million in October.
“This administration’s actions are angering not just Democratic voters or folks in big blue city centers — they are crossing a line for people in red and rural areas, in the suburbs, all over the country," said Leah Greenberg, the other co-executive director of Indivisible. "The defining story of this Saturday’s mobilization is not just how many people are protesting, but where they are protesting,"
Two-thirds of the RSVPs have come from outside of major urban centers, Greenberg said, listing registration surges in conservative-leaning states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, South Dakota and Louisiana, as well in competitive suburban areas of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.
"Millions of us are rising up from all walks of life, from rural communities to big cities at No Kings,” said Katie Bethell, executive director of MoveOn, another major organizer. “And as we do so, we will send the loudest, clearest message yet that this country does not belong to kings, dictators, tyrants. It belongs to us.”
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Associated Press videojournalist Nicholas Garriga in Paris and Associated Press reporter Colleen Berry in Milan, Italy, contributed to this report.
