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no kings
To Stop Trump, the Pro-Democracy Movement Must Center Workers
Marches alone won't beat authoritarianism; the movement has to fight where working people already fight.
Apr 19, 2026
Last month, 8 million people marched in the largest single-day protests in US history for "No Kings 3." More than 3,000 rallies were held across the country in a “record-breaking” display of opposition that an estimated 1 in 50 people participated in.
To translate that march into a movement, the fight to have your voice be counted is one working people have to take up every single day. The warehouse worker getting a Sunday night text saying they need to be in tomorrow even though she requested that day off for her daughter's physical therapy. The tenant whose rent jumps $200 with no explanation.
For working people, those fights start at work, in their neighborhoods, and at the polls. To have a successful pro-democracy movement in the United States, we must recognize working people's struggles as central to stopping authoritarianism, not separate from it.
I'm the founding executive director of Organized Power In Numbers (OPIN). Before that, I helped lead the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and organized car wash workers in Los Angeles. Lofty speeches about democratic norms don't move working people. Winning does. Fighting for power at work, increasing the minimum wage, lowering utility bills, and providing free healthcare are the same as fighting for democracy.
Our hope for defending democracy is in a movement of the multiracial working class that wins material gains and builds solidarity across race, industry, and immigration status.
Signing a union card is often where working people who have been systematically disenfranchised first experience democratic power. They vote on contracts, elect leaders, and make collective decisions. Winning stable schedules, workplace protections against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, or living wages teaches people that power doesn't only belong to employers and landlords. It can belong to them.
In LA, I helped organize car wash workers, mostly undocumented. No overtime, no breaks, and bosses stole wages constantly. At one shop, the owner refused to let workers use the bathroom, telling them to urinate in a drainage grate instead.
After years of organizing, hundreds of car wash workers won a union contract with bathroom breaks and better wages. They built a network where workers understood their rights. When one shop faced retaliation, workers from other sites showed up.
However, not all workplace organizing automatically builds that larger sense of power. Some unions negotiate good contracts and go quiet when ICE raids their members' neighborhoods, when states close polling places, or when Black women lose 319,000 jobs in the public and private sectors. Focusing only on workplace interests without connecting to the bigger fight against authoritarianism leaves those union members isolated and feeling powerless.
When President Donald Trump tells workers they’re poorer because immigrants took their jobs and no bold labor movement responds, the resentment goes toward scapegoats instead of the billionaires responsible. That’s how authoritarianism grows.
To win against fascism, candidates, campaigns, and movements will have to connect with and run on the agendas that matter to working people.
At OPIN, we've reached more than 27 million poor and working-class people in the Sunbelt over the last six years. Through thousands of organizing conversations, the common thread was that housing costs, groceries, and utility bills keep them up at night. We organize our campaigns around what workers need: clear pathways to dignified jobs and stronger communities, not lectures about civic duty.
That’s not just good organizing strategy. History shows that authoritarianism is stopped when labor and democracy are bound together. Our hope for defending democracy is in a movement of the multiracial working class that wins material gains and builds solidarity across race, industry, and immigration status.
Countering the power of bosses and landlords builds a base of people who won’t accept it from the White House either.
That’s the force that can beat fascism. And it’s the same force that showed up on March 28 for No Kings 3.
Now we need those movements to merge, for more of us to move, to take risks collectively, for all of our well-being.
Labor can’t advance while ignoring the assault on democracy. And the pro-democracy movement can’t ask working people to defend abstract principles while they’re still fighting for a voice of their own. We need higher wages, stable schedules, and a voice on the job alongside the solidarity and political power to beat authoritarianism.
That’s why labor and community organizations are planning for a day of action on May 1 around taxing the rich, protesting ICE and illegal wars, and expanding democracy, all together. It's the only way to win.
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No Kings, One Planet
Trump has made himself the perfect target for what may well be a growing movement to rebuild humanity itself.
Apr 02, 2026
The glow of the recent No Kings rally still pulsates in my heart. Some 8 million people across the planet took part in over 3,000 separate events—people carrying signs that said things like “Power of Love, not Love of Power,” and “Jesus was a refugee,” and, well... “Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS” and “Grab ’em by the midterms.”
Credit to President Donald Trump. He wages his wars and struts through life with so much arrogant swagger—so much indifference to politically correct propaganda—that he has made himself the perfect target for what may well be a growing movement to rebuild humanity itself. Oh God, I hope this is the case! Trump is the fool, the bellicose idiot of the moment—in partnership, of course, with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu—but they’re only the current faces of the trek to hell and nonexistence we’ve been on for a while.
