By David Hoffman 

A nine-year-old boy named Caleb, a 3rd grade student at Glebe Elementary School, stood in Ballston’s Welburn Square Saturday and with his parents, he chanted, in his own soft but deeply resonant voice, “No Kings!”  

Caleb was holding the sign he had created for this event which drew an entirely peaceful crowd of about 400, overwhelmingly white and middle class, of all ages, united to speak out against Donald Trump and his record of tyrannical rule.

Utterly reminiscent of the anti-Vietnam-war gathering in 1967 at the Pentagon, famously dubbed by Norman Mailer an “army of the night,” the highly animated yet perfectly unthreatening gathering in Welburn square lived up to its name:  However, this was an army of the day, well-spoken indeed, but nevertheless burning with fierce zeal.  

In Ballston – one of about 2,700 No Kings rallies nationwide – people in green costumes like the frogs first appearing in Portland Oregon, and yellow ones for banana peels, stood together joyously in their determination to oppose President Trump and his second-term record of harshly cracking down on immigration, indiscriminately deploying the armed National Guard militias into cities like Washington DC, and ferociously going after his many critics and political opponents, reminiscent of 250 years ago, when George Washington, and the 13 colonies then together in revolt, drove another King – George III and his Hessian mercenaries and British Redcoats – out of what became America and “a Republic, if you can keep it,” in the famous challenge voiced by Benjamin Franklin.

For soft-spoken Caleb, this determination was top of mind for his self-drawn poster depicting the American flag with a caricatured king wearing an uneasy crown and a diagonal slash mark drawn across it representing total opposition. “I drew the crown on it and drew a line through it, cancelling it out because we’re not a monarchy and because we shouldn’t have kings in America, because we’re a democracy, not a monarchy!” he repeated for emphasis.

But Caleb was not alone in Welburn Square in rejecting the authoritarian rule of kings in favor of democracy.  Also speaking out was No Kings Day local spokesperson 81-year-old Arlington resident Terry Rea, who invoked the Holocaust where she lost her uncle and grandmother during World War Two, saying “the theme of this rally is “Never Again!” 

Terry was brought to America from her birthplace after the war in England.  She grew up “very sheltered” in affluent Beverly Hills and attended the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, where she cut her teeth opposing wrongful authority — literally alongside Mario Savio and the “Free Speech” movement on campus then.  Most of her life was spent as a resident of Falls Church, she explained, until moving recently with her husband to live in senior housing in Arlington. “The younger me would have been frightened to be here, but not me,” she stated with emphasis, “because everything is at stake now: women’s rights, immigrants’ rights, everybody’s rights! I couldn’t just complain and be depressed,” she added as she joined in the ongoing crowd chant of “No Kings, No ICE!”

Also at the Welburn Square rally was the slightly younger (in her 50s, she said) Ballston resident Marcie Burns, who told me that she liked “the fact that the theme of ‘No Kings’ is to do what you can, wherever you can, that it’s so open-ended, and that you can be involved like this, in your own community.”  Meanwhile in Middleberg Virginia, anti-Trump author E. Jean Carroll preached resistance to a crowd gathered at a film festival in the tony horse farm country there.  Aged 81, Carroll was also appearing at a screening of the new documentary film “Ask E.Jean,” directed by Ivy Meeropol, about Carroll who in a 2019 book “What Do We Need Men For?” accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store fitting room in either 1995 or 1996.

When Trump denied this had happened and accused her of lying, Carroll sued him in 2019 and again in 2022, for both defamation and sexual battery.  She won jury verdicts in her favor both times and Trump has been ordered to pay her a total of $88.3 million in damages.  (He has appealed these verdicts, and she has yet to receive any of the money.) 

 Echoing the rhetoric from the No Kings rallies, according to the Washington Post, Carroll told the dozens gathered at the film festival that Trump exhibits vindictive behavior characteristically.  She urged all Americans to remain alert, adding that “It should scare all of you, every single person in this room should be terrified of that.”