Well, here we are. The second inauguration of Donald Trump is quickly approaching. And there’s no doubt that progressives have a lot of work to do in the months and years ahead. Our guest this week co-founded one of the biggest groups that initially came about in response to Trump 1.0. Leah Greenberg is co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, an organization with a mission to organize thousands of local groups to resist the GOPs agenda, elect local champions and fight for progressive policies. She joins WITHpod to discuss lessons learned from the past, ideas within Indivisible’s “Practical Guide to Democracy on The Brink” and glimmers of hope as ordinary people fight back.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Leah Greenberg: If there’s anything we know about successful movements to defeat autocracies around the world, right, successful movements to take down dictatorships, it’s that they build broad coalitions and the coalition may not be united by anything other than their opposition to what is currently happening. And that is okay. That is actually a precondition for success in many cases. And so, part of what we’re going to have to do during this time is recognize that some people will be with us on some issues that we care about and they won’t be with us on other issues that were or other policies that we care about. And we still need them as part of that broad front for democracy.
Chris Hayes: Hello. And welcome to Why is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Well, as I speak to you, the country is preparing for the second inauguration of Donald Trump. And the Democratic Party and the broader, let’s say, center-left, the broad coalition of folks on the center-left, ranging from Noam Chomsky to Liz Cheney, is trying to figure out how they are going to deal with, work against, maybe compromise with this new Trump administration. And there’s been a pretty notable different tune being sung by a lot of prominent democratic politicians about Trump. I think in 2016, to generalize, Democrats generally thought it was a fluke. He had lost the popular vote by three million votes, which is like not an insignificant amount actually. And in fact, it’s a larger amount than he won it by this time. And that he was an aberration and needed to be resisted from day one. And we saw that with the woman’s march that happens the day after inauguration. We saw with Democrats skipping his inauguration. And generally, this, you know, this notion of resistance, which became a kind of watchword.
This time around, you have a lot of prominent Democrats saying we have to take a different tack. We have to work with Donald Trump on areas of shared agreement. You even have Bernie Sanders, obviously, who’s sort of to the left of the Democratic caucus saying, I look forward to working with Trump on capping credit card fees at 10 percent, which is some policy that Trump, in his sort of inimitable way, threw out at some campaign stop, which, don’t hold your breath for that to happen. You’ve got Tom Suozzi, who’s a kind of centrist moderate Democrat in the Long Island district that Donald Trump won running op-ed this weekend saying, we can’t just resist. We have to look for areas of agreement. You have Ro Khanna, who’s a progressive from California member of Congress saying the same thing.
And so, there’s an interesting debate happening about, okay, what do Democrats, progressives, liberals, people on the left, that whole spectrum of folks, what do they do this time around with Trump? Should there be lessons learned? Is there evidence that the previous approach didn’t work because he got elected. Does that mean new approaches have to be tried? Should there be more treating him like a quote unquote normal president? Should there be more cooperation or looking for areas of shared agreement? And this is something that I’ve been thinking about too, not so much in those terms, but even how we cover him and how we do it, you know, this time as opposed to last time. And so, I thought it’d be good to talk to someone who’s sort of been in the trenches of this since 2016, right after Donald Trump was elected there was this group called itself Indivisible that published this kind of manual. It was from former Capitol Hill staffers basically being like, here’s how to think about in real concrete tactical terms how to resist Donald Trump in politics. And Indivisible became this mass organization. It’s very distributed. There’s thousands of local groups and they’ve remained very active. They played a really key part in defeating the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And they’ve done a whole bunch of stuff since then. They were very activated on child separation. They’ve been activated in the election and they’re still around.
Leah Greenberg is one of the folks that founded, co-founded Indivisible back in 2016. And she’s the co-executive director there now. And I thought it would be good to kind of check in with her about how Indivisible, which is one of the biggest groups that kind of came about in response to Trump 1.0 about how they’re thinking about Trump 2.0. So, Leah Greenberg, welcome to the program.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
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Chris Hayes: Will you tell me first a little bit about your background and how Indivisible came about the first time?
Leah Greenberg: Absolutely. Well, I’m a former congressional staffer, as you mentioned. And I had spent a lot of my career before Trump was elected working in the field of human trafficking, so organizing congressional staffers to talk to advocates from the human trafficking field about how to understand and how to move policy. And after Donald Trump was elected, like a lot of people, I was looking at the work that I had done and I was looking at what was at stake as Donald Trump was preparing to come in. And I was very, very alarmed and felt like we needed to move from the policy work that I had been doing to organizing to build power to stop Trump and what was happening. And my husband, Ezra Levin, who’s my co-founder, co-executive director, had worked on poverty policy before that. He had the same set of reactions.
And we were looking around, we were seeing this massive wave of people who were organizing, right? Regular people who were out there all over the country, who were suddenly looking for answers on how they were going to push back and stop Donald Trump. And so we took all the lessons that we had learned when we met the Tea Party in our own congressional careers, a very, very effective local organizing force that organized locally, that focused on their own elected officials, that never gave an inch. We took all those lessons. We took out the racism and the violence of the Tea Party, obviously. We turned it into this guide. We pushed it out on Google docs. We figured our friends would read it. They’d share it with their families. Maybe, you know, somebody would let us know in six months that they had read it and they’d used it at a town hall and we would be super proud of ourselves.
That’s not what happened. Instead, thousands of people picked it up. They started organizing. They started running with it. And suddenly we had catapulted ourselves into the middle of this mass movement of people who had gone from zero to 60 determined to stop Donald Trump.
