Uncommon Ground: When No Kings and MAGA Meet

What one small-town standoff reveals about faith, politics, and the limits of dialogue in divided America.

Ashland, OH: A man carrying a Trump-themed American flag at the Promises Kept rally, across the street from the No Kings rally (photo: Ashland County Pictures).

The MAGA event was supposed to end. No Kings was scheduled for Ashland, Ohio’s Corner Park at noon on October 18, 2025—but local Trump supporters had cleverly organized a “Promises Kept” rally that began at 11 AM, before any protesters had arrived. Waving dozens of flags and holding signs that said “HONK FOR TRUMP,” the early movement, so to speak, got the jump. The intersection of Ashland’s Main Street and Claremont Avenue was assailed by the sound of car horns, including the overly loud hollering of one truck that was, as far as anyone could tell, circling the block to honk each time it passed the park.

Then they arrived. First a trickle, then a flood, eclectic homemade signs with a myriad of messages. No Kings was there, but the spot was taken. Custody of the park itself was almost irrelevant. As one sheriff’s deputy explained with a shrug, “I can’t kick them off the sidewalk.”

So the sides arrayed themselves. Most No Kings supporters took advantage of a nearby parking lot just across the street, but there were handfuls of them on the other two corners of the intersection, too. A brave few decided that they were planning on being on the park corner anyway, so they crossed the street and stood among the Trump flags, holding their own signs.

“The key takeaway for the impartial observer is so simple it may feel tautological: Everyone there was more alike than they thought they were.“

Within five minutes of the appearance of the first No Kings signs, shouts began. It wasn’t actually a protester who started it—a driver stopped at the intersection, rolled down his window and shrieked, “You voted for a pedophile! Pedophiles! Fascists! You’re fascists!” Everyone who heard it turned. Most faces were either nervous or annoyed. An older man with a TRUMP 2024 flag tried to shout back, but his voice was, frankly, too weak, and it only encouraged the shrieking driver. Across the way, a handful of No Kings protesters began to chant, “Fascist!” One man stood and shouted curses, drawing concerned and disapproving looks from many of his No Kings allies.

Then one of the Promises Kept attendees, Ben Bowman, shouted “Jesus loves you! I love you! We aren’t enemies! We can talk! We can talk! Jesus loves you! All of you! All of us!” He wasn’t holding a MAGA sign or a Trump flag. His sign read “Only One King” and bore a painted cross.

The nervous looks and anger on the Promises Kept side dissipated, hot air let out of a balloon. A few even laughed as if to say, “Can you believe how those other guys are acting?” Faces with working jaws and suspicious glances returned to talking to their neighbors.

The tone was set for the afternoon. Though the thermometer’s reading went up as the sun beat down, the political atmosphere never again felt like it was going to boil over. Even as the No Kings protesters’ numbers steadily grew and their chants grew more coordinated, there was no moment that felt as tense as the first. Before the event and especially as it became clear Promises Kept wouldn’t leave, everyone seemed to wonder: Would Ashland, Ohio be peaceful or devolve into violence? Peace won the day in a landslide.

I was there because the narratives around No Kings had grown difficult to untangle. Chuck Schumer summed up the stated purpose of the protests: “It is vital for Americans from one end of the country to the other to stand up for our basic freedoms, because Donald Trump is eroding our democracy day by day by day.” On the other hand, Mike Johnson declared that No Kings would be a “hate America rally.” Peaceably standing for American democracy, or anti-American hatred—it’s hard to think of two more distinct forms the protests could take.

When I saw that Ashland would host a Promises Kept event before the local No Kings protest, I thought: Here we go. In one place, I can talk to people from both sides. Who’s happy about what’s happened so far in this administration and why? Who’s willing to show up to protest—and what do they think we should do to solve the problems they’re seeing?

There was another problem. The flyer for the Promises Kept event prominently featured a crown. Were Ashland Trump supporters really coming out in favor of monarchy? I had to wonder. A picture cannot, after all, speak for itself. It might say a thousand words, but a flyer’s iconography is more of a Rorschach test than a photograph. So I wanted to know what the Promises Kept people actually thought: in their own words, not through the filter of a flyer or a Facebook comments sectionBy the time I got to Corner Park, there were about two dozen red-capped supporters there already. This wasn’t a first-time gig for most of them. A local group that calls itself The Coalition was formed years ago to give MAGA-supporting Ashland residents an outlet for their Trump support beyond what the county GOP had the time or interest in running. “We’ve been doing this for five years, waving flags. We thought it was good to get out there and show our support for a conservative, principled government, and common sense policies” said one member, Chuck Bisesi.

