According to one crowdsourced estimate, a staggering 4 million to 6 million people may have attended “No Kings” protests this weekend, a sign of just how much pushback has emerged toward President Donald Trump during his second term.
That estimate indicates a surge in activism against Trump this time around compared with his first term, says former FiveThirtyEight Editorial Director G. Elliott Morris, who reported the range.
Morris worked with other independent data journalists to arrive at the figures and cautions it isn’t an “official” tally, though he does believe it’s the most comprehensive currently available. The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the organizers of the “No Kings” demonstrations, has also estimated that more than 5 million people attended protests this weekend.
Morris, citing data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, notes that there have been nearly three times as many political protests by this point in Trump’s second term as there were by the same point in his first term. His analysis shows that there have been 15,396 political protests in 2025 since Trump’s inauguration, compared with 5,043 in a comparable time frame in 2017.
The “No Kings” demonstrations, which organizers spearheaded to call out Trump’s abuses of power, are poised to be one of the largest outpourings of such activism. Per Morris, the turnout at the “No Kings” protests has the potential to exceed that of the 2017 Women’s March, which he described as the “largest single-day protest in U.S. history.”
Estimates placed Women’s March attendance between 3.3 million and 5.6 million people, Morris says, and it’s possible that “No Kings” participation was higher, including as many as 6 million people, or about 1.8% of the U.S. population.
The scale of the activism against Trump is a notable reflection of the discontent that many people — including those who voted for him — have felt about his second term as he’s escalated immigration enforcement policies, activated the military to respond to largely peaceful protests, and cracked down on funding for medical research and higher education institutions.
According to a June Quinnipiac University poll, 54% of registered voters disapprove of how Trump has handled the presidency so far.
“I voted for Donald Trump, and now I regret that, because he’s taken this fascism to a new level,” Peter Varadi, 54, a first-time protester and attendee of a “No Kings” march in Los Angeles, told The Associated Press.