On June 14, 2025, more than 2,000 protests are taking place across all 50 U.S. states in a nationwide event called “No Kings Day”. The demonstrations, organized by a coalition of over 150 groups including Indivisible and the ACLU, directly counter President Trump’s $45 million military parade and protest the policies of his second term. Organizers describe the mobilization as “the largest single-day, peaceful protest in recent American history”. The central message, captured on signs reading “He was elected president NOT KING,” is a direct response to President Trump’s recent embrace of monarchical rhetoric. In Philadelphia, one of the major demonstration sites, Pennsylvania criminal lawyer Holly Feeney stated her reason for marching: “I am just appalled at the lawlessness of this administration. Disappearing people is what authoritarian governments do, not democratic republics”.
The Founders’ Prophecy
The current conflict touches on the foundational principles of American government, which was explicitly designed to prevent the emergence of a monarch after the revolution against King George III. The nation’s founders expressed a near-universal opposition to royalty, building firewalls into the U.S. Constitution against the concentration of power in a single executive.
Thomas Jefferson, who witnessed European monarchies firsthand, was one of their most trenchant critics. He believed such societies were characterized by the “general prey of the rich on the poor” and warned against the rise of an “elective despotism” in America. He argued for a government where powers were so balanced that no single person “could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others”. It was James Madison who provided the architecture for that restraint in Federalist 47, defining tyranny as “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective”. By deliberately including “elective” tyranny, Madison acknowledged the profound danger that a democracy could vote its own despot into office.
The ultimate rejection of monarchy came from George Washington himself. When Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote to him in 1782 with the suggestion that he become an American king, the general responded not with consideration but with horror. “Be assured, Sir,” Washington wrote, “no occurrence in the course of the War, has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the Army.”. He called the proposal a potential “calamity” for the United States. This sentiment permeated the Constitutional Convention, where Edmund Randolph feared a single executive would be the “fetus of monarchy”. The founders’ rejection of a king was absolute; Alexander Hamilton called the Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility the “corner-stone of republican government”.
The Nine-Year Escalation
Today’s crisis is the culmination of a nine-year escalation that has systematically challenged these founding principles. The pattern began with rhetorical tests of executive power during President Trump’s first term. In July 2019, he made a claim of boundless authority, stating, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president”. By the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, this evolved into an assertion of absolute power: “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total”.
After the 2020 election, the rhetoric became a direct attack on the constitutional order itself. In December 2022, Trump called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” to reverse his election loss. A year later, in December 2023, he told supporters he wanted to be a “dictator for day one,” normalizing authoritarian language in American politics.
The legal framework for this power grab arrived in July 2024. The Supreme Court, in Trump v. United States, granted presidents absolute immunity for actions taken under their “core constitutional powers” and presumptive immunity for all other “official acts”. In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the majority had made the president a “king above the law” and the principle of equal justice a “mockery”. The ACLU noted the ruling “sits like a loaded weapon for Trump to abuse”.
With this legal cover in place, President Trump’s second term began with an open embrace of monarchical imagery. On February 19, 2025, a message appeared on his Truth Social account celebrating a policy victory: “LONG LIVE THE KING!”. This post was amplified by official White House social media accounts, which shared an AI-generated image of Trump wearing a bejeweled golden crown. Just days earlier, he had posted a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” positioning himself above legal constraints. By March 30, Trump stated he was “not joking” about seeking a third term, while allies like Representative Andy Ogles introduced constitutional amendments to permit it.
The Institutional Capture
This pattern of behavior represents more than personal rhetoric; it reflects what experts on international democracy call a playbook for institutional capture. Observers note “striking parallels” between these actions and the democratic backsliding seen in Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, where leaders use “democratic tools to attain power; once there, they dismantle those processes”. This model of “competitive authoritarianism” maintains the facade of elections while hollowing out the democratic substance within. One international observer stated that “Trump went further in two months than Orban could in 15 years” of dismantling democracy in Hungary.