Chuck was one of a dozen Promises Kept attendees I interviewed before No Kings began, leaning in to hear each other over the incessant honking of Trump supporters who wanted to show their allegiance but didn’t have the time to stand on the street corner. His refrain of “common sense” was the most consistent throughline of the Promises Kept crowd. What did common sense mean to him? Bisesi cited as his first example Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent unwillingness to define a woman.

The most popular answer though, was immigration enforcement. Tyler Voyik, another Promises Kept attendee, said “Clinton did it, Obama did it. Millions deported. Trump is doing the exact same thing, but now people act like it’s new.” Though the specifics varied, every Promises Kept attendee I talked to listed immigration enforcement as something they cared about—even if, as happened many times, they said that it could be handled better.

I asked every single Promises Kept attendee I spoke to the same question: What do you think about the “King” narrative? Should Trump have more power? To a man, each was adamant that they did not want a king. Joe Kearns echoed Voyik’s comparison to previous presidents: “If you look back, Clinton and Obama used executive orders very freely… [Trump is] doing nothing different than what came before. He’s just using the power of the executive branch.” 

Calls for Trump 2028 were also rejected, unequivocally, by everyone I spoke to: “Last I checked,” Bisesi told me, “There was a law against that. I don’t want him to break the law.” Heather Smith, waving a Women for Trump flag, said “I’m comfortable with anything within the Constitution. No breaking that.”

So what was up with that crown? A joke, organizer Cody Ragle told me. “That was a funny,” she said with a smile. She didn’t smile when she was commenting on the No Kings protesters, by then forming up across the street. “I know that if we had a king, they wouldn't be standing right here, running their mouths like they do.”

By then, I’d heard a constant refrain from the Promises Kept attendees: Once the No Kings protesters arrived, the tone would change. “We’re happy conservatives,” Bisesi said. Voyik followed up shortly thereafter: “All they hear is negative. Of course they get heated. They never get the positive side.” Ragle argued, “[Promises Kept] is all a celebration here. It’s a rally for things we like. That’s why you see us here… We’re spiritual people. They need to repent. They need God, badly.”

Things did heat up once the protesters arrived, of course. But it never spilled out into violence. Ben Bowman, whose choice of response helped the first and tensest confrontation de-escalate, said, “I would sit down over a cup of coffee with them and talk. I mean, if they’re willing to be reasonable, be rational and not be yelling, screaming and swearing, I would do that.” When I asked about his sign, he admitted that he didn’t make it. “Someone else painted it and it was just here, but I thought, this is perfect for me. Jesus preached love and acceptance and tolerance, not hate.”

If the signs were any indication, many of the No Kings protesters would agree with Bowman. “What would Jesus do?” appeared alongside “No Kings but Christ.” There was a distinctly partisan turn to some of those signs, though: One of the WWJD signs was two-sided, and the other side read “Eat the Rich.” I asked the sign’s holder, who wanted to be called “Hopeful Citizen,” what it meant to them. Hopeful replied: “Well, it’s not personal. It’s the corporations and all those things. It’s—eat Amazon, not Jeff Bezos.”

Hopeful wasn’t the only No Kings protester who refused to provide a name, and not the only one waving a left-wing slogan. But, just like Hopeful’s double-sided sign, there was a gulf between what one might expect from a left-wing protest and the reality. “Abolish ICE” read one sign, whose bearer insisted that “I’m not against enforcing the law. I’m against secret police. I’ve seen enough history, I know where having secret police goes. It’s the way it’s enforced that is the problem.” And, notably, there were around five times as many American flags among the No Kings crowd as there were among Promises Kept, whose iconography was decidedly MAGA and Trump-related, not generically American.

As the shrieking driver’s cries of “Pedophile” predicted, there were plenty of signs that read “Release the Epstein list” or otherwise alluded to Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to Donald Trump. “But,” said one bearer who wished to remain anonymous, “this isn’t political. It’s not Republican and Democrat. I was saying it before, Trump’s just the one in office now.” One anonymous Promises Kept attendee, when asked about the Epstein signs, clicked his tongue, looked at the ground, and said “I don’t know why he hasn’t released it yet, to be honest. I’m sure there’s a reason. All in good time.”

Most No Kings protesters didn’t identify themselves as partisan Democrats. Of those that did, a full 70 percent echoed the message of Jen and Emma Holtz, a mother-daughter pair. Emma, aged 17, had decided to miss an event with friends to attend the protest, saying, “I’m here because equality is most important, and I want to make sure everyone has the same rights.” Jen followed up, “This is a party issue, but it’s because MAGA ruined the Republican party. It wasn’t always like this. It’s ruined the discourse.”