Chris Hayes: One of the things that I loved about that original document was just how concrete it was. And one of the key things, this is, I think, in some sense is an obvious point, but a really important one, which is it really matters if you can get a bunch of people, it doesn’t have to be a huge amount, 20, 25, 30, 100 who are represented by an actual member of Congress to contact that person or to organize together and say, come meet with us, to say, these are our priorities. Like that, I guess at some level it’s obvious, but it’s amazing how A, hard it is to do that and B, how often it isn’t done by non-professional groups. There’s all kinds of groups that are, you know, creating this kind of agitation or lobbying from a sort of top-down professional way, but actual grassroots, hey, me and 25 of my fellow members of your district are really angry about this thing. And we want to hear what you have to say about it. And we want to meet with you and talk with you about it.
Leah Greenberg: That’s right. That’s right. And that is the core of our theory of change, right? Is that if you organize locally and you push with your elected officials, you can either get them to listen to you or you can often exact some political consequences if they do not listen to you and they do not do what you are asking them to do. And that effect is true in Congress. And it can actually be even more true on the very local level, right? If you get 10 people to show up to a county commissioner meeting, that is a fire alarm for that county commissioner, right? And so actually this kind of very local organizing, if you know what you’re talking about, if you come in armed with an ask, that puts you pretty much automatically in like the top 1 percent of influencer constituents in your district.
Chris Hayes: In fact, what’s funny is that basic lever, right? That you can kind of get a kind of 10X, a 100X power response from showing up —
Leah Greenberg: Right.
Chris Hayes: — is often used to terrible ends, you know?
Leah Greenberg: Right.
Chris Hayes: You know, the problem with this big debate we’re having about the inability to build housing and the sort of NIMBY versus YIMBY postures towards it, a lot of times just a few people show up to the planning meeting and the people that are motivated to come to the planning meeting are people that oppose the new affordable housing development. And so, if there’s five of them there and they’re like, we don’t want this, that has outsized power. One of the insights I think for your group is that progressives can use that to their advantage if they could also get five or 10 people to show up.
Leah Greenberg: A 100 percent, a 100 percent. You can be a really outsized influence in your elected officials’ minds if you are simply organized and you are prepared and you show up and you use the tools available to you, whether that is local press, whether that is social media, whether that is organizing your friends, or whether that’s just calling into their office on a regular basis and checking in on the status of the thing you care about.
Chris Hayes: So when you think about, so Indivisible, it had this kind of viral moment. You said you weren’t, you were anticipating, sort of put it out there, maybe people will use it, and then it became this sort of the move on of its generation in some ways. I mean, it was similar in some ways to MoveOn, which also kind of virally took off, was distributed, had local groups. MoveOn obviously still exists, very much so, very much a very effective organization.
Leah Greenberg: They are.
Chris Hayes: But this was 2016. What do you think when you look back on those four years, what are the kind of successes and failures? What are the wins losses? What do you think, oh, yeah, we really nailed that. Okay, we didn’t nail that. And I want to take some lessons from it.
Leah Greenberg: Well, I would start at the beginning because I do think that we’re a little bit memory holding just how deeply uncertain the immediate period after Donald Trump was elected back in 2016 was, right? You had Democrats, including Democrats like Chuck Schumer, who were talking about, well, we lost, an election is an election, they have consequences, maybe we’ll work together on infrastructure. That’s actually a big part of why we wrote the Indivisible guide, because we were really disappointed and frustrated with the lack of leadership that was coming from a lot of Democrats in Washington in November and December. And we were thinking the thing that’s going to shake them out of this torpor is having a big bunch of their constituents show up and get mad. And that is exactly what happened, right? Chuck Schumer had daily and weekly protests outside his house, outside of all his congressional districts. He had this massive wave of constituent protests from Indivisible, but from a lot of folks across New York that got him in shape and got him moving back into a resistance posture. This happened with a bunch of Democrats. I think that we can forget a little bit. We can sort of look back and think that it started with the Women’s March, which was obviously like a huge and enormous moment, but there was a lot of people kind of running around in circles for the first few months.
And so, the actual fact that we were able to organize not just to save the Affordable Care Act, but the first step in saving the Affordable Care Act, which was getting all of the Democrats in line, getting them consistent and united so that it was a fight between Republicans about trying to get to the number necessary to pass it. That set of achievements, I think, is the first and very significant success that we need to focus in right now.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, let me take a second with that because I think that my history, that complicates a little bit of the very quick history I gave at the top of the show, which is what you’re saying is there’s actually more similarity between the omission reaction 2016 and now, which is, and I think this is almost like woven deep into the DNA of Democrats, which is like, well, we got our butts kicked, let’s work together as the kind of first instinct, right? Not the instinct of Republicans at all, obviously quite famously not Mitch McConnell, coming out after Obama won this enormous victory, 60 Senate seats and saying, yeah, screw them, screw them all. So what you’re saying is that there was a lot of that impulse early in reaction to Trump’s election and that part of the resistance posture was the product of organizing that channeled the grassroots desire to not compromise on these core things.
Leah Greenberg: I think that’s a big factor. And more generally, I would say there are in fact a lot of similarities right now. Again, we talked about the first kind of big active resistance as the Women’s March, but actually the first big active resistance was a ton of people getting organized to show up to somebody’s house the week or the month after the election and have a community meeting, right? People went and showed up to their neighbors. They had meetings in churches or synagogues. They got together in local libraries, et cetera. A lot of the reason why Indivisible was able to take off is because people had already started to organize themselves on a hyper-local level in early 2016.
