It was Christina Hall’s first protest rally. And she was terrified.
So are a lot of people who protest the rule of Donald Trump. They often decline to give their full name or any name at all, fearing reprisal from a notoriously thin-skinned president who routinely vows revenge against his critics.
When Hall joined an estimated 7 million Americans for the second “No Kings” protest Saturday, Oct. 18, Trump responded the next day with an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and dumping feces on protesters from a fighter jet.
But what truly scared Hall was simply being around other people. A rare autoimmune disease usually keeps her in her Salem home where she protests by signing petitions and sharing information online.
Being around other people — especially an estimated crowd of 2,000 at the Oregon State Capitol Building in Salem — threatens her health and fills her with terror, she told Street Roots.
Only two things terrify her more, she said. One is seeing the country at the mercy of a convicted felon who attempted to orchestrate a violent insurrection.
The other is staying home and not doing enough to oppose it.
“I do everything I can to resist online from home, but I couldn’t miss today,” Hall said. “I had to be here.”
Record crowds
While some 2,000 people protested at the Oregon Capitol Building, estimates from the Portland Police Bureau put the number of protesters in downtown Portland between 40,000 and 50,000.
Across the nation, according to estimates from NBC News, 7 million protested in more than 2,700 American communities — representing an increase of more than 2 million people from the first No Kings protest June 14.
Numerous cities in Oregon held their own rallies, including the mid-Willamette Valley community of Lebanon. The town of 20,000 people, roughly 80 miles south of Portland, may seem an odd place to rally opposition to Trump.
Blue protest, red town
Lebanon is a rural community with conservative leaders in Linn County, where Trump took 60% of the vote last year. Yet organizers of Lebanon’s rally told Street Roots their protest drew hundreds of people to line Main Street and wave signs.
Karen Schuleller, one of the organizers of the event for East Linn Indivisible, put the official headcount at 448.
“People moved around a bit, so it was hard to get an exact number,” Schuleller said.
It was local resident Mich Bennett’s first protest.
“I’m surprised by the amount of thumbs up and honking versus the middle finger,” Bennett said.
Not everyone was happy to see the protesters.
At one point, protesters were shrouded in heavy black exhaust from a large diesel truck whose driver seemed to intentionally rev his engine as he passed by.
Bennett said people can’t be discouraged by such things.
“You’re living in this world, and you have to participate,” he said.
Fire on the right
A small group of counter-protesters showed up at the Capitol rally. Several protests have been held at the Capitol since Trump was inaugurated in January. This is the first one to draw a conservative counter-protest.
Conservative protesters occupied the southern end of the Capitol mall along Northeast Court Street, while liberal protesters occupied the opposite end along Northeast Center Street.
Organizers of the counter-protest claimed their event drew at least 400 people. The crowd size varied, but to a Street Roots reporter, it never seemed to exceed 150 people.
Bill Minnix of La Pine was one of the main speakers at the counter-protest. Aside from supporting Trump, protesters’ main agenda items included recalling Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek.
Minnix is the chief petitioner behind the recall effort through his group Oregon for the People.
“She has failed in her leadership responsibilities by supporting policies that prioritize support of illegal immigrants over law-abiding Oregonians, including veterans, low-income families and victims of crime,” Minnix said.
She has failed to obey Trump, risking federal funding in the process, he said. He also accused her of trying to make up for the lack of federal funding by taxing Oregonians more.
Oregon governors have no authority to raise taxes by themselves. They must get approval from the state’s legislators.
Legislators passed House Bill 3991 last month, Kotek’s proposal to raise $4.3 billion in revenue over the next decade to fund road maintenance, operations and public transit.
The bill was motivated by Oregon’s budget shortfall, as well as federal cutbacks.
Minnix said he bears no animosity toward anti-Trump protesters, but at least two opposing protesters nearly came to blows after a heated exchange of words.
A similar exchange ended shortly after the conservative protester bragged he could do more push-ups than his leftist counterpart, and the leftist protester responded that he is an experienced SCUBA diver and can hold his breath underwater longer.
Beyond those isolated incidents, both rallies seemed to proceed peacefully — even if conservative demonstrators characterized the larger anti-Trump rally as a “riot.”
A gray rebellion
Protests in the Salem area also included rallies in Keizer, Dallas and other communities.
Beth Monticue and Emily Herbert with Polk County Indivisible got an early start on the day, hanging a banner on a pedestrian bridge on Highway 22 between Salem and Dallas.
Like Monticue and Herbert, many of the protesters at the mid-valley protests were 60 or older.
“We look like a box of Q-Tips,” Mike Mooney of Salem told Street Roots. “Fox News is losing its target demographic.”
Mooney, 72, said he began protesting as soon as Trump was first elected in 2016.
“If I had to choose just one thing that infuriates me, I would say the lies,” he said. “I just cannot believe the blatant lies coming from every member of the administration. You can easily refute those lies. I think the people who just ignore the facts, despite all the evidence, that’s the definition of being a cult member. You can’t reason with cult members. They’re brainwashed.”
Standing in solidarity
Karla Morton, the pastor of Salem Mennonite Church, brought a group of some 20 parishioners to protest and sing.
“We’re singing because it’s a way to gather us together,” she told Street Roots. “It’s one way to build courage in this time of tyranny and further oppression.”
It is important for her and her fellow Mennonites to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, Morton said.
“Our ancestors were persecuted because of our faith tradition of not aligning with the state,” she said. “While we went through part of the Reformation, we said it didn’t go far enough. We were still too closely aligned with the state, and we have always pushed for the separation of church and state.”
Abby, a student studying to be a physician assistant, declined to provide her last name. Nonetheless, she said protesting publicly is important.
“A lot of what the Trump administration is doing is violating human rights and violating our Constitution,” she said. “The more people who gather and share the message that we don’t agree with what’s happening, the greater the power of resistance becomes.”
Abby attended the first No Kings protest in June while living in Boise, Idaho.
“It was the biggest protest Boise has ever had in its history, and Idaho is a very red state, so it was a very special place to be at the time,” she said.
The most compelling issue for her is immigration, Abby said.
“It’s essentially kidnapping people off the street from unmarked vans with no badges shown,” she said. “It’s very cruel. That’s not how we should be treating people, and it’s especially not how our government should be treating people.”
Past lessons
Beth, who also declined to provide her last name, said she sees the effects of Trump’s immigration policies on the people who work with her in the restaurant business.
“Working in restaurants, we have an immigrant community that works in our restaurants who bust their rear ends,” Beth said. “I have people in the immigration process who did everything right, and they’re scared. That’s not OK. There’s a way to do this, and this isn’t right.”
Her father escaped Nazi-occupied Poland as a child. He was 6 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.
“I’ve always been taught that we’re immigrants here,” she said. “When have we ever been a show-your-papers country? It goes against everything.”
Isa, another person who prefers to only give her first name, is a student at South Salem High School.
“I’m learning about fascist movements in history and seeing something very similar happening right now,” she said. “You can see the effect of past movements.”
Volunteer brigade
The Capitol rally was largely organized by Salem Region Indivisible. One of the organizers, Tom Gapen, laughed at the claim by counter-protestors that the 2,000 people at the other end of the mall were paid to be there.
“We’re all volunteers, and we have two or three meetings a week where we figure things out,” Gapen said. “We often say that we’re building the airplane as we fly it. None of us knew how to do this shit, but we’re just figuring it out.”
Gapen said he was a casual activist until Trump was elected.
“Now, with the militarization of blue cities and targeting sanctuary laws and all those fucking idiots he has in his cabinet, it’s just unconscionable,” he said. “We can’t sit still.”
True fear comes from watching the country abandon the rule of law for the vanity of one man, first-time protester Hall said.
“All of this is very scary for me,” she said. “My grandmother was a judge. I come from a family in the legal profession. We grew up thinking this could never happen here.”
Morton said she understands people being afraid, but she nonetheless gave her full name. “What’s going to happen to me? I don’t care. I mean, I do, but I don’t.”
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This article appears in October 22, 2025.