JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
More than 5 million people turned out at more than 2,000 No Kings protests over the weekend. That's according to organizers' estimates. And the size and scale of anti-Trump protests has been growing compared to President Trump's first term. That is according to the political scientist Erica Chenoweth at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Chenoweth co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, which documents political mobilization in the United States. They have called this widening movement an American Spring. Erica, welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ERICA CHENOWETH: Thank you for having me.
SUMMERS: Thanks for being here. OK, so we talked a while back, and when I talked with you then, you told me that crowd size, crowd diversity and a disciplined message are some of the factors that really make for a successful protest movement. So I'd like to ask you to take stock of the protests that we saw over the weekend. In your view, did they have those elements?
CHENOWETH: Well, my team is still tallying the protests from the No Kings events from around the country. But anecdotally, at least, and for the records that we've already validated, it's very clear that the general sense of many of the people who are participating was that they felt their own power and agency in participating in the protest. The second thing to note is that the day came off with potentially millions of people in the streets, as you mentioned, and with very few incidents of injuries, arrests, property damage or anything else that might play into the narrative that the movement is not disciplined, is not nonviolent and is not democratic in its ethos.
You know, the other piece is that it was truly nationwide. There are reports of, for example, at least a thousand people in the town of Bath, Maine. That is well over 10% of its own city's population. And so there was a very widespread nature to the mobilizations that I think set it apart from, you know, previous eras of American protest.
SUMMERS: You've taken a look at the size and the scale of protests in President Trump's current term and compared them to those that happened during his first term. Can you tell us a bit about what you found?
CHENOWETH: Sure. So my team at the Crowd Counting Consortium, which I co-direct with Jeremy Pressman, has been tallying protests every day since the Women's March of 2017. So we've got a lot of years of comparative data, day over day, for what has been happening in the country. And what we've been able to, we think, pretty reliably demonstrate is that through May of 2025, there have been well over three times as many protest events in the United States as has happened during the same period in 2017.
The second thing about the protest that's really interesting and important is that over 99.5% of those thousands of protests during the April and May period alone featured no injuries, arrests or property damage. That's an extraordinarily nonviolent movement, especially for the number of events that we have seen.
SUMMERS: Despite your findings, at least up until June, that protests have largely been nonviolent, we have seen the Trump administration use isolated instances of disorder to justify, for example, commandeering California's National Guard, to sending Marines to that state. So I wonder, to your mind, is there a danger here that widening political protest could invite additional use or displays of force coming from the federal government?
CHENOWETH: There's this scholar named Christian Davenport who, a number of years ago, wrote an article called "The Law Of Coercive Responsiveness," and in that article he makes the claim that any time a protest movement actually becomes powerful and threatening, the government will respond with force. And the more powerful and threatening a movement is becoming, the more powerful the response with force. One way to interpret the escalation is as a sign of the growing power and impact of the movement.
That said, as you indicated, there is certainly a danger to protesters for engaging in protest once it is more threatening to the government and - more politically threatening, I should say - when the government, for example, bundles peaceful protesters with those engaging in violent criminal acts while protesting. But I would say that it's a predictable response when a movement is gathering power.
SUMMERS: That's political scientist Erica Chenoweth of the Harvard Kennedy School. Thank you so much.
CHENOWETH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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