Johnson Describes Planned No Kings Rally As ‘hate America,’ ‘pro-hamas’ Gathering

Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday slammed the No Kings protest march scheduled to take place at the National Mall next week, describing the planned protest as the "hate America rally" that would draw "the pro-Hamas wing" and "the antifa people." His characterizations, however, drew condemnation from some Democrats who defended the protest movement, whose first big demonstration was overwhelmingly peaceful.

“They’re all coming out,” Johnson said Friday in an interview on Fox News. “Some of the House Democrats are selling t-shirts for the event. And it’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally because they can't face their rabid base.”

Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), another senior House Republican, also criticized the planned demonstration and blamed it for prolonging the shutdown. Telling reporters Democrats had caved to the “terrorist wing of their party,” Emmer alluded to a “hate America rally in D.C. next week.”

The No Kings movement first sprang up as counter-programming to a military parade spearheaded by the White House in June, leading to the largest coordinated demonstration against Trump to date since his return to the Oval Office. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, and organizers at the time said they specifically did not plan an event in Washington to avoid a conflict.

The coast-to-coast protests went on almost entirely without incident, with one notable act of violence — when rally “peacekeepers” in Salt Lake City shot and killed a bystander because they believed another man with a gun was about to fire on the crowd.

The organizers of the upcoming rally largely brushed off House GOP leaders’ characterization. In a joint, unsigned statement, which they said they issued “after a few moments of laughter,” they pressured Johnson over the government shutdown.

“Speaker Johnson is running out of excuses for keeping the government shut down,” the No Kings coalition wrote. “Instead of reopening the government, preserving affordable healthcare, or lowering costs for working families, he’s attacking millions of Americans who are peacefully coming together to say that America belongs to its people, not to kings.”

The organizers of the rally run the gamut of the Democratic coalition, from labor unions to the Indivisible to Vote Save America, the fundraising and volunteering arm of Crooked Media.

Jon Favreau, one of Crooked’s co-founders, criticized Emmer and Johnson on social media, emphasizing that the first No Kings protest was “peaceful” with “American flags everywhere.”

“Those of us who will be participating next weekend in what Emmer calls a ‘hate rally’ for ‘terrorists’ love our country — particularly its promise that we're all created equal, that we all have the right to speak freely, to enjoy equal protection under the law, to believe what we want, and to choose our leaders without fear of reprisal,” he wrote.

Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Emmer again linked support for Hamas with next week’s rally in a statement to POLITICO.

"Chuck Schumer and Democrats are putting the livelihoods of the American people at risk to score political points with their pro-terrorist wing of the Democrat Party,” he said. “Just last month, one-third of Democrats surveyed said they support Hamas — a foreign terrorist organization — more than our ally, Israel. Schumer and Democrats must end the political games and reopen the government."