Freedom of Assembly and an Irrepressible American Spirit on No Kings Day
October 22, 2025
Neither the invective-filled disparagement from White House officials nor the vulgar video posted by President Donald Trump on October 18, in which he hailed himself wearing a crown and piloting a jet fighter plane while dropping excrement on Americans who participated in the nationwide “No Kings” protests, deterred the seven million protestors in some 3,000 locations across the country who demonstrated the strength and spirit of the majestic First Amendment right of peaceable assembly. Freedom of assembly, our nation’s founders believed, was an essential, democratic means for protecting the voice of the people, so integral to their republican experiment that they supposed it to be, in the words of Justice Joseph Story, “unquestionable and inherent.”
Trump acolytes, including Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, in the runup to the largest protest on a single day in American history, had, for days and weeks, baselessly disparaged protestors as those who “Hate America.” The steady stream of slurs covered the ground: Hamas terrorists, Marxists, Socialists, criminals, idiots, and members of “antifa” – yes, always the bogeyman of antifa, which Trump wants Congress to brand a “domestic terrorist organization,” even though no such organization exists. Another authoritarian leader, Mussolini, for whom Trump has expressed admiration, prosecuted “anitfas” in Italy in the 1920s. Their crime? They were anti-fascists who opposed the fascist leader. The administration’s disdain for the right of Americans to exercise speech and assembly freedoms illuminates the authoritarianism into which Trump has plunged the nation.
The constitutional guarantee of Freedom of Assembly, which finds its roots in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, emerged in the heat of pre-revolutionary America as colonists voiced objections to repressive measures enacted by the king and parliament. In 1774, General Gage, on behalf of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, assumed the authority to issue a proclamation that declared it “Treason” for inhabitants of the province to assemble themselves to consider their grievances and form “associations” for their common conduct. All civil magistrates and officers were ordered to apprehend such persons for their “Offences.” In August 1774, Thomas Jefferson expressed outrage: “it is the most alarming Process that ever appeared in a British Government.” He said that “the executing, or attempting to execute, such Proclamation, will justify Resistance and Reprisal.” On October 14, the Continental Congress issued the “Declaration and Resolves,” the first document in American history to protect freedom of assembly, which Congress called a “natural right,” and the direct precursor of the declaration of rights contained in the Revolutionary state constitutions, beginning with the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776.
In debates on the Bill of Rights, members of the First Congress in 1789 raised no objection in principle to including freedom of assembly in the First Amendment, but a few representatives wondered aloud whether it was necessary, given that it struck everyone as a “self-evident, unalienable” right, “inherent” in freedom of expression, and “certainly a thing that never would be called into question.” It was, therefore, “unlikely” to be denied. Other members, however, pointed to English history and governmental denials of assembly, including its prohibition in the reign of King Charles II, and predicted it might happen in America, which made its protection necessary. Others supported its incorporation and pointed out that it would justly enhance our “democracy.”
Justice Story, at the forefront of the nation’s early landmark judicial decisions, addressed in 1833, the standing of freedom of assembly as a fundamental right. “This would seem unnecessary to be expressly provided for in a republican government, since it results from the very nature of its structure and institutions. It is impossible, that it could be completely denied, until the spirit of liberty had wholly disappeared, and the people had become so servile and debased, as to be unfit to exercise any of the privileges of freemen.”
On October 18, the vulgar denigration of freedom of assembly by President Trump could not match the irrepressible spirit of the American people. Trump might have ignored the millions of citizens who assembled in objection to his deeply unpopular policies, which have left him under water in the major categories of opinion polls, or responded like Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who simply but appropriately replied to protests against their policies by stating that, in a democracy, the people have a right to voice their opposition. Trump, however, doesn’t seem to believe that.
-David Adler