And so they were able to pick up the Indivisible guide and just graft it onto what they had already started trying to do and called themselves Indivisible. And we were off to the races, but that organizing had already happened. And we actually have seen that too this cycle. We had a joint movement call with about 100 organizations from across the progressive ecosystem immediately after the election. This was Thursday after the election on Tuesday. We had about 140,000 people on that call. And out of that call, our main ask for people, you know, we laughed, we cried, we processed, we tried to hold space for each other’s grief. But our main ask for people was to host a meeting for your friends, for your neighbors, for your community, get folks together to process in person. This is not a healthy moment to be doom scrolling on the internet. It’s the kind of time you need to get face to face with other people. And we have seen over a thousand meetings come out of that process. Those folks continue to be activated. Those communities continue to be activated. They’re all coming to us and asking what’s next. So, what I would say is that there are actually a lot of similarities on the ground level in what is happening right now to what was happening in 2017 at this point.
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting you say that because I think there’s a broad sense that it’s very different that people have checked out that they’re kind of like, and that. And I do think, I don’t know if you feel this way, I feel this way that like the fact that he lost the popular vote the first time and won it this time has some profound psychological effect that in 2016, it’s like the country didn’t actually choose this guy. Like a quirk of a constitutional system that is just a terrible wiring in the walls of our country, basically glitched and we got him. This time, you know, there’s a lot more of kind of, I don’t know, resignation, depression, or like, well, I guess this is what America wants. What are you going to do? And what I’m hearing from you is you don’t, at the grassroots level, in terms of the folks that you’re in contact with, you don’t feel like there’s resignation. You don’t feel like there’s checking out.
Leah Greenberg: Oh, no. But what I would qualify there is I think that at, for the lack of a better term, I’m going to say elite stakeholder levels, there is a ton of resignation. Right? When I am thinking about people who run institutions that are kind of battening the hatches and, you know, hunkering down and trying to avoid attracting the Trump administration’s attention. When I’m thinking about corporations —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Leah Greenberg: — that are sending their CEOs to Mar-a-Lago to try and reach a detente. When I’m thinking about, you know, media institutions like ABC coming to a major, a settlement agreement with Donald Trump. I think if you are looking at a lot of elite institutions or people with a lot of resources who are thinking about how do they protect themselves, there is a ton of resignation going on. But if you are looking at actual regular people whose values did not change, just because we lost an election by 1.5 percent, right? It is true that we lost the popular vote this time. That doesn’t mean it’s 1984. That doesn’t mean it’s a landslide. Sometimes you lose elections. We got a lot of people out there who are still incredibly frustrated, incredibly concerned and looking for answers on how do they move forward and how do they push back.
Chris Hayes: So, okay, so that’s one lesson was that this posture of resistance wasn’t organic, that it had to be actually mobilized and organized from the bottom up. What are other things that you think were successes of the model, of the Indivisible model —
Leah Greenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and the sort of broader resistance model in the first term?
Leah Greenberg: Yeah, what I would say was challenging as time went on in the first Trump term was that the tactics, a lot of the tactics started to stay the same and started to get stale, even as our targets were evolving, right? So, some of those Republicans who were squishy early on and who were maybe movable during 2017, during 2018, they were a little scared. They did not know the size of the wave that was coming at them. They could see that something was genuinely happening in reaction to Trump and they weren’t yet sure whether that was a wave that was big enough to take them down in their Trump plus five or Trump plus 10 district.
Over the next couple of years, they got a little bit of a handle on what they were facing and most of them reached an assessment if they were in a safe Republican district in particular that they were going to be in more danger from a primary challenge than they were going to be —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Leah Greenberg: — in danger from us, from any kind of other organized constituent opposition, and that they had more to gain from representing the far right of their party than they did their median constituent. So that’s one thing that changed was, you know, the Republicans became a more aligned, more consolidated force. Trump critics were pushed out. Trump enablers were promoted within the party. There was just less of the room for actual constituent advocacy designed to change people’s minds as opposed to constituent advocacy that was designed to share a political message that could bring people to our side.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Leah Greenberg: And so I think we were slow to recognize that as that was changing, we needed to think about our tactics less in terms of how are we going to actually flip these guys and more in terms of how are we designing and telling the political story that is necessary to build the broader coalition to get these folks out.
Chris Hayes: Let’s stay with that because there are ways in which Trump 2.0, I think, represents a larger threat and is scarier in certain ways, just in terms of what it means for American democracy and also the tail risk of mismanaging the federal government, whether that’s terrorism, pandemics, et cetera. But one thing that’s pretty striking is on this narrow question of mobilizing constituents around legislative fights, which is the origin of what you and Ezra were writing about in that original document, this is one of the narrowest congressional majorities we’ve ever seen. It’s going to be 220, 215, and then actually 219, 215. They’ll get a few seats once, you know, Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz get confirmed and presumably they run special elections. Although, you know, we’ve seen Democrats —
Leah Greenberg: Who knows.
Chris Hayes: — outperform in special elections at insane levels, so nothing is a given. Those will actually be really interesting early fights that are worth contesting for sure because those will be real messages. But even if it is, you know, whatever it’s going to be 220, 215, let’s say. That is going to be a tough sledding for Mike Johnson. And the ability to sort of stick a spoke in the wheels of this is even more available to Democrats and progressive activists than it was eight years ago, ironically, in an election that Trump actually won this time with a narrower Republican majority.
Leah Greenberg: Well, and that goes to a basic point, right? He does not have a mandate. He won on the basis of dissociating himself from the Project 2025 agenda, which he is absolutely then going to try and put into office. One of the constant challenges that we heard from people who are running focus groups, who are doing testing around how do you message on Trump was that his locked in people believed him. But a lot of these folks that we lost to him, they simply didn’t believe some of the stuff that he said he was going to do. Right? That is not a stable coalition once you’re actually trying to enact your promises, even if you do have a big congressional majority.
When we stopped the first attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the House, they had a 43, they had a 43-seat majority.
