Nearly seven million Americans joined what organizers describe as one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history on October 18, taking to the streets in more than 2,700 cities and towns across all 50 states to oppose what they characterize as President Donald Trump’s authoritarian policies.

The “No Kings” demonstrations, which drew two million more participants than similar protests held in June, marked the third major mobilization against the Trump administration since the president returned to office in January. The protests extended beyond American borders, with solidarity rallies held in major European cities including London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome, and Lisbon, as well as in Canadian cities such as Vancouver and Montreal.

According to the Urbana Police Department, 4,000 demonstrators gathered outside the Champaign County Courthouse in Urbana.

Urbana’s peaceful demonstration featured speeches from multiple community leaders, including Matthew Hurtado, outreach coordinator for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, who emphasized the importance of optimism within activist movements. Other speakers included Kendell Harrison of Champaign County Indivisible, University of Illinois student body president Gabi DalSanto, Cunningham Township supervisor Danielle Chynoweth, and law professor Faye E. Jones.

Following approximately one hour of speeches, demonstrators marched through downtown Urbana streets that had been closed by city officials with concrete blocks and barricades. 

The nationwide movement emerged in response to what organizers and participants described as an escalating pattern of executive overreach. Protesters cited multiple grievances including aggressive immigration enforcement operations conducted by often-masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, the deployment of National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities without local consent, significant cuts to federal education and environmental programs, attacks on the media and political opponents, and the ongoing government shutdown now in its third week.

The protests demonstrated unprecedented geographic reach, extending far beyond traditional liberal strongholds into rural areas and Republican-voting counties. According to Jeremy Pressman, a political science professor and co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium at the Harvard Kennedy School and University of Connecticut, protests in 2025 have reached a broader spectrum of counties, including those where many residents voted Republican, compared to earlier years of Trump’s presidency.

Despite concerns raised by Republican leaders about potential violence, the demonstrations remained overwhelmingly peaceful. Law enforcement in New York and Washington D.C., where some of the largest crowds gathered, reported no arrests related to the protests. A few isolated incidents occurred, including a woman arrested in South Carolina for waving a firearm near protesters. In Los Angeles, dispersal orders were issued hours after the main protest concluded when a small group of approximately 100 people refused to leave, resulting in at least one arrest.

Prominent Democratic lawmakers participated in the rallies across the country. In Washington D.C., Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut addressed the crowd. Sanders criticized tech billionaires who he claimed have amassed greater wealth and power since Trump took office, specifically calling out Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.​​

“When we stand together and don’t allow demagogues to divide us up, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish,” Sanders said.

Also in DC, Journalist and Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan delivered a passionate address that directly challenged Republican critics while celebrating American diversity.

“I’m not here out of hate. I’m here out of love. I love this country. I love America. I love the First Amendment. I love our democracy. I love our diversity. And I am not willing to sit back and watch our glorious American multi-racial, multicultural, democratic experiment, our constitutional republic destroyed by the guy from Home Alone 2.”

In Chicago, Illinois Congressman Jonathan Jackson said, “If anybody thinks that this gathering is about blowing off steam, they have grossly underestimated the severity of this moment. And better still, they have misunderstood the determination that we have not to allow this country to become a racist dystopia where cruelty destroys the rule of law.”

The Boston rally on Boston Common attracted over 100,000 protesters and featured Mayor Michelle Wu as the keynote speaker.

“Day after day, this president and his corrupt cabinet mistake cruelty for greatness and chaos for power. These are the tools of a tyrant desperate for the respect that he’ll never earn.”​

“He is counting on us going quiet, getting too scared or too tired to keep speaking out. But Boston has never been good at surrender or silence.”

Republican leaders condemned the demonstrations in harsh terms. House Speaker Mike Johnson labeled the events a “hate America rally,” claiming without evidence that participants were being compensated for their attendance. Johnson stated on Fox News, “It’s all the pro-Hamas faction and the antifa supporters. They’re all coming out.”

Johnson, along with others in the Trump administration are using several tactics to paint an unrealistic picture of the No Kings protests and dissatisfaction with what the Republican party is currently doing. 

The primary tactic is poisoning the well, a propaganda technique and logical fallacy where irrelevant negative information is presented preemptively to discredit an opponent or their arguments before they are even made. This rhetorical technique involves “preemptively discrediting an opponent to bias the audience against them before they even have a chance to present their argument”. By labeling protesters with inflammatory characterizations before examining the substance of their concerns, Johnson attempts to create a “mental anchor” that biases how the public interprets the demonstrations.

Johnson’s comments also represent a delegitimization strategy, specifically used to undermine protest movements. This involves portraying protesters as illegitimate actors rather than genuine citizens exercising their rights. The claim that participants were “being compensated for their attendance” fits the historical pattern of the “outside agitators” or “paid protesters” trope, which has been used throughout American history to undermine the legitimacy of protests.

Johnson’s characterization involves a straw man fallacy, where he misrepresents the protesters’ actual position to make it easier to attack. By claiming the rallies were “all the pro-Hamas faction and the antifa supporters,” he creates a distorted version of who the protesters are and what they represent. This involves “exaggerating, distorting, or oversimplifying the original argument” to create an easily refutable position that doesn’t reflect reality.

The straw man works by substituting the protesters’ actual concerns about authoritarian governance with false characterizations about terrorism support and anarchism, allowing Johnson to attack this fabricated version rather than address the genuine grievances about executive overreach.

The rhetoric also employs demonization, a propaganda technique that “promotes an idea about the enemy being a threatening, evil aggressor with only destructive objectives”. By associating peaceful demonstrators with Hamas and Antifa, Johnson portrays them in moral terms as inherently threatening and evil. This “character of the opponent is depicted in a Manichean way, as good against evil,” creating a stark binary that dehumanizes those exercising their First Amendment rights.

These overlapping tactics work together to create what researchers call “out-casting,” a macro-strategy that includes “enemization, criminalization, evilification”. The combination is particularly powerful because it exploits “cognitive biases, particularly confirmation bias” and “the anchoring effect,” where “the audience is primed with negative information about a person or entity” making them “more likely to interpret subsequent actions or statements from that target in line with the initial negative framing”.​

The effectiveness of this rhetorical approach lies in its ability to prevent rational examination of the protesters’ actual concerns while creating emotional reactions that “cloud the audience’s judgment, making them less likely to evaluate the opponent’s arguments critically”.