Why autocrats paint peaceful protest as dangerous
Trump wants you to worry about attending ‘No Kings’
Tomorrow is No Kings Day, part two. Organizers are expecting historic turnout — potentially even the largest protest in American history. At over 2,500 protests in small towns and big cities, millions of people will peacefully take to the streets to reject the Trump administration’s authoritarian attempts to consolidate power.
This is democracy at work. (Find the one nearest to you here.)
The Trump administration seems to understand how big a deal these protests are. After all, mass peaceful demonstrations pose an existential threat to autocratic regimes.
Predictably, the White House is trying to intimidate citizens into staying home. They may seek to investigate or criminalize the work of some of the organizers — falsely painting peaceful protesters as criminals or even terrorists.
Read more: Donald Trump wants a conflagration.
This is because the White House knows how unpopular many of their actions are becoming and how vulnerable they are to Americans peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights. Instead of listening, they want to engineer the justification to strip dissenters of those rights.
The desperate effort to scare Americans out of exercising their freedom of speech and assembly
Right now, Donald Trump and his administration have no way to stop millions of Americans from protesting tomorrow. Practically, legally, politically — they’re powerless in the face of patriotic citizens taking to the streets to celebrate our democracy. The First Amendment protects everyone’s right to do so.
So their only option is to try to scare Americans into not participating. They can’t muster repression, so they’re counting on anticipatory obedience.
Perhaps that explains some of the statements from Trump’s allies:
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described the planned march on the National Mall in Washington tomorrow as a “hate America rally” that would draw “the pro-Hamas wing” and “the antifa people.”
Likewise, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said that No Kings Day is “about one thing and one thing alone — to score political points with the terrorist wing of [the Democratic] party.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s threats were a bit more hamfisted: “The No Kings protest, Maria, really frustrating. This is part of Antifa, paid protesters. It begs the question who’s funding it.”
None of this is real.
No “antifa” organization exists. If the last No Kings Day was any indication, protests tomorrow likely will be overwhelmingly peaceful and safe. Organizers are going to extraordinary lengths to avoid chaos or violence.
Instead, the real risk is that targeted repression by the administration — either threatening legal retaliation against organizers or hinting at using force to disperse protests — will cast a shadow of fear that saps energy from the whole movement.
Their goals seem to be two-fold. First, dampen enthusiasm and scare off would-be participants from tomorrow’s protest to minimize its scale and impact. Second, use any instances of violence or property damage that do arise tomorrow — no matter how small, isolated, or (un)related — to renew attacks on organizers, protesters, and other dissenters in the hope of preventing or weakening the next mass mobilization effort.1 This is a strategy straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
And it’s a bluff. We suspect Americans will call them on it tomorrow.
Peaceful protest and preparedness are key
For individuals, preparedness means continuing to flex your constitutional rights of free expression and assembly while also lowering the tension and remaining peaceful. No matter what. (Even if that means enlisting inflatable animal costumes and Neil Diamond).
Ben Raderstorf put it best before the first No Kings Day:
The more families and retirees and grandparents and union members and musicians and teachers and cyclists and picnicgoers and farmworkers and scientists and dancers and truck drivers and artists and students that show up, the less likely it is that their voices and genuine disagreement with the administration’s actions will be minimized, ignored, or painted as fringe or extremist.
When the sort of Americans who don’t usually protest show up this weekend, they will reveal the emptiness of the administration’s dangerous and fundamentally un-American gamble.
This is more true than ever. Everyday Americans have the power to demonstrate just how ridiculous the administration is being with its descriptions of No Kings protesters.2 Tomorrow, they can prove to the rest of the country that pro-democracy demonstrators don’t hate America, nor are they terrorists or members of “antifa.” They’re our friends and neighbors, fellow citizens who believe in American democracy — and want to keep it.
This will deny Trump the ammunition he needs to shut down civic space.
For civil society organizations, preparedness is crucial. You can draw a relatively straight line between the late-September executive actions, the antifa roundtable last week, and the mental and linguistic gymnastics that Trump and his allies are doing to paint the No Kings protests as exercises in domestic terrorism.
It’s absurd, and no organizers or other civil society organizations should be dissuaded, including from continuing to host peaceful protests — but neither should they be unprepared. Whether or not something happens tomorrow that provides a pretext for a new crackdown, the administration is only escalating its attention on nonprofits.