Steven Levitsky of Harvard, an expert on how democracies die, identified Trump’s language as “classic authoritarian discourse”. Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele noted a crucial distinction that makes the threat more acute: unlike many historical autocrats, Trump has “a mass movement willing to fight for him”. The transformation of the American presidency mirrors what scholars call “crown-presidentialism,” a hybrid system where an elected leader wields the guardian powers of a monarch while claiming fidelity to a democratic constitution. The structural safeguard the founders relied on most—congressional control over the budget—is now under direct threat. “The thing that prevents the president from being an absolute monarch is Congress controls the power of the purse strings,” explained Georgetown Law Professor Josh Chafetz.
The Human Stakes
The constitutional crisis has tangible consequences that have driven protesters into the streets. In Atlanta, where over 5,000 people were expected to protest today, social worker Renee Hall-George criticized the parade’s cost amid social needs. “People are hungry. People are hurting. We need that money in other places,” she said. “How about funding education? How about feeding people?”.
For Melissa Steach, a Waffle House employee and member of the Union of Southern Service Workers, recent mass ICE raids triggered a deep, historical fear. “It triggers something in me, and it makes me so uncomfortable with what’s going on,” she said, after protesting outside ICE headquarters. “It needs to stop”. In Savannah, Chris Machki, co-founder of Coastal Georgia for Democracy, explained his motivation simply. “We are peaceful people. We are your neighbors,” he said. “We’re just upset. People are upset and ready to speak out.” He described being “fundamentally bothered and disturbed by the lack of separation of powers”.
Organizers have worked to channel this public anger into a unified message. Kristin Crowe of the Indivisible Georgia Coalition summarized the movement’s core principle: “In America, we have no kings, we have no thrones; the authority resides with the people, and this nation is owned by the populace,” she declared. That sentiment has been galvanized by recent events. Jim Chapdelaine, founder of Indivisible Connecticut, noted that motivation surged after a sitting U.S. senator was “thrown on the ground and handcuffed for no reason” during a press conference.
The Constitutional Reckoning
The gravity of this moment is not lost on legal and historical experts. A survey by Bright Line Watch found that the “vast majority” of over 500 political scientists believe the United States is “moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism”. The nation’s democracy rating from the group plummeted from 67 to 55 on a 100-point scale in just a few months.
Experts at the Harvard Kennedy School have described the administration’s actions as “the most severe attack on the rule of law in the United States since confederate armed forces began lobbing artillery shells into Fort Sumter in 1861”. The comparison to the Civil War, once unthinkable, is now common among scholars who see democratic institutions facing their greatest test since the nation nearly broke apart.
In response, congressional Democrats introduced the “No Kings Act” (S. 4973), a bill explicitly designed to reaffirm that no president is immune from criminal prosecution. Introduced by Senator Chuck Schumer with 34 co-sponsors, the bill’s very name invokes the founders’ anti-monarchical stance. It aims to legislatively overturn the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, citing Federalist No. 69, where Alexander Hamilton distinguished the American president from a “sacred and inviolable” British monarch. A group of fifteen founding-era historians filed a legal brief arguing that presidential immunity “would transform the presidency into a monarchy—exactly what the Framers of the Constitution sought to avoid”.
The Choice
The protests of June 14, 2025, represent more than a political disagreement; they are a manifestation of a deep constitutional conflict. Protesters have made a conscious choice to wave American flags, an effort to reclaim patriotic symbols and assert that “the flag doesn’t belong to President Trump. It belongs to us”. The movement’s messaging bridges generations, connecting through the anti-authoritarianism of 1990s indie rock and the civic lessons of 1970s Schoolhouse Rock.
This moment forces a binary choice upon the nation, the same choice the founders faced: accept the perceived stability of an all-powerful leader or embrace the difficult, constant work of self-governance. The protests demonstrate that millions of Americans recognize the stakes and remain committed to the latter. However, the ultimate test lies in whether the nation’s democratic institutions, designed as a firewall against monarchy 248 years ago, can constrain the unprecedented assertions of executive power they now face. The events of today are not the end of this constitutional crisis, but a pivotal chapter in the ongoing struggle to answer Benjamin Franklin’s enduring challenge: a republic, if you can keep it.