Photo Essay: This Is What Democracy Looks Like

October 23, 2025

‘No Kings’, Chicago, IL

10/18/25

This past Saturday, over 200,000 people in Chicago, and nearly 7 million people countrywide took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction with Donald Trump’s administration, making this ‘No Kings’ protest the second largest single-day protest in American history.

While Trump called the protests ‘small’, ‘a joke’, and said that the protesters were ‘not representative of our country’, who I saw all around me on the streets were exactly who represent our country. I saw people of all ages, all races, families, couples young and old, frat boys, veterans, farmers, and someone from every walk of life in-between, walking beside me.

I saw and heard thousands of united Americans exercising our privilege and right to protest, voicing real life instances of hardships caused by this administration, and voicing real solutions for both us, and the existing party apparatus to undertake instead of succumbing to nihilism. I saw and heard thousands of united Americans supporting the causes that oppose occupation not only in Chicago, but Gaza as well.