For many who participated in the “No Kings” protests on Saturday, October 18, the simple act of marching in what may be the country’s largest show of resistance against the rise of authoritarianism in recent times was both cathartic and hopeful. An estimated seven million people turned out across the United States to protest President Trump’s monarchic tendencies, from deploying the National Guard in US cities to suppressing art and free speech. Still, some on the left criticized the movement for not going far enough.
But there’s one group that seems to agree on how they feel about the No Kings marches.
Republicans threw a collective tantrum over the weekend in a show of petty rage that only validates the movement’s impetus. President Trump, achieving a new low that previously seemed impossible, posted an AI-generated video of himself manning a warplane emblazoned with the words “King Trump” and bombarding protesters with what looks like human excrement.
Why is the movement so provocative to the right? It might have something to do with its “surprisingly patriotic” aesthetic, as Hyperallergic contributor Emma Cieslik observed from Washington, DC, where she captured marchers in head-to-toe Revolutionary garb and eagle costumes accessorized by US flags and copies of the Constitution that subverted Trump’s jingoistic iconography. One sign depicted an exhausted George Washington warning against the repetition of history ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. It must sting for Trump, seeing the event he’s tried to co-opt for his nationalistic personal brand framed not as a celebration of American independence, but as a mourning of its loss.
Or perhaps it’s protesters’ clever, creative calls for Trump to release the Epstein files — including one sign, photographed by Hyperallergic Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian in Manhattan, that invokes the president’s own alleged birthday drawing for the convicted sex offender.
Then again, maybe the right is irked by the fact that Saturday’s protesters assembled lawfully after the GOP spent weeks trying to vilify them as dangerous. House Speaker Mike Johnson — the same man who once referred to the January 6 Capitol rioters as “innocent” Americans who “just happened to be walking through the building” — derided the No Kings protests as a “hate America rally” attended by “the pro-Hamas wing.” Are those the same people who were gently gliding in inflatable frog costumes in a nod to the peaceful anti-ICE activism of Portland, Oregon? Just wondering.
See some of the most creative looks and protest art from this weekend’s No Kings marches below.
