More than 2,500 “No Kings” protests are being held on October 18 throughout the US, in every major city and many smaller towns, as well as in other countries. The Socialist Equality Party supports these demonstrations and calls for the broadest possible participation. The last “No Kings” demonstrations, on June 14, attracted upwards of 10 million people in what is believed to have been the largest single-day political protest in American history.
These demonstrations are taking place under conditions of a mounting conspiracy by the Trump administration to establish a presidential dictatorship. In the days leading up to October 18, administration officials and leading Republicans denounced the protests as a “hate America rally,” branded demonstrators as “terrorists” and threatened to launch investigations against those organizing them. The White House is also preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would give Trump sweeping powers to deploy the military throughout the United States under his direct command.
National Guard troops have already been deployed to major American cities, including Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and Memphis. In Chicago, the third-largest city in the country, residents face daily assaults by a combination of police, ICE and Department of Homeland Security agents, while National Guard forces have arrived in preparation for further action.
The language coming from the White House is the language of civil war. Trump has called for the military to be used against the “enemy within.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has described even the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organization.” Trump has opened up the White House to neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists and far-right propagandists, who are openly plotting the abolition of democratic rights.
What is unfolding is not a temporary aberration or a passing episode. There will be no “return to normal.” With the Trump administration, the American ruling class is breaking with constitutional forms of rule.
The decisive question is: What is to be done? How can Trump’s coup be defeated?
The October 18 demonstrations express deep hostility to the Trump administration’s efforts to set up a fascistic dictatorship in the United States. The central slogan, “No Kings,” articulates vast popular hostility to autocracy, (though we would add to it, in the present-day context of the neo-Nazi program
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