On Oct. 18, 2025, protests erupted from the Pacific to the Atlantic. American cities were filled with protesters waving American flags and shouting, “No Kings!” During my visit to the protest on Emrick Boulevard in Bethlehem, I witnessed these passions firsthand. Scientists, activists, Vietnam protesters, veterans, patriots from every demographic of America, White, Black, Latino, men and women, all unified in their commitment to our republic.
By listening to these Americans, I noticed a common theme in their arguments against the Republican administration. The first was a resounding “no” to an often depoliticized, legalistic, normative belief that might makes right. An example of this would be Donald Trump’s tariff powers. A common argument we hear in defense of Trump is that, under pressure from Trump, Congress granted him this tariff power, so it’s legal and therefore okay. These protesters would probably strongly oppose that, because even though Donald Trump has the power to compel Congress to grant him more tariff power, that doesn’t mean he should seize it.
A parallel to this would be the Kuwaiti Monarchy dissolving parliament on May 10, 2024, and assuming the legislative authority once held by parliament. The mechanism by which an executive uses its political capital and structural authority to compel other branches of government to increase its power remains the same. Ideologically, Trump’s and the Emir of Kuwait’s decisions are not all that different, revealing how normatively authoritarian the Republican Party really is. However, structurally, America’s democratic institutions are significantly stronger than Kuwait’s, making such a sudden democratic collapse unlikely, at least for now.
As the chants “No Kings” echoed across Emrick Boulevard, I spoke with protesters who came from different walks of life, all expressing the same anxiety: that America’s balance of power between its branches is eroding, that America’s government is becoming more and more like Kuwait’s government, a monarchy, not a representative republic. Yet beneath that fear, there was resolve; this could be stopped, and they were willing to be the ones to stand up against it.
I first spoke with a woman named Linda, who was deeply frustrated with the extrajudicial murder of people in the Caribbean by the Trump administration. “He’s murdering people. There’s an easier way: the Coast Guard can get them. He chooses to blow them up because he wants to be the all-powerful person,” she said.
Next, I spoke with Mark Powell, who expressed discontent with Congress’s disregard for the American people’s interests and its prioritization of Donald Trump’s.
“Our senators and our representatives are not representing us; they are representing Trump,” he said.
Powell also expressed that a formative experience, in which he faced political violence for protesting, played a role in shaping his decision to protest today.
“When I was eleven years old in southern Illinois, my parents took me to a protest against the Vietnam War, and the rednecks there threw eggs at me. I was eleven years old, and they threw eggs at me. That’s why I’m here!”
My third interview was with Christina Jackson and Susan Crow. Jackson believed that Trump had abandoned the American people through various acts of cronyism at the nation’s expense.
“We’re abandoning the American people, we’re subsidizing billionaires, we are subsidizing Argentina with 20 billion dollars,” she said. “Corruption is running rampant everywhere, human decency has gone out the window, with just killing people without any prosecution.”
The fourth interview was with Kim, who was wearing an inflatable animal costume. Her main concerns were the attacks on democracy, the press, and the civil liberties of minorities by the government, stating, “Most alarmingly, putting troops in American cities, the press has just revoked access to the Pentagon, attacking trans rights, banning trans people from the military.”
Steve, an older man, strongly opposed the Republican government’s corruption, attacks on the rule of law and healthcare, and civil service purges by the Trump administration.
“Homan, who’s the tsar for kicking immigrants out, well, he calls them all criminals, crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor, not a felony, accepting a bribe of $50,000, that’s a crime … Blowing boats out of the water thousands of miles away from our border without any permission from Congress … getting rid of people’s healthcare that’s really going to hurt our society, that’s gonna put so many people into grave poverty, getting rid of people willy-nilly, then going ‘oh we have to hire these people back because they were important.”
Ron, a young Black man, was mainly concerned about the breakdown of the rule of law, saying, “We have these immigrants being corralled up without due process … Congress is giving him free rein to do what he wants to do rather than do what they’re supposed to do. This is not America; it’s supposed to be about law, following the law, following the constitution, and this is not happening.”
Chris Winner, who was draped in American flags and passionately patriotic, protested “No taxation without representation,” referring to funds allocated by Congress that were arbitrarily revoked and reallocated by the Trump administration. He also stated, regarding Trump’s foreign policy with autocrats like Vladimir Putin, “When fascism is on the rise globally, America is supposed to stick it to these dictators and stand up for freedom, and we aren’t doing that right now.”
Dominik Dominiky, who was worried about Trump’s attacks on minority rights and cruelty, said, “The idea of America to me is uplifting the marginalized and other groups of people that need their voices to be heard, and I think this idea of cruelty and beating down on the downtrodden is not something I support.”
A married couple, Coran Richardson and David Richardson, both scientists who were deeply frustrated by RFK Junior’s conspiracy theories and the cuts to funding for the scientific community.
“I worked on the Hubble telescope; my husband was a chemist.” She continued, “The cuts in funding, the devastation of the scientific community is so easy to break and so difficult to put back together, this is a generational harm to the country … He has devastated original research … even active research in areas that could be productive today has been decimated; university funding has been slashed, the R&D funding community, the military labs, the government labs … MRNA research is being cut,” Coran said.
David agreed, saying, “We’re at the brink of some incredible breakthroughs, and it’s being stopped. Now we are having RFK Jr. with a bunch of bull shit that’s not science, and that’s taking over, that scares me … My colleagues are having their grants cut … The ability to make these MRNA vaccines, you can’t just get it back all of a sudden, as soon as we get our next disease … It is going to take a much longer time than it did with COVID to get us a vaccine and get us safe.”
The last person I spoke with was a military veteran named Larry Sutton, who felt democracy was under siege, “We are slowly dismantling the underpinnings of a free democracy … I actually concur with some of the conservative goals. Still, you don’t do it by making enemies of your people, dismantling a free press, the rule of law, the unencumbered right to vote, all those things you need to have a voice for the people, and that’s slowly being taken away.”
