{"id":10084,"date":"2025-10-20T23:09:31","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T23:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/10084\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T23:09:31","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T23:09:31","slug":"thousands-march-in-manhattan-for-no-kings-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/10084\/","title":{"rendered":"Thousands march in Manhattan for No Kings Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over 100,000 people took to the streets of New York City with signs, flags, and costumes to participate in the nationwide \u2018No Kings\u2019 protest against the Trump administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Americans gathered across the country to express their anger over President Donald Trump\u2019s deployment of the National Guard to major cities across the United States, and the growing, aggressive ICE arrests around the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Under the flashy and ever-changing billboards advertising shows and clothing brands, protesters marched downtown holding homemade signs and banners and chanting anthems such as \u2018hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go!\u2019<\/p>\n

Protesters filled Father Duffy Square at 11 a.m., crowding the streets even by Times Square\u2019s standards. For nearly the first hour, people could barely walk forward due to the sheer number of protesters.<\/p>\n

With a slow start, the protest eventually made its way from 7th Avenue and 47th Street to Union Square via Broadway where it eventually ended around 3 p.m.<\/p>\n

\"PersonA demonstrator clad in mime makeup poses during the march on Saturday, Oct. 18th, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n

\"ManA man holds onto a signpost as demonstrators march past on Saturday, Oct. 18th, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n

\u201cThe march doesn\u2019t have a lot of goals, but what it has is a lot of camaraderie and a lot of collaboration, because we all have a similar view on where the country is going, and we need to change that,\u201d protester and Brooklyn native Amy Winn said.<\/p>\n

\"ManA protester leads chants during the march on Saturday, Oct. 18th, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n

The protest follows the first nation-wide No Kings Day, on President Trump\u2019s birthday on June 14.<\/p>\n

\u2018No Kings\u2019<\/a> is a series of peaceful protests against what organizers say is an authoritarian power grab by President Trump. \u201cThis country does not belong to kings, dictators, or tyrants. It belongs to We the People \u2014 the people who care, who show up, and who fight for dignity, a life we can afford, and real opportunity,\u201d their website says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Organizers pointed to the government shutdown, the cuts in healthcare, the shutting down of the Department of Education, the dissolution of environmental protection programs, and the unconstitutional uses of federal power.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re joining with millions of Americans around the country and probably tens of millions of others around the world<\/a> to protest the Trump administration\u2019s policies against immigrants, against people who receive food stamps, cuts in Medicaid, and Medicare. We\u2019re here fighting the restrictions on democracy,\u201d National Co-chairman of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) Joe Sims<\/a> said.<\/p>\n

\"ManA man braces a large sign on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n

\u201cDonald Trump broke collective bargaining rights for 1.2 million workers,\u201d Sims said, \u201cin addition to laying off hundreds of thousands of government workers and firing tens of thousands.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump banned the bargaining rights of multiple agencies on Aug. 28, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the International Trade Administration, and the Patent and Trademark Office within the Department of Commerce.<\/p>\n

\"ProtestAn aid station worker passes out water bottles on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n

Among the many signs and banners was a pirate flag featuring a smiling skull and crossbones wearing a straw hat. The flag comes from the 1,100-episode anime, One Piece, which Gen Z activists have adopted as a symbol of liberation and resistance to oppression and, in America\u2019s case, fascism. It was one of many symbols borrowed from other protests around the world.<\/p>\n

Most recently<\/a>, the One Piece flag was used by Gen Z protesters while overthrowing the government in Madagascar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I decided to take that symbol, put it on the American flag that my family has flown outside my house for the last 25 years, and fly it again out here,\u201d protester JK Larkin said, motioning to the American flag he wore with the pirate face drawn over it.<\/p>\n

\"OlderA couple poses during the march on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n

\"\"A man wearing an inflatable unicorn costume during the march on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Sam Brule<\/p>\n

Protesters also wore costumes \u2014 mainly inflatable sharks and frogs. This stemmed from activists starting \u2018Operation Inflation<\/a>\u2019 in Portland, OR. Protesters wore inflatable animal and cartoon character costumes to protest ICE and, according to their website, \u201chelp deflate (pun intended) the tensions surrounding protests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shannon Kennedy and her fianc\u00e9, [Louie Salvagno], both wearing green frog hats and yielding \u2018frogs against the machine\u2019 signs, came from Connecticut to attend the march.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey feel like [the frogs] can stand up to them, and people are more interested in what the frog has to say than they are what ICE has to say. The frogs represent getting rid of ice and in its place, more frogs,\u201d Kennedy said. \u201cWe want to keep it weird.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winn said the nearly 7 million people<\/a> who gathered across the nation, though different, shared a concern about where the country is going.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe advantage of this [protest] is that it is unifying, and we know that the target of our outrage cares very, very much about quantity, regardless of quality,\u201d Winn said. \u201cHe cares about ratings, he cares about popularity, and this is going to hit him where it hurts, because all of us agree we may not be in perfect alignment, but we\u2019re in perfect alignment against you and your administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AA man holds a decapitated Trump mask that wears Hitler\u2019s mustache. Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n

\"AA couple with a \u201cDEFEND THE CONSTITUTION\u201d sign sits at a restaurant following the march on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n

\"SignsSigns and an American flag lay on the ground at the march on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Photo by Dove Williams<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over 100,000 people took to the streets of New York City with signs, flags, and costumes to participate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,12,3982,63,7300,6986,8353,1069],"class_list":["post-10084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-no-kings","tag-nyc","tag-photos","tag-protest","tag-the-new-school","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}