The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 24 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Numerous House Republicans are suddenly facing angry voter revolts back at home over Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Some of these Republicans are reportedly in a “panic” about some of the cuts coming from DOGE. Meanwhile, over the weekend, Elon Musk ordered federal employees to send in an email listing their accomplishments over the last week or risk being fired. What followed was funny. Some senior Trump administration officials defied Musk, telling their employees they had no obligation to respond. So what if Musk’s DOGE effort is shaping up as a full-blown fiasco for President Trump and the GOP? How should Democrats capitalize on this to mobilize voters? Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible, has been tirelessly working to galvanize public opposition to everything Musk is doing, so we invited her on to talk about what’s next. Good to talk to you again, Leah.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
Sargent: We’re seeing lots of voter anger at town halls right now. GOP Congressman Rich McCormick was hammered in his Georgia district over the cuts to government. One man denounced the cuts as radical and extremist and sloppy to loud cheers. Representative Scott Fitzgerald in Wisconsin and Kevin Hern in Oklahoma were pressed by angry constituents to say whether they’ll ever ask Musk tough questions before Congress. There’s been lots more. Leah, you’ve been tracking this. Can you give us an overview of what else you’ve been seeing out there?
Greenberg: Absolutely. What I would say is that we are seeing a broad-based wave of opposition sweep the country, including in really deep red areas. We’re tracking town halls that are in very, very safe Republican districts where this is happening. One thing that’s important to name about that dynamic specifically is that the number of elected representatives who hold actual public open town halls has gone down significantly. And in this case, it’s often only happening in these very safe areas where folks tend to assume that they can have a public meeting without having a ton of people in opposition show up. So it’s not an accident that you’re seeing these happen in really red areas because those are actually the only people who are making themselves available to voters at this time. I can tell you if you had any of these folks in a swing district who were doing it, they would be experiencing as much, if not more.
Sargent: It’s really interesting you say that. I guess the result is that we get a bit of a distorted picture in the sense that with a lot of Republicans refusing to hold town halls in swing areas, we don’t even get a clear picture of how deep the opposition is in those places.
Greenberg: That’s right. And we do our best when we work with Indivisibles because a lot of our folks are organizing to turn people out to these town halls in red areas. We’ve got a lot of folks in deep red areas—and what they see is deep and broad community opposition to what is going on, so it’s not a hard pitch. We’ve got folks who are on the ground working in places like Cliff Bentz’s district, like McCormick’s district, etc., but also we have people in swing areas actively organizing to popularize and make people aware of the fact that their own representatives won’t even face them. So [in] places where people are not actually agreeing to face the voters, folks are organizing empty chair town halls, town halls that invite the representative—and when they don’t come, you make a big deal about the fact that they won’t come and the fact that they won’t face the voters. And we’re seeing those events also get enormous turnout. I was just reading about one in Colorado for a safe district there that got 400 people over the course of the night, or the day.
Sargent: Wow, that’s pretty extraordinary. Over the weekend as well, Musk did this crazy tweet telling federal employees that they’d soon receive an email commanding them to document what they got done last week. He said, “Failure to respond will be taken as resignation.” Boy, that sounds very powerful and decisive, doesn’t it? But then after the Office of Management and Budget send out the email Musk promised, new FBI Director Kash Patel told employees not to respond. A senior State Department official sent a similar email to its employees. The New York Times’s Ed Wong reports that this happened at other agencies as well. Leah, Trump officials themselves are saying Musk is the emperor with no clothes. What do you make of that?
Greenberg: Well, first of all, this was an obviously bananas management technique, and also a very, very obvious massive security risk. It’s not an accident that the folks who run agencies that have real concerns about what information is available to who are the ones saying, Please do not respond. So that is one element here that this is just a completely disruptive thing. And you’re seeing the interests of people who actually have to run agencies—malign as they might be—clash with the interests of someone who’s just an utter chaos agent. It’s Godzilla versus Mothra; none of these people are good, but they’re coming into conflict with each other.
Sargent: It seems to me the combination that we’re seeing—voter revolts at the DOGE cuts plus Trump administration officials openly defying Musk—suggests that there’s a broader opportunity here to use the DOGE cuts and firings to divide the new Trumpier GOP coalition. The MAGA faithful will still believe that Musk is succeeding at cutting waste and fraud no matter what happens. But you’ve got the non-MAGA voters—lower propensity, less engaged, working class, some nonwhite—who aren’t in that ideological place, who maybe see all this in a different light, [who] don’t deify Musk. Is there an opportunity to win some of these voters back with some of this stuff?
Greenberg: That’s exactly right, and that’s actually been our strategy throughout the month of February as it’s become clear how far-reaching DOGE’s goals are. What we’re seeing right now is that they are demonstrating in an object way for Americans all over the country how much we actually all rely on and expect things from our government. And they’re demonstrating it by taking a chainsaw, quite literally in Elon’s case, to a bunch of the things that people take for granted in their regular lives: stability, everything from paying for farm, subsidies that cover foreign aid, everything from medical care and medical research into new cures and cures for cancer. These are all things that people assume that someone is taking care of and don’t necessarily understand as government until it goes away. So what we’re seeing is that they are upsetting a bunch of different potential members of a broader coalition for functional and stable and representative government.
