ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
Today, in every state across the U.S., people have been out for what's been dubbed the No Kings Movement. These are marches and rallies to oppose what organizers see as an increasingly authoritarian President Trump. Our reporters across the country are seeing big crowds, people spilling out of viewing areas and filling up city blocks, including Chicago, where Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke in Grant Park.
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BRANDON JOHNSON: That we will not bend, we will not bow, we will not tower.
LIMBONG: We're going to head now to the demonstrations in Seattle, where NPR's Martin Kaste joins us now. Hey, Martin.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Hey, Andrew.
LIMBONG: So Seattle is a pretty solidly Democratic city. What's the crowd like there?
KASTE: Well, right at this stage, they're gathering in large numbers around the Space Needle. This is called Seattle Center. It's sort of the big, green space between the hockey arena - that's the - and the Space Needle. You can kind of picture that. Bands playing - we're going to have speeches, and then soon we'll have a march toward downtown. There have also been people marching toward here. There was also talk of stopping briefly at the Mexican Consulate for part of one of those marches. Lots of people with inflatable costumes that we've been seeing lately, signs with various not-always PG-13 messages to the president, that kind of thing.
LIMBONG: You've been chatting with people in the crowd. What are they telling you?
KASTE: So most people do talk about their concern over what they perceive as creeping authoritarianism. You see signs that are quite simple, sometimes - rule of law, said one. You know, one person had a T-shirt on that said, resist like it's Germany, 1938.
But then there's other things that go beyond sort of the rule of law itself. There are a lot of people out for things like their repulsion at how the administration is going about enforcing immigration laws. There's a gigantic blue-pink-white transgender flag kind of up towards the stage. So it's not just one thing here but clearly all things that would run afoul of the current administration's policies.
LIMBONG: Yeah. Obviously, the whole point of this is, you know, President Trump himself, right? The, quote, "No Kings" idea was directed at him. How has President Trump responded?
KASTE: Yesterday, he told Fox News - the quote was, "they say they're referring to me as a king. I'm not a king." Right now, he's in Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. I think some of the messaging has been left to the Republican leadership in Congress. Yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said, he sees this as just a partisan movement. It's run by Democrats, he says, and he thinks it's about supporting the Democratic side in the current government shutdown.
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MIKE JOHNSON: This rally is not about freedom. It's about the opposite. For many of our Democrat colleagues, tomorrow is about creating really a spectacle. That's what they've been doing here every day of the shutdown, with their little TikTok videos and their publicity stunts, and they're going to do it in a much larger venue tomorrow.
LIMBONG: Well, what's the sense that you and other reporters who have been following these events are getting? Is this more of a pro-democracy event or a more pro-Democratic party event?
KASTE: Well, the Democrats at these events are certainly insisting this is not a partisan thing, that they're not running this. These are independent groups organizing these events. One of our colleagues at WGCU in Fort Myers asked that very question of Jim Rosinus. He's the chairman of the Democratic Party there in the county.
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JIM ROSINUS: We're just supplying signs and refreshments and so forth, but it's not a Democratic party thing. And there are a lot of people who are here who are not Democrats. There are a lot of Republicans who are just fed up with where their party is going and what's happening and want to show it.
LIMBONG: I think there were concerns, Martin, that these protests could get out of hand, and at least two governors have preemptively mobilized the National Guard just in case. Are those concerns justified?
KASTE: We haven't seen any big incidents yet. Certainly, there's concern, especially here in the Pacific Northwest. People in Seattle look down the freeway towards Portland, which has been fending off the Trump administration's attempt to federalize the National Guard there because of some very localized protests around an ICE facility.
Obviously, if we saw something more intense here during the course of the day or into the evening, as we sometimes saw during the first Trump administration, that would certainly be a cause for concern here 'cause they don't want to have that same situation.
And generally speaking, here, though, the politics is very anti-Trump. We have a mayoral race in the works right now, and the candidates are just competing with each other with - about who can be most anti-Trump.
LIMBONG: That's NPR's Martin Kaste. Martin, thank you so much.
KASTE: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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