From Tom Paine in 1776 to Main Street in 2025: No Kings!

Americans have a right to assemble and a right to petition for the redress of grievances. They will use those rights this weekend to resist Trumpism.

A statue of Thomas Paine in Paris.

(Joe Sohm / Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Across the United States on Saturday—from Monument Square in Concord, Massachusetts, to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; from the Town Square in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Travis Park near the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas; from 26 miles above the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska, to La Fortaleza in San Juan, Puerto Rico; from the Fergus County Courthouse on Main Street in Lewistown, Montana (population: 5,952), to City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, California (population: 3,899,449)—millions of Americans will parade and picket, rally and peacefully protest as part of the nationwide No Kings! mobilization against the abuses of power perpetrated by President Trump and his increasingly lawless administration.

An estimated 1,800 demonstrations will take place on what organizers with the 50901 movement, Indivisible, and other groups believe will be one of the biggest and boldest days of dissent in American history.

The No Kings! message resonates deep in the heart of our national identity, extending from some of the oldest understandings of the American experiment. At its best, that experiment has always been about more than the rejection of a single monarch: England’s King George III. It’s been about standing up to any ruler who crowns himself, in the words of Tom Paine, as “the principle ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners, or pre-eminence in subtilty obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.”

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While Trump will mount a princely display of his own in Washington on Saturday, with a military parade on what happens to be his 79th birthday, the No Kings! movement says: “On June 14th, we’re showing up everywhere he isn’t—to say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.”

While “President Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday—a spectacle meant to look like strength,” the No Kings! mobilization argues, “Real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else.”

To that end, No Kings! marchers plan to tell Trump and the president’s allies, “We’re not gathering to feed his ego. We’re building a movement that leaves him behind…a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism—and show the world what democracy really looks like.”

One of the largest of the No Kings rallies is expected to begin in Philadelphia’s Love Park, where patriots plan to gather just blocks from the hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and not far from the historical marker that recalls, “At his print shop here, Robert Bell published the first edition of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet in January 1776. Arguing for a republican form of government under a written constitution, it played a key role in rallying American support for independence.”

Just as Paine, the immigrant pamphleteer who called on Americans to break the authoritarian bonds of the British Empire, rejected the actual monarchs of his time, so the No Kings movement rejects a monarchically inclined president and a robber-baron Congress that is bent on taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

America’s 21st-century Tories govern with such swashbuckling disregard for the rule of law and the rights of the great mass of Americans that it is easy to be discouraged. But Paine and his contemporaries had plenty to fret about in 1776, when they took on the most powerful man, the most intimidating military, and the most overarching empire on the planet.

When the rebellious colonials prevailed, they established a constitutional framework that established peaceful yet powerful tools for averting an American monarchy.

Congress was given the power to check and balance presidents. Courts were charged with applying the rule of law and preventing presidents from becoming “elected dictators.” And, when Congress and the courts were too slow or too cowardly to step up, the people were afforded a right to peacefully assemble and petition for the redress of grievances.

Seizing their own power, workers and civil rights campaigners found ways to expand the scope of American democracy and extend its promise to those who were once disenfranchised by the wealthy white elites that, after the Revolution, often clashed with Paine and his allies. Proud American activists would eventually establish a multiracial and multiethnic heritage of nonviolent civil disobedience that has challenged abuses of power by economic and political oligarchs with considerable frequency—and considerable success.

Today, that heritage informs No Kings! campaigning, as does the legacy of Paine’s writing, which forged a faith that visionary and progressive Americans can accomplish anything when they reject the petty preachments of elites, and choose with their voices and ballots to become their own governors.

Yes, of course, the pursuit of liberty was frightening—especially when it drew the mad wrath of King George III. But “like all other steps which we have already passed over,” Paine explained, affronting the king and the empire “will in a little time become familiar and agreeable: and until an independence is declared, the continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with thoughts of its necessity.”

Times, and circumstances, change. This is an unsettled and unsettling moment, when a president has overruled the governor of the nation’s most populous state and ordered National Guard members and Marines onto the streets of a major city; and when a United States senator, California Democrat Alex Padilla, was manhandled, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for trying to ask a government official—in this case, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—a legitimate and necessary question. But the call to resist wrongheaded rulers, who assume the trappings of illicit and unaccountable monarchy, remains constant.

Paine anticipated Trump when he warned: “Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”

It was in that knowledge that Thomas Paine called America into being with the cry: “O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!”

Or, to put it in another way, one that will echo across the country this weekend: “No Kings!”

John Nichols

John Nichols is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.