No Kings 2: Thousands Pack Uptown to Oppose Trump Administration

No Kings returned to Uptown on Saturday, drawing a crowd of more than 7,000 people to First Ward Park for a rally and march through Uptown. 

Like the inaugural No Kings event in the same park on June 14, which drew an estimated crowd of 5,000, No Kings 2 featured speakers calling out the authoritarian, corrupt and cruel actions of the second Donald Trump administration and supporters of the president’s MAGA movement.

The protest was organized by Indivisible CLT and seven progressive grassroots organizations: Carolina Migrant Network, Center for Common Ground NC, Common Cause NC, Democracy NC, Healthcare Justice NC, Human Rights Campaign and NC Poor People’s Campaign.

The event was one of several No Kings protests held across the greater Charlotte area, including demonstrations in Concord, Cornelius, Lake Norman, Belmont, Fort Mill, Rock Hill, Indian Land, Waxhaw and Monroe. These protests joined events in more than 2,700 towns and cities across all 50 US states.

Organizers said nearly 7 million people attended No Kings rallies across the country, which would make it the largest single-day nationwide protest in US history.

Just over a week before the nationwide rallies, US House Speaker Mike Johnson called No Kings a “Hate America rally.” In rebuttal, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called No Kings “as American as motherhood, baseball and apple pie,” adding that Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 was the real “Hate America rally.”

“‘NO KINGS’ is more than just a slogan; it is the foundation our nation was built upon,” the national No Kings organization’s website states. “Born in the streets, shouted by millions, carried on posters and chants, it echoes from city blocks to rural town squares, uniting people across this country to fight dictatorship together.”

Speakers say democracy is under attack, offer hope  

At the rally preceding the march, Lincoln Project cofounder Reed Galen, Charlotte attorney Lou Lesesne, Rev. Dr. Janet Garner-Mullins, local organizer and advocate Cameron Pruette, and attorney Sharon Dove took to the park’s stage. 

All decried Trump’s authoritarian power grabs, including masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents terrorizing communities and detaining people without warrants, the push to overturn voting rights and rig elections through gerrymandering, and the gutting of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, putting health care beyond the reach of countless Americans.

Dove illustrated the administration’s racism and hatred by recounting her experience with a client who is legally seeking asylum in the US.

“[She asked me] what will happen if the immigration court denies her asylum application? I had to tell her that she and her 2-year-old daughter will be detained and deported,” Dove said. “One way immigrants in the past have avoided detention is by dropping their asylum claims and agreeing to voluntary departure, but … this administration is so cruel that it is not agreeing to voluntary departure. For this administration, nothing is more important than the visual of rounding up as many immigrants as possible.”

Lesesne addressed Trump and the Republicans’ assault on Americans’ voting rights. Noting that Trump’s Justice Department was arguing before the US Supreme Court that the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional because it discriminates against white people, Lesesne warned that the Supreme Court was likely to agree with the Justice Department. 

The result would be the loss of up to 12 democratic seats in Congress and the mass disenfranchisement of Black voters. Furthermore, Lesesne said, the Republican leadership in North Carolina’s General Assembly is going to re-gerrymander NC’s already gerrymandered voting map to give Republicans another seat in Congress.

Garner-Mullins noted that 16 million Americans are due to lose their health insurance because premium tax credits are vanishing due to provisions in Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which became law on July 4. Democrats are refusing to fund the US government until those tax credits are reinstated. 

She suggested that the remedy to her stark assessment of the state of American health care is determination, defiance and adopting a more humane system.

“We refuse to accept the cruelty of our health care system that treats survival like luxury,” Garner-Mullins said in a fiery speech.

“We don’t need more band aids on bullet wounds,” she continued. “Every year, 17,000 lives are lost, not to illness, but to policy, to profit, to silence. That’s not a broken system. It’s a system working exactly the way it was designed, to serve the few and forsake the many. We know another way. Every other wealthy nation has chosen it, and it’s called universal health care.”

In his remarks, Pruette said citizens must be willing to do more than vote.

“In the richest nation in the history of the world, our government is not providing health care,” Pruette said. “It is not strengthening schools, it is not keeping us safe. It is using fascist tools to villainize homeless people, cut our health care and advance white supremacy. There’s no cavalry coming to save us. It must be us, the people, who take [the] country back.”

Pruette shouted out questions: “Who will stand up to would-be tyrants? … Who will show up when ICE is on our streets?”

The crowd responded to each with the cry, “We the people!”

Post-rally comments precede a peaceful march

Backstage after the rally, Pruette expounded on his message.

“If we’re going to call [the Trump administration’s actions] fascism, we need to treat it like it is fascism,” he told Queen City Nerve. “If we’re in a fascist moment, we have to use anti-fascist tactics.” 

Pruette noted that voting, rallying and marching are all worthy actions, but people must also be willing to do more, including volunteering for organizations like Carolina Migrant Network and becoming an ICE verifier who tracks ICE activity and reports back to communities to warn residents.

“This gathering is important so that people will see that we, in Charlotte, North Carolina, will not sit back quietly,” Garner-Mullins said. “We want [protesters] to come away from this march, energized and impacted, but [also] knowing in their hearts and minds that [being] unified will be the best thing to do.”   

The march that followed the rally traced a route identical to June’s No Kings event. Along the route, a bright orange Trump impersonator dressed as would-be emperor Julius Caesar was greeting marchers. A group of drummers encouraged the protesters while other onlookers played John Lennon’s “Power to the People” over loudspeakers.

During the rally and throughout the march, demonstrators held signs reading, “Hate Won’t Make America Great,” “Stop Truth Decay,” “Release the Epstein Files” and more. One protester dressed as a commode, sported a sign that said “Trump: So Full of Shit Toilets are Jealous.”  Others wore colorful costumes, dressed as bees, bunnies, dinosaurs and frogs.

Sumer Roberts, dressed as a friendly inflatable Tyrannosaurus, said her costume choice was inspired by the Portland, Oregon protesters who dress up as frogs and dance to mock ICE agents.

“I saw Portland and was like, ‘They’re going to paint this as violent no matter what we do, so [why not make them] try to paint an inflatable costume as violent. So, now it’s radical-left to wear inflatable costumes?” 

William Jacobus, a retired professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, also used humor to ridicule Trump, particularly his apparent subservience to Russia, by reciting a “MAGA-approved” version of The Pledge of Allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the United Colonies of Russia/ And to the autocracy for which it stands/ One nation, under Putin/ With liberty and justice for no one.”

“I know what it’s like to live in Russia,” said Jacobus, who resided there when he participated in a health exchange between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Medical Research Center for Cardiology in Moscow.

“The [Russian] people are great,” Jacobus said. “It’s the government that’s awful. I think we can say that about the current situation [here] right now. Everybody’s got to stand up to [Trump]. He’s a threat to this country and our way of life.”

Jacobus said that the next step to restore democracy must be a nationwide strike.

“If this continues, what we’ll have to do is have a national boycott,” he said. “If we don’t spend any money except on food for three months, the corporations are going to get off their asses and start doing something. We the people still have the power.”

Police presence, including officers on bike, foot and in vehicles, was more pronounced than the similar No Kings event four months ago.  

CMPD reported no arrests or incidents during Saturday’s peaceful event, in contrast to the June protest, when tensions between police and protesters who stuck around after the march was over escalated to the point that officers pepper-sprayed the protesters. 

In that incident, two people were arrested and charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer, and another person was sent to the hospital to be treated for chemical exposure. Prosecutors have dropped the charges against one of the protesters arrested in June while the other case is still awaiting resolution.