No Kings is bigger than “no kings.” It’s more than just a movement to reclaim the democracy we used to have (back in the days of George W. Bush, for instance). Yes, it’s a movement in opposition to actions of the Trump administration: the pointless war in Iran and the global economic chaos it has created; the war on immigrants; the invasion, especially of blue cities, by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Gestapo; and, no doubt, people’s ongoing shock and outrage over the Epstein files and the sexual abuse of young girls.
“But voicing opposition is one thing,” as a recent piece in The Christian Science Monitor put it. “Turning it into action is another. The long history of American protests, dating back to the original Boston Tea Party in 1773, shows that not all mass movements produce tangible or lasting results.”
So on Saturday I knew that we marched with open souls. We felt the wrong that’s underway, perpetrated by our country, and turned that wrong, as best we could, into hope. Into love.
And tangible, lasting results are definitely what the participants want: what we want. And it’s crucial we don’t let this movement go, this movement emerging from “a broad progressive coalition,” according to the article, “with supporters across the country. No Kings organizers include labor unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union; veterans organizations, such as Common Defense; environmental groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters; and civil rights groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union.”
As I pushed my wheeled walker through the streets of Appleton last Saturday, feeling an urgent connection with the thousands of people present, I wanted to swaddle the moment in my arms. I knew it was bigger than Donald Trump. I felt like we were crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge—stepping into, and beyond, humanity’s hatred of itself. We were marching not simply for No Kings but for One Planet.
Could this be the civil rights movement rebirthing itself? This movement, of the ’50s and ’60s, wasn’t just about the nation’s great wrongs—the racism, the segregation, the enormous lie that some people are less than human. It pushed against the hatred that had been structured into law and turned into national certainty. The civil rights movement pushed us toward a connected world. It opened the nation’s eyes... and soul.
So on Saturday I knew that we marched with open souls. We felt the wrong that’s underway, perpetrated by our country, and turned that wrong, as best we could, into hope. Into love. Love for the children our bombs have murdered. Love for the families ICE has torn apart. Love for the lost refugees whisked to concentration camps.
This is One Planet! We know it on the streets. We will not stop marching until it is known in the halls of Congress. Until it is known in the White House.
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Building Beyond 'No Kings'
Why there is cause for both celebration and concern.
Mar 31, 2026
It’s easy to both celebrate and criticize the “No Kings” marches—and perhaps some of both is warranted.
The latest “No Kings” march in San Francisco, like others, featured a broad and diverse forest of protest signs spanning from moderately liberal to strongly left/progressive. There were American flags (many appropriately upside-down), copies of the Constitution, basic urges to rescue democracy and the vote; there were signs against Trump’s murderous and illegal war on Iran; signs for Palestinian rights and freedom; signs denouncing oligarchy and the billionaire class; and a wide array of others (one of my personal favorites from a friend’s octogenarian mom read, “I have dementia and even I know better.”)
It was inspiring to be among tens of thousands locally and more than eight million nationwide. When you get a record eight million people into the streets protesting fascism, war, and bigotry (and a host of other concerns), that’s something to celebrate. It’s no minor feat to mobilize so many millions nationwide to spend hours of their weekend marching and chanting for our rights and our future.
Before we get to the criticism and growing calls for change within this change movement, it’s important to honor the accomplishment of providing this avenue for mass dissent. “No Kings” and related movements have created a valuable space for public uprising and expression, a space that encourages and could enable other forms of dissent, disruption, and organizing.
I’ve been to every “No Kings” and dozens of other protests and marches against this insane, viciously destructive administration. It has been both inspiring and at times frustrating. It is remarkable we have assembled so many millions so quickly against Trump and his horrendous, harmful policies. It’s also true that the messages have been diffuse and diverse, lacking in concrete demands or impact. Weekend marches every few months have limited effect, but they’ve been an important start that we should build on now.
If we’re going to build a meaningful and lasting resistance movement that creates real impact and change, we need both the broader masses of liberals and moderates and the strong, sharp voices of progressives and the left.
“No Kings” and affiliated groups are a broad and loose yet growing coalition of liberals, moderates, some Republicans and former Trump supporters, as well as more progressive and left-wing activists. This coalition of dissent is united in at least a few things: we are against Trump and his assaults on democracy, the Constitution, government for the people, as well as on immigrants and core human values like diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Promisingly, evolving research shows that a strong and growing majority of “No Kings” protesters are being organized through a protest infrastructure and are motivated most by outrage at Trump’s illegal, murderous war on Iran, as well as by attacks on immigrants and protesters.