At the same time, one of the things that you see in a stable and functional authoritarian regime is that they assemble a coalition of winning interests. Corporations, big business, different stakeholder groups that all benefit under the existing regime. These folks are not doing that; they are actually upsetting a bunch of different apple carts at the same time. They are acting like people who don’t believe that they are accountable to literally anyone, including the Republicans who are themselves facing the wrath of voters right now.
Sargent: Absolutely. I want to try to bear down on this question of what to do with the working class here because I noticed something in some of the new polling we’ve seen which finds broad public disapproval of Musk on many fronts. In the CNN poll from a few days ago, a plurality of noncollege voters, 49 percent say Musk’s role is a bad thing. In the new Washington Post poll, again, a plurality of noncollege voters disapprove of Musk’s role. Is this something Democrats should use as a guide to how to proceed here? What would that look like? Can this begin to fix the problem Democrats face with working-class voters?
Greenberg: What we’ve seen in general with Musk is that the people who like Elon Musk and people who like Trump are actually not the same set of people. The people who trust Musk are a different population; and there are a lot of people who are not actively opposed to Trump but who think that Musk absolutely cannot be trusted. And that is what we are seeing. It is working class, it is cross-racial.
There’s a real opportunity here. And frankly, it wasn’t necessarily clear six months ago, but as Musk has gotten himself more involved in politics, his broad public perception has gone from a heterodox inventor-billionaire to a Nazi incel. And it’s also been more easy to make a very clear case that this is about a collective of billionaires, a collective of Silicon Valley neo-reactionaries who have come in with a vision of how they ought to be in charge and [who have] no interest at all in listening to or engaging with anyone else.
One of the things that we’ve seen pop up quite a bit coming out of these town halls, coming out of spaces where people are reacting is, It’s not just Elon, it’s Elon plus a squad of flying monkeys of teenage computer programmers who believe that they are collectively capable of automating functions that require judgment, require a hair for trade-offs, that require some sense of the common good, and the disrespect that you can imagine people feel when they’re having their jobs eliminated by a 22-year-old who has absolutely no idea what they do.
Sargent: Yeah, I heard that Trumpism is driven by anger at elites.
Greenberg: Yeah, it’s almost like we’ve got an entire new set of elites who are running rampant through the federal government, breaking things that they don’t even understand.
Sargent: It is almost like that. Politico reports that Republicans privately are in a panic over some of the DOGE firings, particularly ones laying off military veterans or crippling efforts to fight bird flu. I know it’s easy to make fun of this—they’re only complaining to the White House privately while publicly cheering Musk on. But still, this has to guide Democrats, right? They need to figure out ways of driving this wedge deeper and forcing Republicans to go public, don’t you think? What could this possibly look like?
Greenberg: I think it looks like escalating public pressure on a whole host of fronts. One thing that we’ve been calling on Democrats pretty consistently to do is use all the tools at your disposal when it comes to the legislative process. There’s a bunch of stuff in the Senate that you can use to slow things down, to dramatize your opposition, to force them to take votes—like the votes they’ve been taking on the budget resolution for the upcoming tax cuts bill where [Democrats are] actually putting them on the record again and again in ways that really jam them and force them to squirm. So there’s that piece.
I also think there’s just a public confrontation element to this. What’s really clear is that Republicans do not want to be personally affiliated with this. They do not want to defend it in public if they are themselves in any way electorally vulnerable. So we’ve got to go on the offensive. We’ve got to get in those districts. We’ve got to make sure that every voter understands that whether or not your representative will show their face, they are actively enabling and complicit in this agenda.
There’s a certain amount of just organizing on the ground to make sure that people continue to really feel the heat. In D.C., it’s doing the things that actually force them to get themselves on the record, force them to give a quote about what is happening—just generally making sure that they either have to start breaking publicly or they have to pay the political consequences of being personally affiliated.
Sargent: And I think Democrats play another role here as well. They have to go to every single microphone and forum they can find to just drum up noise. Make noise, create the impression, which is correct, that something is deeply amiss, that things are really going off the rails, that terrible things are happening. That draws more media interest, that creates a snowball effect in the information space. New revelations pop out, which has been a really big thing happening fairly regularly. And then that forces Republicans to do more publicly around this.
Greenberg: A hundred percent. And I think one of the tensions that we’ve experienced between Democrats and a lot of their traditional supporters right now is that there’s been a lurking strategy amongst a bunch of folks in Washington of, Let’s stand back and let this become unpopular, as opposed to, Let’s actively throw in to make it unpopular. That’s based on a real misread of how 2024 went. That’s based on a misread of how you get attention and how you get your message through in an algorithmic era. I think that people have to join the fight. They have to make their case if they want to be heard.
