Over 250 Photos From Around the Nation and the World From the Historic “No Kings Day” Protests
Almost no one showed up to Donald Trump’s surprisingly timid, depressing, and generally lackluster birthday party in Washington, but protests against him were bursting at the seams across the globe.
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Introduction
The Minutemen of the American Revolution had the Gadsden Flag. The Americans of the Donald Trump era—who like their forebears are doing all they can to achieve a lasting democracy in America, now have the No Kings Flag.
No Kings Day may well go down in history—and should arguably be celebrated in the future on every June 14, given that that’s Donald Trump’s birthday… and his birthday is a day that should be obliterated from America’s collective memory if at all possible.
While June and July already have several holidays, from Juneteenth to July 4, at least until Trump is gone from American life by peaceful, legal means it seems No Kings Day is worth its own celebration, as it’s less a remembrance of the past than a promise regarding America’s future. There’ll be no kings in America but the American people.
With all this in mind, I’ll say that what follows may be my favorite piece of curatorial journalism of all those I’ve ever done. It’s certainly the first one ever to actually make me happy.
I decided to try to find crowd photos of as many of the over 2,000 No Kings Protests as possible, not just the ones held in the U.S. but those held around the world on June 14, 2025.
That’s right: the photos below aren’t just from America but all over the globe. It’s hard to articulate what a historic moment No Kings Day was, but saying that it was a global celebration is probably a good start.
Compiling these photographs turned out to be a massive undertaking. For all that Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post hilariously claimed that only “thousands” showed up to the thousands of No Kings protests, it was, of course, millions. And that means that there were in fact so many protests that trying to find photographic evidence of them all is an impossibility. So my goal here was to at least find hundreds of protests that in total would at a minimum show hundreds of thousands of anti-Trump protesters.
I hope readers will understand why the repository below is only for Proof subscribers: while I of course only used photographs that had been made public, I certainly don’t want to risk any of the MAGAs who spent No Kings Day watching the saddest parade in American history (the birthday bash that Donald Trump threw for himself at the American taxpayer’s expense) deciding to harass any of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who appear along with their hometowns in the photographs below.
On the subject of The Saddest Parade in History, it’s the one that happened in D.C. as the nation was protesting Trump’s openly fascist agenda. Trump aimed to celebrate his birthday (a birthday that makes him about the age Joe Biden was when Mr. Trump began saying Biden was too old to be President of the United States) by spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and causing tens of millions in damage to Washington’s roads on a parade that was short in every way imaginable. It was short timewise and it was short in terms of its route, which was only 1,600 meters.
It was also lackluster in ways even I couldn’t have imagined beforehand. On Twitter and Bluesky I compiled some of the chatroom comments that were made during the event in (of all places) a conservative chatroom: the online site of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. You’ll truly be stunned at how universally Trump’s parade was panned.
But after all, why not? Below you can see a photo from the extremely scattershot and extremely slow-moving parade whose only intention, apparently, was to force soldiers to dress up in awkward period costumes for a would-be dictator. Certainly, the crowd was sparse (see image below) and the event itself so sluggish that many online were seen to wonder—in all earnestness—whether the same few tanks were being driven around the block several times to make the whole event seem more robust than it was.
As for the music? It wasn’t music at all but muzak—lyric-free almost-covers of well-known hits that had been carefully calibrated not to provoke civil lawsuits. Picture lots of unremarkable guitar solos. In fact, the music was so horrid that many online wondered if much of the $45 million Trump had demanded for his parade had instead been pocketed by him and/or his pals. It certainly wasn’t spent on any licensing fees.
Yes, the structure at the background of the bottom photo is the Presidential Viewing Stand; so in looking at the photo you are, in fact, looking at the very thickest part of the paltry crowd at Trump’s birthday bash. Even as his fans crowed online that the claimed attendance (apparently a White House-provided figure) was 200,000—if past is precedent, the White House was simply using a jazzed-up version of the number of meaningless digital RSVPs as an attendance quote—observers, including this author, suspect that the total number of attendees was likely in the thousands only. (And if this is to be believed, which is a mystery as yet unsolved, some of those in attendance may have been paid as seat-fillers; certainly, Donald Trump loves to secretly do what he has long accused his political opponents of doing, and he continues to falsely say that Democrats pay protesters when in fact he’s the only U.S. politician who has been caught doing so in recent years.)
And it’s not just me saying all this. Trump’s parade has been panned, and to a possibly historic degree. Amidst a tide of public criticism, there are those who genuinely feel that a single epic fail by the President of the United States—with respect to a televised pageant, no less, the sort of thing that’s supposed to be his forte—could actually (not joking) hurt America’s standing in the world. Yes, the parade was that putrid.
Even Trump’s son Barron wanted nothing at all to do with his dad’s birthday bash.
And apparently few D.C. Republicans wanted to go. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R-FL) was even, hilariously, caught yawning as one of the parade’s least impressive vehicles went by.
