On Oct. 18, 2025, some seven million protesters across the U.S. staged “No Kings” marches. In major cities across Europe, North America, and the Pacific, using such slogans as “No Tyrants” or “No Dictators,” hundreds of thousands gathered in solidarity. The overall message was a nonviolent rejection of Donald Trump’s assaults on U.S. democracy and his seizing of authoritarian power.
The home-grown protests revolved around three issues:
- Authoritarianism and abuses of power (AAP)
- Governmental policy actions (GPA)
- Democratic over autocratic values (DOAV)
Examples of AAP include disregarding the rule of law, deploying federal agents, targeting dissent as well as specific groups, and eroding democracy.
Examples of GPA include immigration enforcement, cuts to social programs, economic policies, and the federal government shutdown.
DOAV issues include defending the constitution and people power over Trumpian power, as evidenced by signs featuring slogans like, “We Have a Constitution Not a King” and “America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people.”
I understood such slogans all too well. When in my work I speak of a “mafia state” or of Trump’s “mafia state apparatus,” I am referring to them as being interchangeable with other garden variety authoritarian states. I am speaking about the institutionalization of a “criminal state” as a particular kind of “autocratic” state in the sense that governmental arrangements operate even less like legitimate, public-serving institutions and more like self-serving, illegitimate racketeering institutions.
Our racketeer-in-chief is presently “shaking down” the Department of Justice for $230 million in compensation for two federal investigations into a purported number of violations of his.
The complaints were submitted through an administrative claim process in late 2023 that will in all likelihood be settled before it could become a lawsuit against Trump’s “own” DOJ. This is because any settlement that may be reached will be decided by former Trump defense attorneys who have now become senior level officials in the DOJ. Pretty neat, huh?
The first investigation was the FBI and special counsel investigation of Russian election interference, and links to the Trump campaign, in 2016. The other was related to the 2022 searches of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida home, for retaining classified documents and conspiring to obstruct justice, for which Trump alleges his privacy was violated and accuses the DOJ of malicious prosecution.
Not unlike “organized criminal syndicates” or major global drug cartels, Trump’s mafia state is more criminal and dangerous to democracies near and far than are “marginalized” kleptocracies or oligarchies, autocratic or illiberal democratic. By definition, mafia states are organized as criminal states where self-serving criminality becomes the modus operandi of governing and political corruption, legal weaponization, and state violence, as well as state-sponsored illicit activities or the suppression of dissent, becomes “normalized.”
On No Kings Day, then, I was determined to do my part. With more than 3,000 people, I demonstrated at Riverside Park in Ypsilanti, Michigan’s Depot Town, a stop on the Underground Railroad in the heart of the Huron River Valley.
The protest was organized by Ann Arbor Indivisible and Ypsilanti Indivisible, two chapters of the nationwide pro-democracy organization. It was only one of some 100 rallies in Michigan.
What I found very interesting was the level of “antifa” consciousness — how many signs announced people hearing Republican attacks on so-called leftwing extremists and saying, effectively, “Me too.” One sign stuck in my mind, “Aren’t we all antifascists?”
It was a joyful and exhilarating afternoon, without any political speeches. Nobody seemed to be in charge. Depending on your perspective, it was quite disorganized or fluid. As demonstrators left the park, Michigan Live reported, “long processions of marchers split in different directions though town,” each circling parts of Huron, Cross and River streets as well as Michigan Avenue.
One group left the sidewalk, where they were supposed to stay, to block traffic and spontaneously shout, “Whose streets? Our streets!”
In the park, there was no shortage of drumbeats and chants like, “Is the power of the people bigger than the people in power?” There were original songs, created for the No Kings Movement, like the call-and-response, “Neighbor, Neighbor Can’t You See.” There were of course a few classic anthems, like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin.”
Most demonstrators understood that the MAGA majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has become out-of-the-closet autocratic rather than originalist legalitarian, to form the backbone of Trump’s authoritarian takeover.
The people understood that the MAGA court has been rendering politicized decisions that do not align with any legally neutral principles but rather are in lockstep with the unethical and corrupt operating principles of a commander-in-chief on a mission to dismantle democratic institutions from the top down and the bottom up.
The people further understood that this MAGA court has been “abusing its power of judicial review” in two systemic ways.
On the one hand, these justices have been using their powers of constitutional interpretation to attack the electoral core of American democracy, as in their erosion of civil rights legislation such as the Voters Rights Act of 1965.
On the other hand, these justices have been engaged in “judicial backsliding,” undermining the judicial independence of lower courts by overturning soundly reasoned constitutional decisions in order to prevent them from checking the abusive and out of control executive and legislature.
Eventually, in Ypsilanti and elsewhere across the country, the No Kings marchers went home. How did Trump respond? Well, the manchild did what we have all come to expect. He posted absurd AI videos.
As USA Today described it, one showed Trump wearing a crown and robe and wielding a sword while a song featuring the words “Hail to the King” played and figures including the former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bowed before him.
Let NBC News describe another: “Trump posts AI video showing him dumping on No Kings protesters.”
We will need to march again.
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm election