Sargent: I want to go big picture: In 2017, we saw Trump greeted by initial shock and anger. Crowds showing up at the airports to protest the Muslim Ban; the #MeToo march; rising public anger over other things. It then became clear over time though that this wasn’t just a passing thing. Organization and mobilization started to happen at a very deep level on many communities, a lot of it driven by middle-aged women who hadn’t been previously active in politics. We saw a lot of formerly apolitical people who really start seriously contemplating running for office, resulted in a lot of great candidates for House seats, then the 2018 House takeover. I know it’s early, but candidly, what do you think the prospects are right now for something like this? What are you seeing in the ferment right now? Something like that potentially, or not?
Greenberg: What’s been interesting for us.... Because we organize with local communities of volunteers and grassroots pop-up groups all over the country and have been for the last eight years, we’ve seen the rise and we’ve seen how people have carried on during the Biden era, we saw a big bump of people coming in during the wave around Kamala Harris. What we saw immediately after the election was people were not shocked.
Shock was a dominant emotion in 2016, and it produced some of those big mobilizing moments very early on. People weren’t shocked anymore. There was deep anger, there was deep fear, there was deep sorrow, but people didn’t have that initial, I must take to the streets to demonstrate my disapproval because I think a lot of people understood instinctively that the way out of this was going to be the deeper forms of organizing. They were going to show up to their local Indivisible group, and ever since November we’ve had massive surges of people showing up locally all over the country.
Every month since November, we’ve broken the record for new Indivisible groups formed. I think at this point we’re up to 10 new groups joining a day around the country. What we’ve seen is people didn’t necessarily go straight to the mobilizing piece of this, but they went straight to the organizing piece of it. They wanted to find a lever for how they could impact things that they could do, and they didn’t start with the assumption that what you needed to do was just make your disapproval heard.
Now, at the same time, we are seeing a bunch of new and exciting formations that are coming into being around the mobilizing side of this. If you look and track the rise of the 50501 efforts, which started on Reddit a month and a half ago and have been regularly calling demonstrations that are growing in strength, what we’re seeing is that people are organizing and people are mobilizing. The energy is just building pretty consistently, and it’s building across a bunch of different groups who are coming in under their own banners and who are collectively—I am very confident—going to be creating that patchwork grassroots infrastructure that powered the winds of 2018 that helped to get him out in 2020.
So I’m very optimistic that we are seeing a surge in grassroots engagement that will equal and potentially even surpass what happened in the first Trump term. It’s building in a different way—what people want to do and how they see their opportunities are different right now. But it is absolutely building.
Sargent: It was a shame that it didn’t really come through in 2024 the way we’d hoped. But you’re optimistic that there’s really the prospect for something sustained now.
Greenberg: Well, here’s what I would say on that. I think there’s a little bit of: Who is responsible for what in the Democratic Party as it goes to 2024? Because the experience that we had as people who organized the grassroots was we worked real hard to get to 2020 and to get Donald Trump out of office. And we were told politely but firmly by a bunch of people in the establishment at that point, Thank you very much. The adults are back in charge. We’ll take it from here.
And folks continue to organize, but there are limits to what you can do as the grassroots when the decisions are being made by people who are not really interested in a ton of feedback on that front. So when I hear people say, Oh, the resistance didn’t keep Donald Trump out of office in 2024, I’m like, Who do you think was running the campaigns? Who do you think was making the core decisions in 2024? Because we will do what we can. We work with regular people who respond to the political currents that are set by some of the decisions that are being made. And our folks worked incredibly hard, but there are limits to what you can do when the entire population is very, very deeply frustrated with an incumbent who’s got a historically low approval rating.
Sagrent: Absolutely. So what about going forward? Are you optimistic that what you’re seeing now really has some staying power to it? Does it feel that way?
Greenberg: Absolutely. What we’ve seen is we’ve got people who’ve been with us all eight years who’ve organized the kinds of grassroots communities that are capable of onboarding all of these new folks. We’ve got people who stepped away in 2018 or 2020 who are showing back up again in droves. We’ve got new people, young people who are showing up particularly, who are activated for the first time, who might not even remember the first Trump term but are certainly horrified by what they are seeing right now.
Collectively, what we’re seeing is very similar to some of the early stages in 2016 where people sought out community, sought out local opportunities to make a difference, sought out ways to be in solidarity with communities under attack. They were trying to find whatever they could do locally, and there was honestly more energy than there were ways to immediately channel it. That is absolutely what we are seeing right now, and I expect it to only build as the Trump administration continues to escalate its attacks.
Sargent: As you said, they seem to be proceeding as if they’re not accountable to anyone, which means the craziness and destruction will only continue. Which really raises the prospects for what you’re talking about to come through. Leah Greenberg, thank you so much for coming on with us. Always good to talk to you.
Greenberg: Good to talk.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.