By contrast, as someone born in 1976 I think I can safely say that I’ve never seen so many large, enthusiastic, diverse, festive, and truly dynamic protests across America as we saw on No Kings Day. And there were virtually no reports of property damage or arrests, despite some sinister far-right LEO folks seemingly hoping there would be.
Sidebar: Almost All the No Kings Day Violence Was Far-Right Violence
Thankfully, there was almost no violence anywhere on No Kings Day.
But what violence there was came from Trump supporters—the opposite phenomenon, of course, from what these very same people had assured themselves, one another, far-right media, and the nation at large was going to be the case. It was another example of the MAGA mantra that reads as follows (say it with me, now): “Every accusation is a confession.”
In Tennessee, a right-winger was arrested and charged after brandishing a gun at No Kings Day protesters. In Utah, a man was accidentally shot and killed when security personnel were forced to open fire at a right-winger clearly lunging for a rifle to shoot protesters with. In California, security footage showed a right-winger attacking a protester who had an “8647” sign (a term that means no more than firing someone from a job or removing them from a role) and ripping the said sign up; the footage quickly went viral. In Florida, someone in The Villages coordinated an assault on protesters with high-velocity water (yes, odd as it may seem, any sort of water cannon, even a sprinkler system, constitutes an assault and is at least distantly reminiscent of the brutalities of the Civil Rights Era). In Virginia, a right-wing man intentionally drove his SUV into the crowd in an apparent attempt to reproduce the 2017 Unite the Right Rally murder and attempted murders. And the exact same thing happened in Riverside, California, resulting in a woman being in a coma. In another viral video, a far-right-wing driver “rolled coal”—sprayed heavy black exhaust from his pick-up truck—on a long line of unsuspecting No Kings Day protesters from a distance of a few feet. That too is a crime (one the perpetrator was so proud of that he had a friend in a trailing vehicle film it so it could be uploaded and enjoyed by their fellow MAGAs).
{Update: The incident, which occurred in Ontario, California, resulted in the unhinged man—who, quite concerningly, also had a firearm in his truck—getting arrested for Reckless Driving. It turns out that he made so many passes of the protesters to spray them with toxic exhaust that the local police had ample time to apprehend and arrest him and impound his vehicle.}
And of course there’s the now-confirmed Minnesota right-winger who posed as a police officer in order to assassinate a Democratic politician and their spouse and nearly kill another Democratic politician and their spouse. The man had No Kings Day flyers in his car and left behind a hit-list that confirmed he was looking to kill people who supported the panoply of policy items linked to No Kings Day and the U.S. left.
{Update: The suspected assassin, Vance Boelter, has thankfully been arrested in Minnesota.}
As discussed more in the Coda to this report—see infra—major-media coverage of No Kings Day has been surprisingly paltry on the day after it. Troublingly, one of the key impacts of this has been to erase so much of the far-right terrorism that intermittently marred an otherwise peaceful day.
Here’s one more shot of Trump’s micro-sized “parade,” just for good measure. Keep the image below in mind as you read the rest of this lengthy photojournalistic report.
And just to cleanse your palate, now, here’s a small sample of my favorite No Kings Day photographs (with the full photo archive below the subscriber fold a bit further down):
Pittsburgh, PA
Boise, ID
Paris, France
Ocean Beach (San Francisco), CA
St. Paul, MN
Cincinnati, OH
St. Louis, MO
Palm Springs, CA
As great as these photographs are, most of my favorites remain below the fold (see the beginning of the report proper). There are over two hundred more photographs infra, including ones from abroad, ones with celebrities, ones from places you would never expect an anti-Trump crowd of any kind to form, ones with unusual people and some genuinely hilarious signs… it’s truly a photo album the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
One caveat: almost all of these protests are even bigger than they appear in the photos. For many of the still images below, I’ve also seen the video versions, and they pan the crowd in a way that underscores the incapacity of any one photograph to capture the whole of an event. But even so, the size of the part(s) we’re able to see are shocking.
I sincerely hope you’ll find the hundreds of photographs below as jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring as I do. They sent a clear message that resonates, I think, deep within the heart of every American who feels anxiety but also resolve in the face of tyranny: you’re not alone.
{Note: Besides the obviously fun thing to do with the photographs below—look at the signs, as some of them are hilarious, and many location-specific—another fun game you can play with these photos is to try to spot the celebrities. Some are hard to find, but there are plenty there. They’re of course no more important than anyone else at these protests, but that’s sort of the point: the way even well-known Americans just blended into larger crowds on No Kings Day is a testament to the fact that we really are one people, the majority of us in open opposition to what’s happening in the Trump administration and D.C. If you’re looking for a particular protest, below, simply press “Ctrl+F” and type the town or city you want to see into the search box. Please note that the photos are in random order; there is no intended message or specific logic in the order towns and cities below appear in. Some of the larger protests do have more photographs of them, but this is simply because more high-quality photos are readily available.}
Over 250 No Kings Day Protests Photographs
So without further ado, here’s a full tour of No Kings Day, from America to Europe and beyond: