The progressive "No Kings" movement has announced a nationwide event for June 14, President Trump's 80th birthday, headlined by a 90-minute concert in midtown Manhattan featuring Bette Midler, Patti Smith, and actress Jane Fonda, with 18 watch parties planned across 11 states.
The event, dubbed "Rise Up, Sing Out," will take place at The Town Hall in New York City. It marks the fourth round of organized demonstrations since Trump returned to office, following protests in June 2025, October 2025, and March 2026.
The timing is no accident. June 14 is also the date the UFC is scheduled to hold fights on the South Lawn of the White House, with construction of a temporary octagon already underway as of this week. The contrast tells you everything about where each side wants the cameras pointed.
The concert lineup reads like a roster of familiar progressive voices. Singer Rufus Wainwright and vocalist Sasha Allen join Midler and Smith on the bill. Fonda, who restarted the Hollywood-based Committee for the First Amendment in October 2025, is listed as a featured participant. Liberal commentator Joy Reid rounds out the announced names, as The Hill reported.
Behind the celebrity sheen sits familiar organizing muscle. The progressive groups 50501 and Indivisible, both fixtures of the anti-Trump protest circuit, are involved in organizing the demonstrations. The Committee for the First Amendment, Fonda's advocacy group, is sponsoring the concert itself.
The movement's website frames the event in sweeping terms, tying it to America's approaching 250th anniversary:
"The next 250 starts with us. As America approaches its anniversary about what story we tell. We can let strongman politics and corruption define the moment. Or we can make the story of America about people coming together, across race, background, identity, belief, and community, to defend our rights and build a future rooted in people's power."
A second statement from the movement's site described the concert as "about reclaiming patriotism as something inclusive, participatory, and rooted in care for one another, not power, pageantry, or one person's spotlight."
The language is polished. The accusation embedded in it, that the current president represents "strongman politics and corruption", is not.
This is not the movement's first pass at the president. The original "No Kings" demonstrations launched on June 14, 2025, Trump's 79th birthday, timed to coincide with the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary parade in Washington, D.C. The New York Post reported that those protests descended into chaos.
The scale of the first round was substantial. AP News reported nearly 2,000 protest locations across all 50 states, with organizers expecting millions of participants in what they called the largest single-day mobilization since Trump returned to office. A flagship march and rally took place in Philadelphia, pointedly not in Washington, where the military parade rolled through with approximately 6,600 troops and 150 military vehicles.
The 50501 Movement's website at the time did not mince words. Its statement declared: "They've defied our courts, deported Americans, disappeared people off the streets, attacked our civil rights, and slashed our services. The corruption has gone too far. No thrones. No crowns. No kings."
A second round of protests followed in October 2025, with Newsmax reporting on plans for another wave on October 18 of that year. A third set came in March 2026. The June 14 concert and watch parties will be the fourth.
Trump himself addressed the "king" framing during an October 2025 interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures."
"They're referring to me as a king. I'm not a king."
In a separate exchange, as Fox News reported, the president elaborated: "I don't feel like a king, I have to go through h*** to get stuff approved... We're not a king at all, thank you very much."
The president's blunt dismissal has done nothing to slow the movement's momentum, or its appetite for celebrity endorsement. The entertainment industry's eagerness to serve as the opposition's megaphone is by now a well-worn dynamic. The White House recently condemned actor Mark Hamill for posting an AI-generated image of Trump in a grave, one of many recent clashes between the administration and Hollywood figures.
Fonda's involvement is particularly telling. Her decision to restart the Committee for the First Amendment, a name borrowed from a 1947 group that opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee, signals a movement that wants to wrap progressive protest in historical legitimacy. Whether that framing resonates beyond the already converted is another question.
The broader pattern of entertainment figures inserting themselves into political confrontation has drawn criticism from within the industry itself. RFK Jr. recently called out late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for the decline of comedy into partisan hectoring, a critique that applies just as easily to a concert billing itself as patriotism while built entirely around opposing one man.
For all its talk of "people's power" and "inclusive patriotism," the "No Kings" movement leaves several questions conspicuously unanswered. Who founded it? Who funds it? How many people actually showed up to the previous three rounds of protests? The movement's website offers slogans. It does not offer an accounting.
The 18 watch parties are spread across 11 states, but the movement has not named which states. Expected attendance figures for the concert and watch parties have not been disclosed. Neither has the cost of admission.
The vagueness is strategic. Movements that traffic in grand rhetoric and celebrity names can generate media coverage without demonstrating real grassroots depth. A 90-minute concert in a Manhattan theater with Bette Midler and Joy Reid is not a mass movement. It is a fundraiser with better lighting.
Meanwhile, the political climate around these events has grown more volatile. The shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner earlier this year, carried out by a suspect who donated to the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, is a grim reminder of where overheated political rhetoric can lead.
On the same day the "No Kings" movement holds its concert and watch parties, the UFC will stage fights on the South Lawn of the White House. Workers began building the temporary octagon this week. The visual split could not be sharper: progressive celebrities in a Manhattan theater versus a combat sports spectacle on the president's front lawn.
The movement insists it is "reclaiming patriotism." But patriotism that defines itself entirely in opposition to a single elected leader, and draws its energy from the same coastal celebrity class that has been wrong about the American electorate for a decade running, is not patriotism. It is branding.
Trump won the presidency. Twice. The voters who put him there are not looking to Bette Midler for guidance on what America means.