Roughly 3,000 Brooklynites marched through Park Slope on Saturday to denounce President Donald Trump and his cabinet as part of the nationwide “No Kings” march.
Waving signs and banners with slogans like “United We Stand, divided Democracy Falls” and “Kings Are For Fairytales,” protestors of all ages marched from Grand Army Plaza to Bartel Pritchard Square, pushing back against the administration’s “chaos, corruption, and cruelty.”
The first round of No Kings marches swept across the country in June — on the same day as Trump’s “Grand Military Parade” — in opposition to presidential policies and actions seen as authoritarian. Just four months later, the scope of the protest had grown, as New Yorkers pushed back against mass arrests of immigrants by masked federal agents, the deployment of federal forces to cities around the U.S., damaging spending cuts, the ongoing government shutdown, and more.
In recent weeks, Trump has frozen billions of dollars in funding for infrastructure projects in New York City and attempted to take back $34 million in security funding from the MTA because the agency is “based in a Sanctuary Jurisdiction city.”
The president has also vowed to cut federal funding to New York City if Zohran Mamdani wins the mayoral election and denounced the candidate as a communist.
“The Cheeto has some nerve calling anyone anything, look at what he’s doing to this wonderful country,” said one Brooklyn marcher, Phil Marks.
The first No Kings event in Brooklyn drew a crowd of just about 250 people, organizers said, and the crowd grew exponentially in the space of just four months.
Brooklyn’s march was a companion to the anchor protest in Manhattan, which drew a crowd of roughly 100,000 people. Organizers said online that the Park Slope march was an alternative to “accommodate local people” who couldn’t get to Manhattan — but urged Brooklynites to head to the main march “if at all possible.”
A number of Brooklyn’s local elected officials marched in Manhattan — including U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez and Council Members Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés.
I joined 10s of thousands of New Yorkers today to say it loud and clear: No to tyranny. No to cruelty. No to kings in America,” Velázquez said on X. “The GOP can smear these protests all they want, but they can’t silence the truth. Americans are fed up with their authoritarian agenda.”
