Yes, there are concrete next steps after No Kings 3

You are being asked to gather your people together and get engaged locally

Apr 01, 2026

The third No Kings Day was a glorious national declaration of dissent. A record-breaking estimated 8 million people turned out across more than 3,300 events, sharing a powerful sense of connection and taking a forceful stand against Trump’s authoritarian rule — and for peace, democracy, and human rights.

There’s another mass event just a month from now, on May 1. More on that further down.

But right now, the big question is: How do you translate the energy of a mass protest into an effective, ongoing political force?

And this time, organizers are being specific about what you need to do next. They are asking you to host a local organizing meeting sometime between now and April 12 and make plans to take action in your community. Here is an excellent, detailed community gathering toolkit.

Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, explained it this way on an organizing call last night:

We talk about the 3.5% of the population that is needed to mobilize to successfully stop dictatorship…. But that figure is not about a single day. It is about getting people into ongoing, sustained civic engagement everywhere in the country. That is what actually defeats dictators….
No action alone is going to fix things, but together it all creates that tapestry of defiance that is necessary and builds the muscles we are going to draw on as we face challenges ahead….
So our top ask for you tonight is a little more complicated than usual, because there is no one simple website to go to or single action to take. This is not about building a national email list or a simple digital action. It is about the work of getting into a relationship and information in real life. Our ask is that sometime in the next couple of weeks, you get into a room with people in your community to talk about what you can do together, to be part of that tapestry of defiance and to build towards that 3.5%.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an activist who emceed the call for No Kings, said:

If you boil it down, our ask for you tonight is to go forth and gather with your people. My hope is that how you define your people is expansive in this moment. I want you to talk with them. I want you to listen to them, and I want you to collectively develop what’s next. Organizing is bringing people together across their differences to be able to take collective action together. I want you to be doing what makes the most sense in your community.

The No Kings “What’s Next?” web page outlines four forms of action:

Build power locally: grow sustained organizing in your community
Protect our neighbors: stand up to ICE abuses and threats
Escalate and innovate: strengthen nonviolent and lawful actions that refuse business as usual
Defend our elections: protect the vote and enforce the results

Still not concrete enough for you? I feel you. That’s why I loved it when Henderson riffed on some specific possible group activities:

You can build mutual aid action infrastructure, whether it’s a backpack and school supply drive with your local teachers union or a hot meal train for immigrant communities. Whether it’s building a community food market… or maybe it’s a parent swap for childcare …
You could ask neighbors to join a community WhatsApp or Signal group chat to be able to communicate urgent alerts, community support needs, and foster direct connections between community members.
You could participate and spread the word about Ice Watch trainings….
You can get down with warehouse fights. Check out Project Saltbox and the Communities Not Cages toolkit….
You can be hosting Fourth Amendment workplace drives to prepare staff for potential ICE raids. You could be opposing efforts to roll back rights and protections for trans people… supporting the visibility effort, [and] keeping them safe.
You could join local Election Protection Coalition efforts. You could rock with the Freedom Trainers like I do and get trained in noncooperation. Did you know that there are 300 -- at least 300 -- nonviolent tactics that you could be taking to slow down and stop this authoritarian threat in a neighborhood that you are in?

So there’s your to-do list!

The No Kings 3 Experience

Spend some time with these wonderful photo galleries of No Kings 3 from the Associated Press and Getty Images, and as collected by The Atlantic. Reuters’s photo gallery comprises of 47 signs.

Getty also has some great videos. This CNN video focuses on inflatables and other strong visual elements:

Here’s video of Bruce Springsteen, one of the headliners of the No Kings flagship event in the Twin Cities, performing his protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis.” He had a few words to say before he sang:

This reactionary nightmare and these invasions of American cities will not stand. You gave us hope. You gave us courage. And for those who gave their lives: Renee Good, mother of three, brutally murdered, Alex Pretti, VA nurse, executed by ICE, shot in the back and left to die in the street without even the decency of our lawless government investigating their deaths. Their bravery, their sacrifice, and their names will not be forgotten.

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote a lovely appreciation of the day:

One thing striking about this round of #nokings protest is that people recognize that it’s all connected, because women’s rights, immigrant and refugee rights, trans rights, voting rights, racial justice, public health, environmental and climate issues, the rule of law, and accountability are all under attack by the same players…
There’s fierce joy in feeling far from alone, and something magical can happen and has, again and again, when thousands of individuals feel part of a greater whole, feel the power of solidarity and the possibility that arises from it when they become civil society incarnate. I’m a believer in the almost sacred space of the street and the power of what happens there….
I believe that coexisting with strangers in public is a foundation, of democracy, an embodied participation in literal public life that underpins the capacity to participate in political public life.