At the same time, it is problematic and concerning when “No Kings” features top Democrats in Congress who receive huge amounts of AIPAC funding and who have offered meager, milk toast resistance to Trump and who have helped uphold Israel’s genocidal war crimes and annihilation of Gaza. It is a very real problem and limitation for a movement to provide a platform for (and to align closely with) Democrats who, other than some basic opposition to Trump, have maintained this country’s murderous and deeply inequitable status quo. As some have pointed out, most “No Kings” protests featured little mention of the war on Iran or the US-aided Israeli annihilation of Gaza.
Decisions like that have led many lefties to diss and dismiss “No Kings” in ways that are both partly accurate and also simplistic and counterproductive. Some have repudiated “No Kings” as merely an AIPAC-run front group for the mainstream Democratic Party; others have announced they’re not attending because they believe “No Kings” is mostly a bunch of flag-toting liberals and moderates who aren’t allies with long-term left movements (and they are at least partly right). These are old, old divisions and wounds, nothing new. But if we’re going to build a meaningful and lasting resistance movement that creates real impact and change, we need both the broader masses of liberals and moderates and the strong, sharp voices of progressives and the left.
Why? Because, as an extra-astute op-ed in the New York Times explained, our troubles are not just about Trump—they are about this country as well. While we need a massive “big tent” resistance against this horrendous man and moment, we also need a sustained and independent mass movement against America’s bipartisan wars, its bipartisan military-industrial complex, its bipartisan marriage to corporate power and interests. As nightmarish as things are now, they sure weren’t “great” under Biden or previous Democratic administrations—they just weren’t as disastrously awful, in most ways. While Trump is enabling Israel’s sickening assaults on Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere, Biden did that as well.
This moment requires more both/and thinking and strategy. We need both the huge, unifying if diffuse mass protests and more concrete, impactful actions, whether huge or not. We need both a big Democratic victory in the midterms and a strong resistance movement that is independent of the party. We need to both celebrate and critique (and change) the “No Kings” rallies.
There is room and reason for both support and criticism of “No Kings.” The important thing is to be engaged and constructive. Build up, don't tear down. Come out and support the massive marches even if you have criticisms and frustrations. Create alternative actions, work with any allies you can, and build those up. Sneering and sniping from the sidelines isn’t useful. It’s also not helpful if we merely defend “No Kings” against that criticism. We must be a part of making this movement and moment all it needs to be.
If we are serious about stopping Trump’s atrocious policies, we must grow not only in numbers but in our focus and strategy.
As a writer and activist with more than 40 years of experience in the streets, I urge liberals and leftists to move through these age-old disputes and seek common ground wherever and whenever possible. We will often continue to disagree. I want to see more liberals at antiwar and pro-Palestine protests and more radical actions. I want more liberals to see that our real common enemy is the corporate neoliberal establishment; the military-industrial “forever war” complex; this country’s deep racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia; and America’s grotesque inequality and deprivations amid insane private wealth. Liberals and lefties will never agree on everything and won’t always support the same candidates or causes; but we must collaborate and coalesce to every extent possible.
As a writer and activist on the left who has participated in and analyzed movements for decades, I think it’s time for a significant shift in the “No Kings” movement, toward greater political independence and separation from the Democratic Party. Yes, many if not most of us will work hard to help Democrats win the midterms—but the movement must be separate if it is to grow and have greater impact. We can’t have a resistance movement closely allied with a party that, as a whole (with some notable exceptions), enables genocidal war crimes and forever wars.
If we are serious about stopping Trump’s atrocious policies, we must grow not only in numbers but in our focus and strategy. Weekend marches every few months are not nearly enough. “No Kings” has created a vast platform and momentum—the question is, what do we do with it now, and how do we create concrete, meaningful change? How do these movements directly confront and challenge power?
One promising answer is the upcoming May Day “general strike” actions, including mass work stoppages and boycotts. As Common Dreams reported, Indivisible and other groups are supporting this more confrontational and potentially impactful effort. A similar general strike by Minnesota activists in January following ICE’s murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti has provided an inspiring model for upcoming actions.
In the months and years ahead, there will be challenging ongoing questions about where this resistance movement puts its dollars and energy; about people’s varying willingness and abilities to put their time, energies, and bodies on the line against intensifying fascism and war; and about the need to build “big tent” mass movement unity and/or (I emphatically say “and”) more targeted and consequential actions to stop or slow Trump’s machinery of death and destruction.
Much like the divisions around the Democratic Party between centrists, liberals, and progressives, these divides and questions in the resistance will persist and, to some extent, may never get fully resolved. In this critical moment, having amassed eight million in the streets, we have an opportunity, in fact an obligation, to forge new alliances, and work with and beyond our differences—both to help stop today’s Trumpian “MAGA” insanities and to create meaningful long-term change toward peace, justice, and greater equality, no matter who wins the next two elections. I’ll be here for it all, and hope you will, too.
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