Emerging figures suggest the glut of protests across the country against President Donald Trump’s presidency marked one of the largest single days of demonstrations in United States history.
“Based on hundreds of crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don’t have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6m people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday,” independent data journalist G Elliott posted to X Sunday.
For reference, that’d mean Saturday’s demonstrations featured 1-2 percent of the total population of 340 million taking to the streets in more than 2,000 cities to voice their opposition to the increasingly authoritarian, far-right policies the president has pursued since assuming office for the second time.
The “No Kings” rallies follow after a spate of demonstrations against immigration raids carried out in Los Angeles and the surrounding area last week, to which Trump deployed 4,000 members of the National Guard and 700 Marines over the objection of California Governor Gavin Newsom.
In a full report on the figures from Saturday’s demonstrations, Morris added that mounting backlash against Trump’s second term has also witnessed “dramatically more protest activity” than during his first stint in the White House.
Since his inauguration in January, Trump’s administration has witnessed more than 15,000 protests and rallies, representing a threefold increase in the number of public demonstrations that had taken place by this point in 2017.
As the nationwide anti-government rallies unfolded, the president attended a Washington, D.C., parade to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, which also happened to coincide with his 79th birthday.
The White House downplayed the scale of turnout at the anti-Trump protests while playing up the number of people who attended the military parade on Saturday.
Trump’s Director of Communications, Steven Cheung, claimed in a series of X posts that “over 250,000 people” attended the 250th anniversary event, whereas the “No King’s [sic] Protests have been a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance.”