Chris Hayes: Wow, I forgot it was that big.
Leah Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. So, if we can, and this is why I keep emphasizing Democrats, if we can hold Democrats united, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Leah Greenberg: As long as we are not losing an entire faction of Democrats who want to go ahead and collaborate, then we are actually going to be able to sit back and watch them fight each other for a lot of this year. And that is our opportunity to really hammer home the set of messages that we will need to define them while they are fighting each other.
Chris Hayes: That is really interesting. So, from a tactical level, and I think actually Hakeem Jeffries has been pretty good at this so far.
Leah Greenberg: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Right? The idea is, —
Leah Greenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — again, we’re just talking purely tactically here. If the Democrats hold entirely together and you have to negotiate with them as a block of 215 votes represented by one person that you do the negotiating with, which is Hakeem Jeffries in leadership, Mike Johnson has essentially an impossible task because he basically can’t pass anything on a party line vote because of the internal dissension and real genuine ideological battles and inconsistencies in his own party. We just saw that with the shutdown thing, right?
Leah Greenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So that’s like tactical goal number one, keep Democrats together and make sure that you don’t have Democrats making separate side deals, separate pieces, right? Because once that starts to happen, then all of a sudden a bunch of opportunities open up for them on say the border bill. So if a bunch of Democrats start breaking off, and working with Republicans on a border bill, then you’ve got a problem. If the Democrats say, look, we’re united, we’re willing to talk about a border bill. We know that there will be a border bill. But the way that you do that is to talk through leadership because we’re united.
Leah Greenberg: I would go further and say that I think on a host of different places, we just have to hold Democrats together, both for the strength of the legislation that we’re going to get out of this, but also in order to drive any kind of clear message. I think there’s been a similar —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Leah Greenberg: — side fight around DOGE, the DOGE caucus around Elon Musk’s plan to cut a sum of funding out of government that would absolutely require going after entitlement, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. And we’ve got some Democrats who are showing up and making warm and conciliatory noise. This is about how they would also want to cut government waste. And this sounds like a great idea and they’d be happy to be involved. Our ability to define what is happening here, our ability to talk about this in terms of autocracy, in terms of a set of billionaires gutting government functions so that they can benefit via tax cuts and kickback contracts. That is wildly undermined if we have got a faction of Democrats who are flying around with Elon Musk talking about how great it is that they’re going after the defense contractors. So we actually just have to cut that down right now.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: My own take here and I’ll just sort of editorialize for a moment. I think collaborating and making these good noises about DOGE is political malpractice. And I think it’s actually quite different from border stuff because I think there’s just different political imperatives. Like it is clearly the case that a majority of Americans did not like the way the border was handled under a button. Whether that was misinformation, whether that was their news sources or whether it was because we had record crossings for a period of time, whatever it was, like there’s genuine, there’s a genuine phenomenon here and real public opinion. You have to work with it.
Now, I’m not saying like, oh, collaborate on a border bill and kick everyone out of the country at all. But there’s something, there’s some gravity there you need to deal with. No one voted, this election was not about cutting government. Like, it’s so insane to me. Like, it’s just very different to me how you think about the force of public opinion in both these domains. The idea that like people want the world’s richest man to cut Medicare is just so obviously politically disastrous, that really seems like a place where you get the hell out of the way and let them blow themselves up.
Leah Greenberg: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think we’ll have a lot to work with, right? I think if you were paying attention over the holidays and you watched the H-1B fight emerge amongst kind of the mega immigration restrictionists versus the Silicon Valley, I’m not sure what we’re calling them exactly, techno anti-democracy faction, whatever we’re going to call it. There are all these places where you can get out of the way and let them fight each other. And neither of those messages are a particularly pretty one.
Chris Hayes: So that’s a tactical question here. There’s the broader, so that, and this all, the thing about all this is like, this is comfortably in the realm of what we might call normal politics, right? So it’s like, if you were organizing against George W. Bush or you were organizing about Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney wanted some big, he’s going to institute the Ryan budget, right? Let’s say you won in 2012, in 2013 he gets inaugurated and they’re going to institute the Ryan budget. It’s going to be big cuts, basically the privatization of Medicare. You know, you would mobilize against, you could use the individual playbook, right? That’s true for legislative attempts. I think the worry people have is what is the toolkit for mobilizing against non-normal politics? Kash Patel at the FBI raiding the homes of political opponents. Special prosecutor being appointed by Attorney General of the United States who starts an open investigation into all the members of the January 6 committee. Like they are just, and I’m just saying this for myself, like what is, what’s the toolkit there once you sort of slip off the known world of recognizably democratic politics where you’re involved in the sort of constituent action that might be able to kill a bad bill?
Leah Greenberg: Yeah. Well, I would take a step back. So we titled our updated Indivisible guide, Indivisible guide, practical guide to Democracy on the brink. And the thinking there was that we should be really clear about the moment we’re in, right? Which is that we still have a democracy, a tattered and torn democracy, but some set of institutions that are functioning some of the time.
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Leah Greenberg: We still have people who represent us at the local, the state, the federal level. We will still have some form of elections in two years. Things we do over the next couple of years will determine the conditions under which those elections take place and the extent to which they are free and fair, right? With all appropriate caveats about how free and fair our elections have been to this point.
We are still kind of working within a basic theory of what do we need to do to get to a 2026 that’s going to be the test point for the ability to hold elections in the future. And 2026, we identified as this crucial hinge moment, right? Because fundamentally, that’s the first time we’re having national elections and we’re able to test the ability to have national elections. That is our first opportunity to deliver a very significant rebuke to Republicans on the national level to demonstrate how deeply unpopular their agenda has become, which we will, we’re going to do some work on making it that unpopular in the meantime. And it’s also the place at which, you know, the folks who have, the folks who win in 2026 are going to be the folks who manage the election in 2028.
