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The founders of the United States feared monarchically inclined presidents who could wage wars of whim.

A mass protest outside an ICE processing facility in Broadview, Illinois, on January 17, 2026.

The abuses of Donald Trump’s second term inspired the rise of the No Kings movement, which this Saturday will return to the streets of these United States, from Key West at the end of the Florida Keys to Kotzebue Sound above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. In more than 3,000 cities, villages, and towns, millions of people will be protesting a president who organizers decry for “sending masked agents into our streets, terrorizing our communities” and “spending billions of our tax dollars on missile strikes abroad all while driving up the cost of living and handing out massive giveaways to billionaire allies.”

The No Kings movement has, from its beginnings, recognized the ways in which Trump’s authoritarian overreach mirrors what the authors of the Declaration of Independence identified as King George III’s “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.”

But after Trump launched a regionally destabilizing war in the Middle East, with neither the approval of Congress nor the support of the American people, those echoes grew louder. They grew louder still after the administration asked for another $200 billion to fund it. 

US Rep. Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin Democrat who co-founded the House’s Defense Spending Reduction Caucus, has correctly identified Trump’s attack on Iran as a “war of choice” rather than necessity. And No Kings organizers are reminding Americans that, in addition to their objections to the domestic chaos unleashed by this administration, they are now called to protest against “An illegal, catastrophic war putting us in danger and driving up our costs.”

This is precisely the circumstance the founders of the American experiment feared, based on their bitter experience with King George III and the British Empire.

In 1776, as the king’s more rebellious subjects were pursuing independence from the United Kingdom a delegate from Virginia to the Second Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson, led a committee charged with detailing grievances against the king and his imperial enterprise. The committee – which also included John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman from Connecticut – produced a document that began to shape a new nation. 

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world,” read the document, which was approved by the Congress,........

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