Just this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent invoked 9/11 and Osama bin Laden in announcing a War on Terror-style campaign against progressive nonprofits. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that “the Trump administration is preparing sweeping changes at the Internal Revenue Service that would allow the agency to pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups more easily.”
Instead of being cowed, civil society organizations must continue to double down on their mission and be prepared to stand together in the face of growing intimidation efforts. There are resources available to help.
Read more: Nonprofit Toolkit: Resources for organizations facing government investigations.
There’s safety in numbers
The authoritarian playbook relies on dividing and conquering, isolating the target and picking off the most vulnerable opponents, using outliers to justify escalations.
In many authoritarian regimes, protest is extraordinarily dangerous — but that’s often because there are only a small handful of people brave enough to take to the streets. In Venezuela or China or North Korea, holding a sign critical of the government is sure to get you arrested. It’s a vicious cycle: Repression discourages protest, which makes protest more dangerous, which discourages protest.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin even started arresting individual Russians standing on street corners holding blank signs — a last, desperate, solitary act of protest. Even holding a blank piece of paper was not safe.
Because they were alone.
Almost no one tomorrow, anywhere in the country, will be alone. Instead, in almost every city and every town in the country, patriotic dissenters will be joined shoulder to shoulder with hundreds or thousands of their fellow citizens.
There’s still no appetite in America for mass arrests of thousands of people peacefully marching down Main Street, Small Town, U.S.A. Moreover, even if the administration saw that as politically advantageous (which, again, it would not be), doing so would be practically impossible. Mass protest like No Kings is still one of the safer ways to engage, rather than the most dangerous.
If Trump can successfully paint protesters as a small fringe group of un-American extremists, he can build public support for suppressing dissent. He can work us towards a much darker future where protest really is lonely and risky — like those Russians with their blank signs.
But we do not believe he will succeed. We can make sure that none of us ever have to stand alone. Strength in numbers.
Courts are calling the administration’s bluff
Yesterday, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court’s temporary restraining order against the deployment of the National Guard to Chicago on the grounds that the Trump administration has not proven that a “rebellion” exists in the city or that the president needs troops in the streets to execute the law.
The language of the ruling is crystal clear:
Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest.
Read the whole ruling.
Protect Democracy filed an amicus brief in this case on behalf of retired national security leaders highlighting the dangers of such deployments. Read that brief here.
What else we’re tracking:
In yet another example of the weaponization of the Justice Department, Trump critic and former White House National Security Advisor John Bolton was indicted yesterday. Read more about politicized prosecutions: How to tell if the Trump DOJ is enforcing the law or retaliating against political enemies.
Media outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax, broadly rejected the Pentagon’s new press policies in a stunning act of collective action. (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has a good explainer on why the policies are so objectionable.)
A new ProPublica report found that “more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents. They’ve been kicked, dragged, and detained for days.”
The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff asks, “Can a deep-blue city fend off Trump’s ICE crackdown?” Read his dispatch from Chicago.
The Supreme Court is weighing whether to further roll back what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Doing so would likely dramatically decrease minority representation in Congress and shift the House of Representatives substantially towards Republicans.
Waging Nonviolence has a great breakdown of the behind-the-scenes organizing and long-term relationship building that led to the successful response to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel: How the Disney boycott beat the FCC’s censorship push.
What you can do to help:
If going to a No Kings protest isn’t in the cards for you tomorrow, there are still ways for you to get involved in the fight to protect democracy. Anna Dorman has six suggestions: The introverts’ guide to fighting for democracy.
As I’m sure is clear, no one action on its own can stop the authoritarians in their tracks. But it takes all of us — millions of small acts in defense of our democracy and communities — to confront the harms of authoritarianism, educate others on the threat, and pave the way to a more democratic future.
You can do your part just as you are. It doesn’t take expertise or experience. You can do it in your bathrobe, on the couch, from your phone — wherever you are, however you’re comfortable — as long as you do something.
However you engage, stay safe, and we’ll see you next week.
It’s worth mentioning that so far, these efforts have backfired. The number of RSVPs for No Kings Day protests has doubled since Republican leaders began criticizing the event.
Think of the widely-shared images of violent attacks against Protect Democracy’s client Rev. David Black. It is preposterous to believe that clergymen praying for the immigration officers and seeking justice for the people they detain are doing anything but peacefully exercising their rights.
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