So if they are people who are invested in liberal democracy continuing, then we are in okay shape for 2028. If they are MAGA election deniers, then we are in very bad shape, right? So, I think basically we have to start from this fundamental question of what is going to set us up best, and what set of messages, what set of stories are we telling heading into 2026 that gives us the strongest ability to win, and in doing so to gain the power to make it to 2028.
It’s kind of a game of what do we need to do to make it to the next step. Within that, I think we have to be really thoughtful about how do we organize against these kind of extra democratic efforts, right? I think we absolutely have to continue telling that story. I think we absolutely have to be very visibly and vocally opposed and united behind whoever those political targets are, right? Is Liz Cheney my favorite person? No, she is not my favorite person. And also that does not matter, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Leah Greenberg: Because fundamentally this is a game of, you know, knock one person out, see how the reaction goes.
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Leah Greenberg: And if it’s not very visible, if it’s not very vocal, then you move on to your next 10 targets. And I think that goes both ways, and at least I’d hope it goes both ways, right? Like one of the places where we know there will be very, very intensive repression is when we’re looking at the pro-Palestine movement, right? That was actually the target of the most recent bill that Congress attempted to move on a bipartisan basis earlier this year, the nonprofit HR 94, 95, which was a bill that would have given the treasury secretary the ability to designate specific nonprofits as supporting terrorism, revoke their tax status.
That was pitched as, and targeted at the Palestine Justice Movement, but it could easily have been used against all of us. And so we are going to have to as a movement collectively defend all edges of that coalition because this is fundamentally the way that they’re going to come for us, is they’re going to pick off people and they’re going to watch for the reaction and then they’re going to go for more.
Chris Hayes: That is a really important point. Let’s stay on this because you guys did some really important mobilizing around that bill, which was kind of snuck in a little bit. I don’t think that many people had eyes on it. And yeah, the idea of like, from the sort of pro-Palestine, Palestine solidarity movement to Liz Cheney as the sort of edges of this coalition. Those are, you know, very, very different worldviews, indirect conflict with each other on central questions, right?
Leah Greenberg: Right.
Chris Hayes: The war in Gaza, American foreign policy, et cetera. Tell me a little bit about the mobilization around that because I thought that was a great example of organizers indivisible among others, kind of putting the spotlight on something, telling a story, we did it on the show, I think partly because you guys had spotlighted it and I was like, oh wait, this is nuts. And other journalists did too. There’s a lot of people that were on top of it. Tell that story because that was a useful little test case, I think, you know, as we head into this era.
Leah Greenberg: Absolutely. Well, first I would say a lot of credit goes to the ACLU who had been banging the drum on this for a really long time, including before the election when it was a lot harder to make the case for a lot of audiences. Part of the story here is that this was a bill that had moved forward with pretty widespread bipartisan support up until the election. And, you know, we could have a longer conversation about how that happened and the conditions that got us there, but the short version was immediately after the election, this was coming back up again in the House and there was a collective realization across the ecosystem that this was handing an enormously dangerous tool to a future Trump administration.
That this would have been a bad bill and indeed we opposed this bill before. It’s not an appropriate thing to hand to a democratic administration either —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Leah Greenberg: — but it was enormously dangerous under an incoming Trump administration with everything that we know about what they’re going to do and how they’re going to act. And so, our version of raising the alarm was really focusing in on how many Democrats have voted for this. How many can we knock off the next time that it’s coming up? And so the theory here was we’re not going to ultimately be able to stop them from passing it out of the House. The first time they brought it up in the House, they brought it up under suspension. We were able to stop it because that required a vote of two-thirds to go forward.
The second time they brought it up, it required a simple majority. We were never going to be able to stop it even by holding the entire Democratic caucus united. But what we were able to do was drastically take down the number of Democrats voting for it. It went from, I think, 45 Democrats voting for it in the first vote in the House to 10 Democrats voting for it in the second vote in the House. And so in the process of doing that, we turned it from something that had pretty broad bipartisan support and was perceived as not particularly controversial to something that was understood as a tool for the Trump administration and that Democrats as a broad coalition could oppose and be comfortably in the mainstream in doing so within their party.
And now as we are heading into the next year, as we are heading into a Republican Congress, it is totally true that they may pass it in the House and it is true they will try to pass it in the Senate. But now that we have turned it into something that the entire Democratic caucus or overwhelmingly the Democratic caucus opposes, we have a lot of hope that we’re able to hold together the votes to prevent them to getting to that 60 vote threshold that’s necessary to pass.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, the provision would have allowed the U.S. Treasury secretary to essentially without real process deem any nonprofit, a tax deductible organization, a supporter of terrorism, and thereby withdraw their tax deductible status, which is essentially the death penalty for a nonprofit. I mean, that is in some ways the sort of essential legal core of what it is to be a nonprofit is this tax status. And it was a bad bill for a million reasons. I mean, like there’s laws to deal with any —
Leah Greenberg: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — anyone that’s supporting terrorism. There’s tons of them in the federal code. It’s not like that you don’t have the ability to do that. Also the sort of lack of process and reviewability and then the power that it would give the Trump administration to do this, but for any administration. And I think that was a place where highlighting it and also kind of keeping the coalition together. I mean, to your point about Liz Cheney, like the key is to get people to vote on these basic principles of democracy, right?
Leah Greenberg: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Independent of their views on the war in Gaza, for instance. Israel’s conduct of that war, right?
Leah Greenberg: Right.
Chris Hayes: Or whether Liz Cheney’s like a good person or you would want to hang out with her.
Leah Greenberg: Right.
