Throngs of peaceful protesters were expected to take to Bay Area streets on Saturday as part of nationwide “No Kings” rallies seeking to cast President Donald Trump as an authoritarian ruler.
In the Bay Area, Democratic-aligned groups had planned about 50 protests for Saturday afternoon in San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Walnut Creek, Hayward, Pittsburg and a slew of other cities, according to the event’s website. Organizers include local chapters of the Democratic activist group Indivisible, the SEIU labor union, 50501 and a constellation of unions and progressive groups.
“The president thinks his rule is absolute,” web pages for the protests read. “But in America, we don’t have kings, and we won’t back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty.”
Trump has pushed back against his characterization as a king. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican ally of the president, has blasted the marches as un-American and said Democratic lawmakers in Washington, D.C., are seeking to drag out the ongoing partial shutdown of the federal government.
That rhetoric didn’t appear to give protesters pause on Saturday. Demonstrators packed places like New York City’s Times Square, the historic Boston Commons, Chicago’s Grant Park, Washington, D.C., and hundreds of smaller public spaces. They rallied with signs like “Nothing is more patriotic than protesting” or “Resist Fascism,” and in many places it looked more like a street party. There were marching bands, a huge banner with the U.S. Constitution’s “We The People,” preamble that people could sign, and protesters in frog costumes, which have emerged as a sign of resistance in Portland, Oregon.
In Oakland, protesters were slated to gather at Wilma Chan Park in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood at 11:30 a.m. and march to Lake Merritt. Organizers expected crowd sizes to surpass those of the “No Kings” rallies in mid-June, when 10,000 protesters showed up. Activists in San Jose planned to congregate at N. 2nd Street and E. Saint James Street in the city’s downtown at noon. More than 12,000 people protested there in June, according to organizers.
All told, more than 140,000 attended the mid-June anti-Trump protests in the Bay Area. The protests were largely peaceful, and organizers said ahead of Saturday’s protests they are committed to nonviolence.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.