Last Saturday, millions of protesters turned out across the country for the second “No Kings” march against Donald Trump. Trump, ever the statesman, responded with a Truth Social post that contained an AI-generated video of himself flying a plane with a king’s crown atop his head, dumping massive amounts of human feces on protesters.
At the same time that Trump was using AI to smear his critics, his supporters were spreading the claim that footage of the enormous rallies was actually fake news. They were wrong: the impressive rally footage was authentic. The turnout on Saturday was even larger than at the first No Kings rally, which wildly surpassed Trump’s sparsely attended military parade in June. While Trump’s biggest fans may have enjoyed his scatological retort and consoled themselves with the notion that massive crowds were a media fiction, the real-life streets were filled with Americans denouncing Trump as a would-be dictator.
In his newsletter Strength in Numbers, data journalist G. Elliott Morris consulted multiple diverse sources to estimate the size of Saturday’s crowds. Morris’s median estimate is five million participants, his upper-end estimate 6.5 million.
Either way, Morris concludes, “Saturday’s events are very likely the biggest single-day protest event since 1970, surpassing even the 2017 Women’s March demonstrations against Trump.”
Strength in Numbers also consulted data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project by the University of Connecticut and the Harvard Kennedy School, to compare protest activity in Trump’s second term to his first term. America has seen four times as many anti-Trump protests this time around.
The number of attendees per protest has also soared since Trump’s first term. Morris estimates that over 12 million Americans have protested against Trump since he took office earlier this year. One standout city for No Kings turnout on Saturday was Washington, DC, where…
Auteur: Meagan Day