Chris Hayes: To get people to think in terms of standing on the barricades, defend basic process, democratic norms, the rule of law as independent of whether the person you’re defending or the group you’re defending is one that you substantively agree with.
Leah Greenberg: That’s right. And if there’s anything we know about successful movements to defeat autocracies around the world, right, successful movements to take down dictatorships, is that they build broad coalitions and the coalition may not be united by anything other than their opposition to what is currently happening, and that is okay. That is actually a precondition for success in many cases.
And so part of what we’re going to have to do during this time is recognize that some people will be with us on some issues that we care about and they won’t be with us on other issues that were other policies that we care about, and we still need them as part of that broad front for democracy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And one of the things too, I think, to think about is that public opinion is going to be important, I think. I’m a real believer that public opinion is a real thing. It’s not simple and exogenous. It’s not just like people feel a certain way. It is completely constituted by all kinds of different factors, things that are happening in the world, the information sources people have, their peer groups, acculturation, a million different things produce what we call public opinion.
But one of the things I found encouraging was “The Washington Post” polled a bunch of stuff. It was probably two or three weeks ago before the holiday break. And they asked people about like, do you approve or disapprove of Donald Trump prosecuting political opponents, you know, or prosecuting reporters and, you know, huge majorities, like the worst most anti-democratic stuff, huge majorities of people, if you ask them, are like, no, I don’t like that.
Leah Greenberg: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And that is something to work with. I mean —
Leah Greenberg: Right.
Chris Hayes: — we would be in a much worse shape if big majorities were like, yes, that’s good.
Leah Greenberg: Right, right. Well, and I think that sometimes we can be a little reductionist in analyzing what is success and not success with something like this, right? The administration has a lot of power. They will be able to do a lot of things unilaterally. Success is sometimes going to look like stopping that. Sometimes it’s going to look like delaying that. And sometimes it’s going to look like exacting a significant political price for it. And the reality is we’re not going to be able to stop everything. But consistently, if we have a story that we’re telling to people about, how the Trump administration is out of control, how it is corrupt, how it is chaotic, how it is delivering for billionaires and corporations, but not for you, how it is inflicting cruelty on people around the country. These are the kinds of stories that we’re going to activate people heading into the midterms around.
And so it’s not necessarily, are we going to be able to stop everything that they’re going to do? It is, are we going to be able to make sure that they, and specifically Republicans in swing districts, Republicans in swing states, pay a price for it.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Are there areas where you think our approach was really wrong the first time or didn’t work and we have to do things very differently this time around? And I ask this as someone who I’ve spent now nine years of my life covering Donald Trump in this era. I think about our own coverage in this way, like what do we do right, what do we do wrong? I’m not sure that I have great answers where I’ve developed a theory going forward. I’m still feel pretty humble about it all. But I’m curious how you would answer that question.
Leah Greenberg: Yeah, I think that there’s a little bit of a conflation between this period of kind of the resistance, right? The first four years fighting against Donald Trump, getting Donald Trump out of office, and then the next four years on the Biden administration.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s a good point.
Leah Greenberg: Right? There were four years in between. And so I think some of the challenge that I’m facing right now and some of the challenge I think we’re all facing is, how do you sort through what worked and what didn’t when all of these variables are interconnected with each other, right? I would say a bunch of the stuff that we did was very effective in conveying to the broad public that Donald Trump was a bad president. And part of what happened in 2018 was that we were able to overcome pretty good economic conditions in order to make a case that Donald Trump was not serving you well, that Republicans were a threat to your healthcare, that the general sense in the country that this was not going well and that voters expressed their displeasure in those terms.
That’s a pretty big success. And you know, similarly in 2020, most of the evidence that we have is that incumbents early on in the pandemic tended to reap a political benefit.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Leah Greenberg: We were able to overcome that political gravity to get him out of office.
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Leah Greenberg: Soon after, we were then overtaken by political currents that are pretty dramatic and also pretty global, right? We are part of a global wave of incumbent governments, people who were in office during 2021, 2022, during inflation, during the rise of the post-COVID period where voters are expressing extraordinary displeasure and overwhelmingly voting those candidates and incumbents out of office. That is a very frustrating and painful dynamic to be part of and to be caught up in. And absolutely, there are mistakes that are made within and between during that time.
And also, I think we shouldn’t throw out literally everything we did over the last eight years and say none of it worked. Actually, we have some basics that do work and they’ve worked not only with Trump, but as you mentioned with Republicans in the past, right? George Bush seemed invincible when he won in 2004 and he said, I’m going to go in for Social Security. I’ve earned my capital and I intend to spend it. Six months later, nine months later, he was a lame duck with a stuck agenda and he was politically finished as a force. So I think we should be a little bit humble about assuming that just because we are back in this position, that does not mean that we don’t know some tactics or strategies and tactics that can have a really big impact.
Chris Hayes: It’s funny you bring up Bush because there’s an “Onion” headline that I always think about that appeared some point during 2004. It was Iraqi stunned by competence of Bush political campaign. And I always think about that line because it so perfectly captures this thing, which is that you can run a very effective political operation and be really bad at governing. And those things don’t actually correlate to each other. And that joke I think about, because there’s a little bit of this transference people are doing of like, Donald Trump, as strange as he is, and as weirdly chaotic as it all was, they ran an effective political campaign. They really did. He was an effective candidate. They ran an effective campaign and they won an election. A lot of that I think was produced by the macro conditions that you just referred to. It doesn’t mean that they suddenly figured out how to be good at governing.
Leah Greenberg: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: And there’s a lot of weird sliding between those two things that people have decided that like, oh, he’s going to be good at governing this time. The other thing that I think people are taking for granted, and it’s because no one has experienced this in America in living memory, not since the late 19th century, is that when he’s inaugurated on January 20th, he immediately becomes a lame duck. And this has not happened in our lifetime. It’s not happened in the last century.
Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century is the last time this happened. He ended up being absolutely swallowed up by the financial crisis of 1893, which basically destroyed his second term and he was basically forgotten, you know, when he had started his political career as this big turning point for post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction politics. So, I actually think the lame duckness matters. And I wonder if you do too. I think people are like very quick to be like, oh, he’s just going to ignore the constitution, run again, yada, yada. I don’t know if that’s true. He’s also super old. I would be more worried about that if he were 50. But there is a gravity that pulls on lame duck presidents that’s different than first term presidents.
Leah Greenberg: I absolutely think it matters. And I think it’s a really important factor in how we develop strategy, right? Because fundamentally what happens with a lame duck, what’s different than in 2016 when you had Democrats who were already looking towards 2020 and saying, who’s going to be the leader of our party? But you had Donald Trump who was definitely going to be the candidate for Republicans. This year, it’s actually a leadership vacuum on both sides to some extent where there’s a contest for power on both sides for the future of the party. And this pains me because I have done my fair share of J.D. Vance jokes, but I think we have to take J.D. Vance very seriously as a political force —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Leah Greenberg: — and as an avatar of a broader set of actors, you know, Silicon Valley folks like Peter Thiel, like Elon Musk, people who believe that they have invested in and bought out this Republican Party and are intending to use the power that they have bought, right? So, I think that we have to be really intentional about how much are we telling a story about Donald Trump? How much are we telling a story about Donald Trump and Republicans? How much are we telling a story and linking J.D. Vance explicitly to some of the biggest and most damaging parts of what is going to happen? Because fundamentally, as you said, maybe we are running against a Donald Trump who’s figured out how to defy the laws and put himself on the ballot again, but much more likely we are running against somebody who has been shaped and molded by the Trump Republican Party and by this period, and who is doing it after a couple of years of the factions contesting for power amongst themselves.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, the Vance point is important. I also think the Musk aspect of this is just a complete, a totally new factor.
Leah Greenberg: Totally new.
Chris Hayes: Totally new. I’ve been pretty obsessed with it, maybe just out of a desire for novelty. To be totally honest, I’ve been covering this guy for nine years and it’s like, well, I haven’t seen this one before. I mean, a lot of things Trump does, you have seen before, you know, and there’s so much of it is he’s just doing what he does. I am personally shocked genuinely by how quickly the Musk thing went zero to a hundred miles an hour, and not in terms of his own politics, which I think were clear for a while.
But from sort of playing with the idea of endorsing him, to endorsing him, to putting a quarter of a billion dollars in, to never leaving his side, to being essentially a kind of co-president figure to the extent that when Mike Johnson’s negotiating a bill, he is telling reporters, yes, I spoke to Donald Trump and I spoke to Elon Musk. These are my two bosses and I’ve spoken to both of them. And I think it’s in some ways ominous because when you look at places like Hungary where Viktor Orban has these very wealthy oligarchs that are aligned with him and they use their power in private markets and their money to do things like purchase opposition media outlets, it’s ominous in that respect.
But it’s also kind of promising in the sense that I don’t think Musk has the same political appeal and talents that Trump does. And I also think his ideological vision is actually wildly unpopular and is now seems much more in the driver’s seat than I would have even guessed two months ago.
Leah Greenberg: I think all of that is absolutely true. I think that, well, first I’ll just say, I resent how much of my time I’m now having to spend trying to psychoanalyze these two absolutely maladapted humans, but this is an incredibly complicated and weird alliance that has developed, right, between two people who are used to being each the center of the universe. There’s one set of questions around how long can that kind of arrangement be stable, even if it is suiting their interests between two people who are this egotistical, this egomaniacal. There’s another set of questions around what political opportunity does this open up for the rest of us, right? Because Americans may have voted for Donald Trump, but they didn’t actually vote for a South African billionaire who has a record of walking into organizations and smashing them up to come in and do that to the federal government, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Leah Greenberg: DOGE is fundamentally a meme coin. They have come up with a meme organization. This is weird stuff. It is not what people expected. It is not what they voted for. Again, I do think this goes to, can we hold and deliver a clear opposition message or are we validating some of this stuff? There’s limited public polling around kind of how popular Elon Musk is and who he resonates with, but I think he’s broadly perceived to be more popular than he actually is if you actually dig into it. He is not a person who is actually that well-liked across a broad swath of places. He’s also somebody who is new to politics and thinks he knows more than he does.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Leah Greenberg: Right? And I think you’ve seen that sometimes with his political quotes to date, right? He is freely talking about going after entitlements, after stuff that most Republicans who’ve been in office for a long time understand to be a third rail. He is blowing up a budget deal and trying to get what he can out of it. In this case, in the most recent case, he was successful in doing so, right, like a lot of the aftermath and a lot of the analysis was that Donald Trump did not get what he wanted, which was a debt ceiling adjustment, but Elon Musk got —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Leah Greenberg: — most of the things that he wanted. So, you do have this dynamic of Elon Musk successfully winning some concessions, but you know, at the cost of blowing up a bunch of political capital before they’ve even taken office, right, and demonstrating the weakness and the dysfunction of the Republican majority. And frankly, giving Democrats an object lesson in what’s possible if they all hang together. So I think it’s an incredibly weird dynamic. I think it is one that if we are thoughtful about how do we message and how do we maintain our own discipline, we can exploit.