Another mother-daughter pair in attendance, Renee and Annie Dubler, made clear that they weren’t in lockstep about all issues. Renee called herself “the lost middle” in contrast to Annie’s more left-leaning tendencies. Renee attended not only to protect immigrants and Democrats, but, as she put it, “the Trump supporters who will, at some point, be on the other side of this power. I want to protect them from themselves.”

The Promises Kept crowd, of course, had been unbothered by the concerns of Renee and others who echoed the sentiment. Their refrain was clear: Nothing needs to change at a system level. Trump’s powers were fine, and not out of step with recent American history. So I asked the No Kings protesters a simple question at the end of each interview: What, if anything, needs to change about the power of the presidency?

Nearly a third of the No Kings protesters answered like one anonymous woman, wearing a full ski mask and sunglasses, who said, “Get him out and this all goes away. It’s his corruption, his evil.” But most of them stopped to ponder the question a little longer. For many, it was clearly the first time they had considered it: they had thought of the problem as contained in the person of Donald Trump.

When pushed, though, most echoed the thoughts of Sarah Toby and William Thompson. Toby summed up the problem: “The checks and balances aren’t checking and balancing the way they should. We aren’t the same country we were when we were founded… We need to be able to come together and talk about what might need to change to reflect our reality.” Thompson said, “We are supposed to follow the rule of law in this country, and that isn’t happening at the top. When it doesn’t happen at the top, that trickles down. We have to find ways to make it happen the way it’s supposed to.”

From both the Promises Kept and No Kings side, then, we see echoes of the same basic American ethos. We see appeals to the Constitution and to the rule of law. I also, less positively, had to contend with the fact that most people on either side had put little thought into policy—and these are the people passionate enough to attend an event! 

Despite the passions present on both sides, then, the value of the parallel events was in-group: both affirmative and signaling. Promises Kept gave the most passionate Trump supporters of the county a chance to have their beliefs validated by a horde of honking trucks. No Kings showed the outnumbered Democrats and politically homeless independents of the county that they weren’t alone in having concerns about this administration’s trajectory.

The key takeaway for the impartial observer is so simple it may feel tautological: Everyone there was more alike than they thought they were. Across the political spectrum, many bemoaned a lack of respectful dialogue or sighed when someone took the chanting too far, into curses and diatribes instead of slogans. There was one message that was completely nonpartisan: “We need to talk to each other better.” 

The problem, of course, is that both sides saw their opponents as the ones making such dialogue impossible. “They won’t listen to reason,” said one No Kings protester, who held an American flag. “It’s a cult, and they won’t listen to anything that challenges their religion.” Her comment, and the tone in which she said it—sad, regretful, a bit annoyed—reminded me of Voyik’s earlier statement that No Kings protesters only hear negative stories about the Trump administration.

The essential issue, then, comes back to information spaces. In the kaleidoscope of modern politics, it is impossible for most people to learn even a tenth of what’s politically relevant at any given time. Yet, as citizens in a democratic republic, we are called on to make decisions about who leads us. Today the politically active are expected to have a take, a reaction to almost anything that might hit the news cycle. Everyone looks into the same kaleidoscope, but the glass turns and falls moment by moment, day by day. Too often we harshly judge our neighbors for glancing into their own kaleidoscope at the wrong time.

That is not to “both sides” the real and serious issues at hand in this administration. Despite the insistence of Promises Kept attendees, the Trump administration has indeed pushed the envelope of presidential power beyond recent precedents. Unlike the majority of No Kings protesters, it is clear to students of American history that this is indeed the trend of the imperial presidency. And even if one agrees with the basic principle of immigration enforcement, civil libertarians of all parties have reason to be concerned about this administration’s methods.

Democracy is not a clean and pretty thing, most of the time. “It seems that nothing is more appropriate for exciting and feeding curiosity than the appearance of the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed. But, despite appearances, there is continuity, Tocqueville continued: “Only the name of the actors is different; the play is the same.” We are playing out the process again, with popular movements struggling to find common ground against increasingly fractured information spaces.

In Ashland, Ohio, the process might have been ugly, and there were indeed lost tempers. But peace prevailed. Appeals to faith helped that time—the common ground that cut through anger long enough for the moment. Another common thread, echoed by many on both sides, is summed up by William Thompson: “At some level, it’s personal. I have to change. We all have to change, to get where we need to be. We have to take responsibility. We have to fulfill the promises of our country.”