“Never Surrender”: No Kings Takes On Special Urgency in Chicago

It was an unseasonably warm fall day in Chicago as an estimated 100,000 demonstrators descended on Grant Park for the second “No Kings” protest of 2025. For more than a month, this city has been at the center of Donald Trump’s Constitution-defying immigration crackdown. But on Saturday, there was a sense of catharsis—because at least for one afternoon, there was somewhere for all the pent up fear, angst, and outrage of liberal-leaning Chicagoans to go.

Demonstrators packed the park with signs denouncing ICE, which has functioned like an extralegal force here since Trump’s so-called “Operation Midway” began in September. Masked state agents have been pulling people into unmarked vans, conducting raids in school pickup lines and churches and apartment buildings, and responding with violence to protests. “Stop the kidnapping,” one sign read. “Chicago bows to no king,” read another.

No Kings—the second such anti-Trump demonstration in recent months—drew an estimated 7 million onto the streets of cities and towns across the country, its organizers said Saturday, reportedly making it one of the largest single day protests in United States history. But with the president targeting Chicago—Trump outright suggested he was declaring “war” on the defiantly blue city as he launched his ICE operation—the mobilization here and the surrounding suburbs took on a particular urgency. “They want a rematch of the Civil War, but we are here to stand firm,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson told the crowd Saturday. “We will never surrender,” added Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who has emerged as one of Trump’s most formidable antagonists, as well as a possible Democratic contender in 2028. “We love America. We love Chicago. Donald Trump, stay the hell out of our city.”

In the lead-up to Saturday’s mass protests, Trump and his Republican allies had likened the demonstrations to acts of violent treason—“hate America” rallies, as House Speaker Mike Johnson dubbed them. Some suggested “antifa,” the loosely defined left wing movement Trump labeled a terrorist organization in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, was behind it all. Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced late last week that he would call the National Guard to Austin in response.

But the protests across all 50 states—much like at the first No Kings in June and the Hands Off protests in April—were overwhelmingly peaceful and upbeat, frequently infused with a kind of absurdist humor designed to undercut the administration’s portrayal of protesters as violent insurgents and their cities as dystopian “hell holes.” Chicago’s event expressed the city’s distinct municipal pride: There was a guy dressed as the Chicago-raised Pope Leo XIV, wearing a cassock and White Sox cap. Another wore a Bears jersey and a tricorner hat. At least one sign deemed the president a “Chicago certified jag-off.”

“I guess it’s hope,” one 20-something demonstrator told me, as we took in the massive crowd. “A lot of people care.”

Trump has operated over the past nine months with the pretense of a “mandate” as he reshapes American political culture in his image. But the No Kings demonstrations served as a reminder that no such mandate exists—that his victory nearly a year ago was not a blank check, and that he is executing much of his agenda without popular support.

That’s important to keep in mind, as Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin, one of the organizers of the No Kings protests, told me. “Authoritarian regimes thrive on a sense of powerlessness,” Levin said by phone. “They want you to feel like they are all powerful. They want you to feel that it is pointless to try to organize against them because you don’t have the power.”

The demonstration wasn’t just about pushing back on Trump; it was about beating back “cynicism and nihilism and fatalism,” Levin said. “You stand up to show that it is indeed possible to push back against this regime, that the current moment that we’re in is not forever.”

Republicans have pivoted from fearmongering to downplaying the demonstrations, with Johnson dismissing them as a “stunt” on ABC News Sunday morning. But the mobilization appeared to provoke Trump, who responded to protestors’ discontent with a bizarre, AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and dumping feces from a fighter jet onto protesters.

What remains to be seen, of course, is if this anti-Trump energy can be translated into real political action. Democrats are still shut out of power in Washington, and continue to lack a cohesive vision beyond their opposition to Trump.

“We’ve seen leaders in charge not deliver on kitchen table issues that matter, and we have to change that,” Mishara Davis, director of Issue and Electoral Organizing at the nonpartisan State Voices, part of the coalition behind No Kings, told me. “This No Kings protest is one way in which we can really bring the change that we’re hoping to see to the community.”