Well over 1,000 people lined up along the front of Paducah’s Bob Noble Park Saturday afternoon to rally against actions the Trump administration has taken over the course of the president’s second term.
Over 3,000 protests took place across the world Saturday – including more than 30 in Kentucky – as part of the No Kings movement, which calls on people to stand up and speak out against actions from President Donald Trump and his administration that the group calls authoritarian. Saturday was the third day of nationwide protests No Kings has scheduled, with its first coming last June on Trump’s birthday as a way for people to counter a planned military parade.
Four Rivers Indivisible, a Paducah-based community activist group, has held rallies on each of the three days No Kings has designated for unified protests. Leslie McColgin, the group’s co-leader, said attendance has grown at every No Kings Paducah protest. Organizers estimated at least 1,800 people attended the two-and-a-half hour event on Saturday – up from an estimated 1,500 at its last No Kings protest in October.
“We're coming together to shift private discontent to being part of something that is bigger than any one of us,” McColgin told the crowd of attendees Saturday.
People at the Paducah event held signs and spoke out against a variety of actions Trump and his administration have carried out. Since October, the administration has captured and detained Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and launched a war with Iran. Federal agents with ICE and Border Patrol shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in two separate incidents while the government was operating increased immigration enforcement actions in the state’s largest cities.
Navy veteran Kempton Baldridge, of Paducah, was among the crowd of protesters at Noble Park, where many drivers traveling along Park Avenue honked their horns and cheered for the cause.
“The level of outrage and concern [I have] doesn't allow me to stay home. I spent a significant part of my life in uniform defending democracy. To see it being cashiered for a crime family, it just breaks my heart,” Baldridge said.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker, who’s running to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell in this year’s elections, stopped by the far western Kentucky protest, walking on a sidewalk in front of the line of protesters and leading chants with a bullhorn.
Charles Booker, who is running for the Democratic nomination for Kentucky’s open Senate seat this year, showed up to the No Kings protest in Paducah Saturday afternoon.
— Hannah Saad (@hannahsaad.bsky.social) 2026-03-28T20:32:41.961Z
Keegan Hill, of Paducah, said he used to be a Trump supporter. However, Hill said he began questioning his support of Trump when the president claimed the 2020 election – when he was defeated by Joe Biden – was “stolen” from him.
Hill said there are several actions the Trump administration has taken that he disagrees with, including Medicaid funding cuts and the war with Iran – which has raised the price of gas by around one dollar per gallon on average across the country in the month since the first attack was launched. Some of Trump’s 2024 campaign pledges included reducing inflation and lowering gas prices to under $2 per gallon.
“All the promises that Donald Trump has made, he has gone against,” Hill said. “There is no good reason to be a supporter of Trump at this point.”
McColgin said Four Rivers Indivisible is supporting the launch of a new group called Murray Indivisible, which plans to conduct similar activism work in Calloway County.
