At ‘No Kings,’ millions of Americans show the flag is mightier than the tank

It would be a gross understatement to say it rained on Donald Trump’s birthday parade Saturday night. Man, it poured.

The 47th president had hoped to rule over Flag Day by deploying the artillery of a strutting strongman, in his long-awaited D.C. parade that rolled 28 Abrams M1A2 tanks and Stryker armored personnel carriers into the capital, as Blackhawk helicopters and fighter jets buzzed the wet and muggy skies.

But Trump had already been defeated in the streets, by everyday citizens who stopped his immoral invasion against the soul of America with a thin red, white and blue wall. On an unforgettable day when several million regular folks marched for an event called “No Kings," the American flag was mightier than the tank.

Nowhere was that shown more powerfully than here in Philadelphia, the city where the Continental Congress had formally adopted “The Star-Spangled Banner” as our national emblem on the very date 248 years ago. On a gray and drizzling afternoon, more than 80,000 marchers took over the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to protest national tyranny with the symbols of Philly “attytood” — from “Go Birds!” chants that devolved into anti-Trump obscenity to signs like, “The only good ICE is wooder ice.”

Yet no icon of America’s founding city proved more powerful than the flag that Philadelphia has claimed, controversially, was first woven at 239 Arch St. by Betsy Ross.

Some marchers even wrapped themselves in Old Glory, as the Stars and Stripes bobbed like whitecaps above the human tsunami advancing in Rocky style toward the Art Museum steps. Few waved a bigger flag than Marcus Flowers, an Army veteran from Georgia who ran as a Democrat against the MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022, and who traveled to Philadelphia to join the flagship march.

“This place doesn’t do kings, period,” Flowers told me on the Parkway near 21st Street, where he’d marched with two friends from the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “This is where we started our experiment … had to be here.” He added: “We need to change the narrative, and we accomplished that today. This isn’t about Donald Trump, or his birthday, or parading the military around so he can have his Kim Jong Il or Putin moment. This is our country …”

“No Kings” — organized by Trump resistance groups such as Indivisible, with more than 2,000 rallies in all 50 states and even a handful overseas — captured the flag that Trump thought he would steal with a bombastic display of military might down D.C.’s (irony alert) Constitution Avenue. That parade ostensibly marked a moment actually worth celebrating — the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday — yet was hijacked as a 79th birthday tribute to a Dear Leader.

The people’s parade in Philly jumped off, fittingly, from a packed-to-the-brim LOVE Park — not with armored combat vehicles but lots of moms pushing strollers. It celebrated the civic virtues they fear losing under Trump as his second presidency devolves into masked secret police snatching migrants from Home Depots and Marines in the streets of Los Angeles.

Carrying signs that ranged from quotes from George Orwell’s 1984 to the plaintive scribbled cardboard plea of 5-year-old Ruby Wenzel of Mount Airy, which read, “Stop Hurting Families,” the “No Kings” demonstrators extolled values rooted not in militaristic authoritarianism but the spirit of 1777 when the flag was adopted. Free speech over silence. Taking to the streets over fear. And, importantly, the power of community over staying home.

“I want to do whatever I can, no matter how small, and I need my motivation,” said 70-year-old Gary Klein of Roxborough, who marched with a mop plastered with notes like “Let’s flush King Trump down the drain” and “Roto MAGA Rooter.” He added: “So it’s nice to be around people getting that feeling that we’re all an extended family, because on our side it’s more of a sense of affection for each other.”

In the first wave of nationwide anti-Trump protests that launched in April, attendees were heavily made up of boomers like Klein, motivated by memories of 1960s and ‘70s egalitarianism that seems lost under Trump, and fearing cuts to cherished programs like Medicare and Social Security. Those folks came out again on Saturday, but they were boosted by thousands of younger marchers appalled by the growing brutality of immigration raids or by assaults on the transgender community and LGBTQ rights.

Indeed, the American University sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies contemporary protest movements, said her survey of the “No Kings” marchers in Philadelphia showed the average age of attendees was 36, a steep drop from the first wave of protests.

An informal glance at Saturday’s crowd suggested a growing diversity of causes. Although African Americans remained underrepresented in a city with a large Black population, those who did participate included some protesting the ongoing war in Gaza, as well as more college or high school-aged marchers, and more Latinos as well.

“I think it’s very important for a lot of people to be here, not only to stand up against fascism but because there’s a lot of stuff going on in the country like ICE deporting people, even U.S. citizens,” 24-year-old Erica Padilla, who works in her father’s restaurant in Gloucester City, and who has in the past seen family members deported, told me.

I asked Padilla if she was afraid to be out protesting. “Yes, I was very fearful coming here today,” she said, adding her relief that protests both in Philadelphia and an earlier one she’d attended in Delaware had proved peaceful. Indeed, the throngs in Philly — where a sizable police presence hovered near but not along the march route — and elsewhere largely lived up to organizers’ hopes that “No Kings” would be ruled by joy and not anger.

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Still, the dismally gray afternoon and the light but steady rain felt like a metaphor for the headwinds of fear and even sadness into which “No Kings” was marching. Saturday’s millions weren’t deterred by the morning’s shocking news that a right-wing, anti-abortion gunman in the Minneapolis suburbs, posing as a police officer in the dead of night, had assassinated a top Democratic state lawmaker, with her husband, while wounding a state senator and his wife.

The brutal Minnesota murders were yet another reminder that — despite the tape loops on Fox News showing a handful of flaming self-driving cars in Los Angeles last week, and their false notion that peaceful dissent and violence are synonymous — the American bloodshed in a tumultuous 2025 is coming in from the right side. Or from a powerful police state.

No significant acts of violence were attributed Saturday to “No Kings” marchers. But in Culpeper, Va., a man was arrested after driving into a crowd of anti-Trump demonstrators — a potentially lethal crime that’s been egged on by some top Republicans — and injuring one person. The most significant mayhem on Saturday occurred yet again in Los Angeles, where peaceful protesters were pushed back by a phalanx of law enforcement officers who began firing tear gas and then “less-lethal projectiles” into the crowd.

Despite these gathering storm clouds, the overriding message from “No Kings” was one of courage. The organizers were never looking for unrest but simply for big numbers, to show not just other Americans but an increasingly anxious world that Trump and ICE are not acting in their name. The longer-term hope is that massive resistance from the people will change not only the warped media narrative after Trump’s 2024 election, but also convince enough lawmakers on Capitol Hill to block his extreme agenda.

That remains to be seen, but Saturday’s vibe shift was clearly felt in Washington, where the tank-driven parade that so many feared would providing a chilling glimpse of North Korea-spiced totalitarianism on the Potomac turned out to be a surprisingly low-energy affair. Camouflaged soldiers didn’t goose-step but ambled awkwardly down Constitution Avenue past mostly empty bleachers — sponsored by influence-seeking corporations such as Coinbase — as tank drivers waved to the sparse crowd. It felt like a coded message from the troops: We, too, know America is better than this.

The juxtaposition of “No Kings’” surging masses with the languid Army celebration, where the metallic squeal of the lumbering tanks could be heard above the utter silence, clearly left a mark on the 79th-birthday boy. The Les Misérables fanatic looked miserable, delivering perfunctory, nonpolitical remarks in a monotone that reeked of utter defeat.

As fireworks exploded over the D.C. void, the curtain fell on what had to be the most momentous Flag Day in American history. In the city where Benjamin Franklin is said to have promised the citizens of a new nation “a republic, if you can keep it,” on the parkway that bears his name, Americans kept it for one more day in a color revolution of red, white and blue.

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