No Kings, Then and Now: Echoes of Magna Carta in the 2025 Anti-Authoritarian Protest Movement
Abstract
On the weekend of June 14, 2025, millions of protestors gathered across the United States under the banner No Kings, opposing authoritarianism, surveillance, and executive impunity under the second Trump administration. Unintentionally coinciding with the 810th anniversary of the sealing of the Magna Carta by King John in 1215—a document widely acknowledged as a foundational gesture toward constitutional restraint—the movement’s name, aims, and timing invite comparison. This article explores thematic parallels between the medieval imposition of limits on monarchic power and modern efforts to contest the expansion of presidential and federal authority. Though separated by over eight centuries, both moments reflect fundamental tensions between power and accountability, state and subject, and law and prerogative.
I. Introduction: A Weekend of Historical Irony
The No Kings protests of June 2025 erupted across more than 2,000 U.S. cities, drawing millions into the streets to decry abuses of power, mass surveillance, and the continued erosion of civil liberties under the administration of Donald J. Trump. Strikingly, the protests coincided with the 810th anniversary of Magna Carta—sealed on June 15, 1215 by King John at Runnymede—which included among its clauses the first written expressions of what would become habeas corpus and the principle that rulers are not above the law. The historical coincidence went largely unnoticed by the general public and media, a missed symbolic opportunity that reflects the fading presence of constitutional literacy in modern discourse.
II. The Magna Carta and the Legal Imagination
Although largely a product of its feudal context, Magna Carta has occupied an outsize place in the Western political imagination. While its original clauses dealt with baronial privilege and feudal obligations, several articles—particularly Clause 39 ("No free man shall be seized or imprisoned…except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land")—have echoed through legal traditions as early expressions of due process and resistance to arbitrary rule.
Over centuries, this document was revived and reinterpreted by jurists and political theorists—most famously in 17th-century England and 18th-century America—as a touchstone for individual rights and constitutionalism. Its force lies less in its immediate effects and more in its capacity to symbolize a fundamental shift: the king, for the first time in writing, was subject to law.
III. The 2025 Protests: Power, Secrecy, and Surveillance
The No Kings movement emerged in opposition to a cluster of trends: federal overreach, abuses by agencies such as ICE, deployment of militarized federal units in domestic contexts, and increasingly unchecked executive authority. The phrase “No Kings”—a direct invocation of anti-monarchic sentiment—was apt, not only rhetorically, but historically.
Protestors, including the author in Downtown Los Angeles, carried signs and chanted against the very notions that Magna Carta symbolically restrained: the presumption of sovereign impunity, unilateral state violence, and law applied at the whim of the powerful. The Trump administration’s willingness to weaponize federal forces and ignore judicial constraints invited a cultural memory of absolutism, even if no formal crown existed.
IV. Habeas Corpus and Detention in Historical Perspective
The tension surrounding indefinite detention and lack of judicial oversight at immigrant detention centers is especially resonant when read alongside the legal innovations of 1215. The Trump-era expansion of ICE’s authority, including instances of detention without timely trial or due process, violates principles that were considered revolutionary even in medieval England.
That the U.S. public—largely unaware of the historical parallel—did not broadly frame these protests in relation to the Magna Carta is a poignant reflection on civic education. While legal scholars and a few protest placards may have made the connection, the moment to explicitly frame the protests in a lineage of anti-absolutism was, in some ways, lost.
V. From Barons to Grassroots
There is, of course, a structural disanalogy: the Magna Carta was the result of elite rebellion by landed barons, whereas the No Kings protests reflect popular mobilization from below. But this difference is instructive. Where 13th-century barons sought to protect their feudal privileges, modern protestors seek to dismantle systemic privilege altogether. The continuum, however, remains: power must be checked.
In both cases, it was not the text of the law that guaranteed freedom, but the act of forcing power to concede to law—by means of coordinated resistance. That truth, more than the specific details of either event, is the lasting legacy of both.
VI. Conclusion: Kings in All but Name
The protests of June 2025 remind us that monarchy is not merely a matter of coronation, but of concentrated, unaccountable power. When a president rules through emergency powers, deploys paramilitary forces domestically, and ignores judicial oversight, the distinction between president and king becomes symbolic rather than structural. The protestors chanting “No Kings” were not reacting to pageantry, but to policy—and to a political culture that too often enables authoritarian drift.
As a journal committed to rigor and historical literacy, we regret the missed opportunity to more explicitly frame the No Kings protests within a tradition stretching back to Runnymede. Still, the resonance lingers. In the spirit of the Magna Carta, the actions of June 2025 declare—however imperfectly—that power, however cloaked, must be subject to principle.