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On Oct. 18, Americans in thousands of locations across the country are expected to gather for "No Kings" demonstrations to protest against President Donald Trump's administration and to celebrate free speech. Organizers have said they expect record-setting crowds.
The second round of "No Kings" protests include more than 2,500 demonstrations in cities large and small. On the first "No Kings" day on June 14, 2025, demonstrations across the country clinched one of the top spots for most attended demonstrations in a single day against a specific idea or entity – in this case, Trump and federal government actions.
Estimates put June 14 attendance somewhere between 2 and 4.8 million people, according to Jeremy Pressman, the co-founder of the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard University and the University of Connecticut that publicly tracks crowd sizes at protests. Organizers said about 5 million people were there.
October's protests are expected to be even larger, organizers said.
“This, without question, will be the single biggest day of protest in American history," Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, which is helping plan the rallies, told USA TODAY. “Since we last did this, people have become far more aware of what is going wrong with this administration."
It's difficult to get an accurate count immediately after a protest, said Pressman, who also is a professor of political science. It took several weeks for the Crowd Counting Consortium team to create its estimate using figures from media reports, photos and video of the events, and organizer accounts. But Pressman expects round two of the protests to again draw millions.
That a protest movement could possibly draw record-breaking crowds for a second time speaks to the momentum of the current political protest climate and organizers' ability to reach and engage Americans, Pressman said.
Pressman and his team has been tracking protest attendance since the Women's March in 2017 at the start of Trump's first term.
Social media and the rise of technology have made it easier for people all around the country to come together for a single cause at the same time, Pressman said. Even so, some community actions in the 1970s and '80s managed to draw numbers in the millions around the country, thanks to social movements that built them up over longer periods of time.
Crowd estimates tend to vary depending on who you ask and how they crunched the numbers, but these are some of the most attended protests and mobilizations in U.S. history:
No Kings Day, June 2025
The first No Kings protest on June 14, 2025, drew between 2 and 4.8 million people at more than 2,000 separate rallies, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. It was one of the largest single-day protest actions in U.S. history.
The protests coincided with Trump's birthday and a large military parade in Washington, DC. Most protests were peaceful, but some isolated instances of violence included a man intentionally driving a car into a northern Virginia crowd and a clash between demonstrators and law enforcement in Los Angeles.
Women's March, 2017 and 2018
The first Women's March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Trump's inauguration, saw between 3.2 and 5.2 million protesters, Pressman said. Earlier estimates put it at more than 2 million. The protests invited women and their supporters to demonstrate against Trump's presidency and rhetoric considered sexist.
A second march in 2018 also drew a couple million people, Pressman said.
March for Our Lives, 2018
March for Our Lives on March 24, 2018, a protest advocating for stricter gun control legislation and the safety of students in schools, was attended by between 1.4 and 2.2 million people, Pressman said. The march was organized as part of a movement after a mass school shooting in Florida.
At the largest event in the nation's capital, organizers said about 800,000 people showed up. Other large demonstrations happened in cities such as Boston, Houston, Minneapolis and Parkland, Florida, the site of the Valentine's Day 2018 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead.
Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests, 2020
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man killed by Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck, demonstrations around the country lasted for several weeks during the summer of 2020. While not a single-day event, the movement also drew millions, Pressman said.
In some locations like Portland, Oregon, the protests stretched on for months. By June 2020, more than 1,700 protests had cropped up in all 50 states, a USA TODAY analysis found.
Earth Day, 1970
Many consider the largest single day of community actions in U.S. history to be the inaugural Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Thousands of protests, rallies, educational programs, environmental cleanups and walkouts drew an estimated 20 million people, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
Earth Day was created by Sen. Gaylord Nelson to "force" the issue of environmental protection into the mainstream national political agenda, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which was founded later that year.
"It was on that day that Americans made it clear that they understood and were deeply concerned over the deterioration of our environment and the mindless dissipation of our resources. That day left a permanent impact on the politics of America," Nelson wrote a decade later in 1980.
Pressman said he doesn't consider it the largest single-day protest in U.S. history only because it's impossible to know how many people were participating in actual protest instead of activities like recycling drives or educational events.
Hands Across America, 1986
Another mobilization action that wasn't quite a protest in Pressman's view was Hands Across America in 1986. Like Earth Day in 1970, Pressman doesn't count the Hands Across America movement as a single protest against a particular entity, but it was still one of the largest public mobilization efforts in U.S. history.
Hands Across America gathered between 5 and 7 million people with a goal to promote awareness of hunger and poverty in the United States, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. On May 25, 1986, people joined hands – literally – to try and form a human chain along a route across the country.
Many of the participants donated $10 to join the chain in an effort to fight homelessness and hunger, but the expectation was dropped to get more people to join, the Akron Beacon Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported. Sixteen states and dozens of cities participated.
Contributing: Sarah D. Wire
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'No Kings' protest organizers aim to break these crowd records
Reporting by Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
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