Chris Hayes: You know, one thing I keep thinking about when I think about resistance and, you know, the resistance, et cetera, and Trump 1.0 is that certain things happen in American politics sort of cyclically. There’s this notion of thermostatic public opinion. So when a pro-immigration leader is elected, the public gets more skeptical of immigration. When an anti-immigrant leader gets elected, they get more supportive of immigration. We see this on a whole bunch of different things, right? So there’s cyclical trends. There’s things that are in response to macroeconomic trends. People don’t like inflation. We saw this across the world.
But then there’s more secular trends, things that persist election to election. And the biggest one we’ve seen is rural areas moving to the right, election after election, doesn’t matter, even if the rest of the electorate is sort of pinging back and forth thermostatically, rural America is moving further and further to the right, election after election after election. We saw it in 2018 where Republicans actually picked up Senate seats because of the nature of those states that they were running in. And we’re seeing this class realignment, working class voters, increasingly, not just white working class voters, moving towards the right.
And I wonder if you think about that in terms of indivisibles organizing. And I know you guys have groups everywhere. I think it’s very easy to kind of stereotype. It’s like, oh, these are all people in metro areas with college degrees and resistance libs, whatever. But how much you think about this huge problem for the coalition, which is losing support among those huge parts of the American electorate?
Leah Greenberg: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you asked that because it gives me the chance to share one of my favorite kind of under known statistics about Indivisible, which is that we’ve actually got a really large rural caucus and a very significant rural organizing footprint. And if you think about it a little bit, like it’s actually for some pretty clear reasons, right? Because if you’re in a metropolitan area, you probably know a lot of other Democrats. You probably know a lot of other liberals and progressives. If you’re in a rural area, if you’re in a pretty red area, the Indivisible group might be or social —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Leah Greenberg: — it might be your only social outlet, right, for people who think like you do. And so some of the groups that I’m actually really the proudest of are the folks who are kind of holding up the banner for progressive causes or for, you know, even just center left causes in really rural areas. They might not be doing organizing that we even think of as super partisan, but they’ll be doing a campaign on why is the local hospital closing or they will be running the towns gay pride parade. They’ll be holding up some kind of, you know, stand for liberal values even in places that are pretty hostile to them.
So I do think it’s a problem and I think it’s a problem of significant under investment from the Democratic Party, from a lot of our own institutions, from a broad sense of we need to do what is necessary to get to the electoral math for this cycle as opposed to we need to do what is necessary to invest for the long term.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Leah Greenberg: Recognizing that in a lot of these places, are we going to win in the next cycle even with a real investment? No. But actually it matters a lot if we’re losing by 20 points or if we’re losing by 30 points. And that’s true in places that are, you know, I think about our folks in rural Arizona, right? Holding those margins down doesn’t matter a lot to winning locally, but it matters a ton to the rest of the state and to whether we’re actually able to get someone like a Ruben Gallego into office. And so I do think there is a long-term under-investment problem.
I also think that, you know, we should be real that it’s not just about, is money being put into organizing in these places. It’s also about the media ecosystem. It’s also about the information environment that these folks are exposed to. The closure of local papers, the shift to algorithm driven social media, the dominance of Fox News in a lot of these places. It’s not just about in-person, it’s also about the actual information that people are getting exposed to and how they’re processing it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and the one thing I would add to that is like they’re also genuine grievance and resentments that are not crazy, which is to say, if you survey the commanding heights of American politics, finance and culture and say, it’s all run by people in large metro areas with college degrees, you’re not wrong at all to come to that conclusion, if that actually is true. And if you feel like I am not that, and those people don’t know me, that is not at all the crazy grievance. There’s other grievances there. There’s some uglier stuff too mixed in.
But that central thing which is not even about the information environment, it’s not even about politics. It’s just like, yeah, like everyone who has power in this country at the biggest level, at the top of the pyramid are people that live in big Metro areas and have four-year college degrees or advanced degrees. That’s not a crazy thing to think because it’s true. And also to feel like some resentment about that.
Leah Greenberg: Yeah. I absolutely think that this is a place where there is some real tension with the ways in which our systems and our institutions work and what we end up representing to people. If you think about what it takes to run for Congress, for example, if you think about Congress as an institution, a place where 99%, 98% of Democrats who are currently holding office have college degrees, and you think about what it takes to run for Congress, which, you know, if you do not have $200,000, you will not be taken seriously —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Leah Greenberg: — by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Think about how much of a barrier that is to a nurse, to a teacher, to the shop steward at a union in an area where you’ve got a compelling local leader, but they absolutely do not have the social network. They absolutely do not have the personal wealth that’s going to get them into office. And so if we think about top to bottom, what are the ways in which our own institutions are enacting systematic barriers to people who are working class, seeing themselves as represented in office, it’s a pretty massive set of questions.
Chris Hayes: It’s a great, great point. Leah Greenberg is the co-founder and co-executive director at Indivisible. It’s a movement of thousands of local groups to resist the GOP agenda, elect local champions, and fight for progressive policies. If people want to learn more about Indivisible or they listen to this conversation, they want to sign up, like where should they go?
Leah Greenberg: You can go to indivisible.org if you would like to join or start a group. We will be happy to connect you locally to make sure that you find your in-person group so that you can organize to resist the Trump agenda and to build a better democracy.
Chris Hayes: All right, Leah Greenberg, thanks so much. That was great.
Leah Greenberg: Thanks.
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Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Leah Greenberg. Really got a lot out of that conversation. If you want to find out more about the organization, Indivisible, you can go to indivisible.org. You can also contact us. You can e-mail us at withpod@gmail.com. We’ve gotten some great e-mails from you recently. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #withpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for #withpod and also follow me across a variety of microblogging platforms, Threads, Bluesky, and what used to be called Twitter, all with the handle #chrislhays.
Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday. “Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work including links to things we mentioned here by going to msnbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
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