Charles Town, West Virginia: School teacher Chervon Grantham is 47 years old and attending her first protest. “I finally had enough and was brave enough,” she says. “I can no longer stay silent about what’s going on in our country.”
Grantham carries a sign with a play on the lyrics to John Denver’s West Virginia anthem, Take Me Home, Country Roads, and wears a T-shirt inspired by the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“Being from West Virginia, I’ve had to deal with racism my whole life,” she says. “I choose to be here and live here because I love my community. But it’s hard, and so now I feel it’s time to stand up so that everyone can be equal and everyone can be free.”
Grantham is with her friend Nicole Sergent, a physical therapist and veteran protester. “It makes me feel like there’s something I can do,” the 49-year-old says. “It feels despairing when you can’t do anything.”
From big blue cities such as New York and Chicago, to small towns in red states like here in Charles Town, West Virginia, millions of Americans took to the streets on Saturday to protest the Trump administration, in one of the largest co-ordinated demonstrations the country has ever seen.
Organisers of the “No Kings” protests said more than 3200 rallies were scheduled across all 50 states. Previous iterations of the No Kings demonstrations also attracted millions.
Donald Trump easily won West Virginia in 2024 – as he did in 2016 and 2020 – including Jefferson County, which takes in Charles Town, and nearby Berkeley County, which includes the city of Martinsburg.
But on Saturday, hundreds of anti-Trump protesters lined the main intersection of Charles Town, outside the historic Jefferson County Court House, where they carried signs, chanted slogans and cheered loudly each time a passing driver honked their horn.
“In general, we mind our Ps and Qs, and we don’t discuss politics. Some people still stick in that mindset,” says Sergent, who is from Martinsburg. “But I do feel that there has been a bit of a turn with certain people.”
Some traditional, non-MAGA Republicans and independent voters who supported Trump are bothered by the violence deployed by federal immigration agents in Trump’s deportation crackdown, Sergent suggests.
Sarah Ward, a 21-year-old from Charles Town, agrees. She also works in schools and says many non-white families don’t want their children’s names and photos to appear in the yearbook due to fears about being targeted by ICE.
Ward says those are the kinds of things that appear to sow doubt about the Trump agenda among the more conservative members of her family. So does the increasing cost of petrol amid the ongoing war on Iran.
“Gas prices and the war have really started to change people’s opinion,” she says. “Because people around here really care about their dollar. We have a lot of blue-collar workers.”
National polls show Trump’s approval rating has fallen sharply since the war started, to the lowest level of his second term. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 36 per cent of Americans approved of Trump’s performance, down from 40 per cent, while 62 per cent disapproved.
On the corner outside the courthouse, a group of mostly older demonstrators has a prime position, holding an extra-large banner that says: “We the people will not be governed by hate.” They sing This Little Light of Mine, which emerged from the American gospel songbook to become a civil rights anthem.
Across the street, a lone Trump supporter is wearing a red Make America Great Again cap underneath a king’s crown and waving a pro-Trump flag. He plays Village People’s Y.M.C.A. and Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA – Trump’s anthems – from his iPhone into a loudspeaker.
“I’m surprised there’s not more of me here,” Jason Butler, 40, says later as the rally winds down. “Maybe people are too afraid. But if you don’t stand up for what you believe in, what else do you have?”
As we speak, a woman yells out the window of her car: “Asshole!” Butler shrugs: “A lot of people get in my face.” People he’s known all his life now think he’s a bigot or a Nazi, he says. “At the end of the day, that’s a really bad assumption to put on people just because they have one belief over another.”
Butler says he voted for Barack Obama but became a Trump convert in 2016 after Obama “went downhill”. And there are still things the president says or does that he doesn’t agree with – the war in Iran is one of them.
“There’s a lot of things he could have approached and done differently, maybe a little bit more diplomatic,” he says. “At the end of the day, he’s doing what he thinks is best … I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff that he knows that he’s not going to tell us until later.”
Butler believes many of the Charles Town protesters are from elsewhere – Virginia, or Washington, DC, which is about 90 minutes’ drive away. Everyone I speak with, however, is a local or from another city nearby.
Organisers are intent on showing that opposition to Trump is not confined to America’s large, liberal cities.
“The defining story of this Saturday’s mobilisation is not just how many people are protesting, but where they are protesting,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, the group that started the No Kings movement last year and led planning of Saturday’s events.
In Washington, several marches converged on the National Mall, steps from the White House (Trump spent the weekend in Florida). One protest was specifically directed at Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, a key architect of the administration’s immigration crackdown.
The White House dismissed the demonstrations. “The only people who care about these Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them,” said spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.
As well as the Iran war, which is now four weeks old, the upcoming midterm elections were a recurring theme during Saturday’s protests. Trump is demanding Congress pass a law, the Save America Act, that would require voters to present identification at the polls, among other things.
Experts say non-citizen voting is exceedingly rare, but the move to require ID has public support. Still, it is not likely to get through Congress with Democrats opposed.
Last week, former White House strategist Steve Bannon said Trump’s decision to send ICE agents to airports to assist with staff shortages was a “test run” for deploying ICE to polling centres at the midterms.
Lizz Winstead, the emcee at Saturday’s protest in St Paul and Minneapolis, told the crowd: “Every single person here today needs to be participating to make sure that our elections are not suppressed, people get to vote, and that in November, everybody is going to be able to vote to make the change that we desperately want to see.”
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.