Tim Dickinson reported from Portland for the Contrarian:

Portland protesters turned the tables by laughing in the face of fascism, donning chicken suits and inflatable frog costumes, and refusing to cower before an authoritarian president whose exercise of extra-constitutional power hinges on fear, passivity, and submission.
On Saturday — amid the compounding traumas of unaccountable ICE violence, the illegal, unprovoked war with Iran, an economy rigged for billionaires, and a kakistocracy that is eviscerating core investments in science and social services — the people of Portland proved they can still gather to lift each other up, spread courage, and build the solidarity that’s needed, when the only way out of this morass is to get through it together.

Some guy on Bluesky who goes by the name of an ancient fish posted a lovely thread on the righteous anger at his local event. It starts:

Walking thru the “Ultra Normie” No Kings rally in my extremely rural, white town and there are Patagonia wearing moms carrying signs that say “DEAD PEDOPHILES DONT REOFFEND” and “ICE GETS THE WALL” and I hi fived an old guy with a sign that said MY DADDY FOUGHT NAZIS AND SO WILL I” this is wild

Dana Fisher, an American University professor who studies civic engagement, headed a team that collected surveys from 198 random protesters at the main event in Washington,. D.C.. She writes:

What was different at No Kings 3 was that war was one of the top motivations listed: 73% of participants reported peace/anti-war as a motivation for joining, making it the third most common motivation behind immigration (76%), and Trump (75%).

At the Twin Cities rally, John Nichols observed for The Nation, speakers and performers repeatedly expressed opposition to the war. Especially Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Sanders was scathing in his analysis of US militarism. “Let’s be honest,” he declared. “The American people were lied to about the war in Vietnam. We were lied to about the war in Iraq. And we are being lied to today about the war in Iran. This war must end immediately.”

May Day!

“No School. No Work. No Shopping.” That’s the ambitious goal of May Day Strong, the group organizing events for May 1:

On May 1st, we are declaring: workers over billionaires. May 1 will be a day of rallies, marches, teach-ins, walkouts, and a refusal of business as usual with: no work, no school, no shopping.
We think this is especially important because this will be the first national test of what we can pull off when we call for widespread refusal to participate in business as usual. Successful movements innovate, trying new tactics to achieve their goals. And we know that in order to successfully push back on authoritarianism, we need to not just protest—we need to be willing to withdraw our participation from systems that uphold authoritarianism.

Here’s a May Day events map.

Another Big Week in the Courts

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered that construction be halted on the proposed ballroom that Trump razed the East Wing of the White House to make room for. Judge Richard J. Leon wrote that the president is the steward of the White House. “He is not, however, the owner!” The judge said Trump had failed to identify any law that allowed him to demolish the East Wing and build the ballroom. “[N]o statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have,” Leon wrote. Now it’s up to Congress.
Another D.C. federal judge ruled that Trump’s executive order cutting off funding to NPR and PBS is “unlawful and unenforceable.” Judge Randolph D. Moss wrote that “the First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—’to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others.”
A federal judge in Boston blocked the Trump administration’s mass termination of the legal status of over 900,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, and Haitian immigrants who entered the country lawfully, using an app introduced by the Biden administration that granted them humanitarian parole. Judge Allison D. Burroughs wrote that an April 2025 email from DHS telling them to depart the U.S. “immediately” violated a process “mandated by statute and by their own regulations.”
A federal judge in D.C. ruled that Trump is not immune from civil liability for his actions related to the January 6 insurrection. Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded that Trump’s speech at the Ellipse was political, not official, and therefore not subject to the immunity for official acts granted by the Supreme Court.
FBI agents who worked on Trump probes filed a class action lawsuit saying they were fired as an act of political retribution, in violation of their First and Fifth Amendment rights.

A Report From Rural Minnesota

This extraordinary article from Emma Janssen for the American Prospect magazine is a gut-wrenching and awe-inspiring look at the resistance to ICE in rural Minnesota. Go read the whole thing. Here are a few paragraphs:

These residents balance their day jobs with going to the Mexican grocery store to pick up food for families, patrolling the town’s poorer streets where ICE agents tend to pop up, and preparing to show up to an active raid or abduction at the drop of a hat….
You can’t always tell who is part of these networks, and that’s what makes them powerful. They’re fresh out of college—and retirees. They’re longtime protesters—and “apolitical” people who suddenly realized they couldn’t sit idly by any longer. They’re pastors and imams, brewery owners and teachers.
A few things are universal: They are scared, exhausted, and they say that the news of a drawdown just isn’t their reality.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?