The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 14 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. It was a discussion with Indivisible co-executive director Leah Greenberg. You can watch it here.
Perry Bacon: I want to talk about Resistance 2.0, for a lack of a better term, later. But I do want to talk about what’s happening in D.C. in terms of the National Guard right now. I think you’re in the D.C. suburb, so what’s it like there? ’Cause I’m here in Louisville and I don’t have a sense of it. What is it like there right now?
Leah Greenberg: Just to start off, it is infuriating and horrifying. There’s a lot of fear that folks are feeling. There’s a lot of understanding that this is going to be something that falls.… First, [it] is just a direct attack on Black political power and on Black folks and people of color in the district that falls really heavily on anybody who might be concerned about an accelerated stop-and-frisk approach policing the entire city or the entire capitol. I think I’ve heard a lot of concern from folks around, What can I expect when I go outside? I know that we’ve seen some peaceful and nonviolent clashes between different folks. Last night there was a group that set up and blocked a street on 14th and W, and crowds immediately appeared and chanted, You’re not welcome here, until they ultimately had to pack up and roll out.
There’s also an element of ridiculousness to it, right? They’re sending these heavily armed people to police Georgetown. They’re sending them to the National Mall. This is security.…
Bacon: They’re not dangerous areas.
Greenberg: Yeah. So I would say that I think we’re still getting a handle on exactly what is happening where, but it is this combination of both very, very serious and should be understood as an extremely alarming escalation in an overarching power grab that stretches from the Texas redistricting to the attack on the census to the attack on D.C. to the threats to other cities—and also that doesn’t mean that at every moment it’s unfolding in that way.
Bacon: And we had the National Guard in Los Angeles. I think they might still be there in some ways. So having the National Guard imposed on two of the most important cities in the country in a three-month period is what dictators do, right?
Greenberg: Right. And we know that he’s threatening to do this to other cities, right? In his speech when he was talking about what he’s doing in D.C., he’s talking about Chicago and Baltimore—notably cities with Black mayors, perceived as [having] majority Black populations. It’s a very clearly racialized attack, right? It’s framed in terms of crime rates that have actually been falling for several years in D.C. All of this is part of his overarching frame of using immigration and racism as the wedges with which he asserts control over the broader population.
Bacon: I don’t want to be too critical of her—it’s an unusual situation—but the comments I’ve seen so far from Mayor Bowser have been, We’re going to work with them. I thought Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass were a little stronger in saying, This is bad. I don’t want to be too second-guessing, but I’m concerned about her behavior. Are you concerned by how she’s.… I don’t want to say condoning this, but it’s not active resistance. Maybe she has to do this, but what do you think of what she’s doing?
Greenberg: Absolutely concerned. And recognizing that D.C. is structurally in a different place than a Los Angeles or a California, we are now trying to communicate a national story about what is happening. And it is a really big challenge if the mayor of D.C. is not actually communicating really clearly what an alarming and terrifying incursion this is into D.C. local government and local affairs. And I don’t think that’s a new thing for Muriel Bowser.
Bacon: Right. She’s fairly moderate.
Greenberg: Well, and she’s been trying to accommodate—
Bacon: Oh, right, right.
Greenberg: —this administration for a while. Think about the symbolic removal of Black Lives Matter Plaza, right? She is trying very hard. She has been trying repeatedly to reach an accommodation with the administration. I would look at folks who are on the council like Robert White. Look at Janeese George. Those are the folks who might be speaking on behalf of D.C. residents with the level of alarm and urgency that a lot of us feel.
Bacon: So when we talked in January, December, you told me the resistance or opposing Trump would be different this time. There’d be fewer marches and different kinds of activity. Talk about how that has played out in the last few months. I think that’s borne out, but I want to talk about the strategies you all have been using. There have been some marches, but what’s the approach been to opposing Trump this time as opposed to opposing Trump last in 2017?
Greenberg: Yeah, absolutely. Well, there’s a few big things. The first is I think it’s important to just name that in addition to the hard power ways in which this is a different administration, [which] comes in with a more consolidated Republican Party, comes in with a much stronger control over the courts, we also saw this massive collapse of elite institutions and elite actors, as you know, once Trump won. You saw folks like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg rushing to kiss the ring. You saw universities trying to make accommodations with them. You see all of these businesses preemptively dropping their DEI policies. The law firms. I can go down the list, right? That actually was a real shift in the dynamics, and it created a series of dampening effects and negative ripple effects. A lot of institutions that have some role in upholding either liberal democracy or even just their own interests and norms declined to do so. And we can talk about which ones did that because they believe in it, which ones did that because it’s to their own advantage—
Bacon: Hard to figure out the difference in some ways, yeah.
Greenberg: Yeah. And it’s interesting and important strategically, but it’s not that interesting morally. It’s all functionally the same. Anyway, that was a really important atmospheric shift. And so a lot of our own thinking shifted from, Can we do one-offs focused on specific policies where we’re mobilizing to try to push back on this policy? to, What do we need to do to build the mass public opposition to Donald Trump? And then to show it in force, in ways that are actually going to introduce into all of these alternate decision-makers this question of, Is Donald Trump actually going to win? Because fundamentally what’s happening is [within] a bunch of sections of society, their decision makers have said, Well, Donald Trump was elected. He won the popular vote. He’s going to consolidate power. This is the new normal. I’ve got to find my place underneath this new regime, and I’ve got to secure my position. And so I’m going to fold in and obey.
And it’s our job collectively as the resistance to make people think maybe that’s not actually going to happen. Maybe this is going to be a short-lived experiment and attempting to impose fascism that’s going to end in a disaster for him and a historic wipe out for the Republican Party and an era of accountability and retribution and renewed democracy afterward. And maybe they need to actually hedge their bets a little bit, right? And so part of the thinking is we shifted to stuff like Hands Off and No Kings, which were obviously massive collective movement efforts. We do need to do things where we’re showing up for different issues, where we’re showing up at different moments of crisis, but we also needed to collectively link arms and have a big-tent orientation to bringing out everyone who could collectively object to some part of what was going on and to show broad displeasure across the board.
And so that was the thinking with Hands Off, which was oriented very much around reaction to the DOGE cuts and to the attacks on so much of our services, federal government, civil rights, all of the pieces that were under attack there. That was the thinking with No Kings, which was a broad anti-authoritarian, anti-overreach, [and], because of the L.A. deployment, anti–immigration enforcement. Each of those protest, they were oriented so that you could show up—whatever brought you out, we were all showing up under the same umbrella to show supportive strength—and then oriented toward organizing people and moving them into longer-term collective local organizing. Fundamentally, what we think is that we’re pretty far down the path into authoritarian consolidation of power. And in that moment, we’ve got to use the traditional tools that we’ve got. We’ve got to use our congressional advocacy. We’ve got to do our electoral work. But we also have to recognize that those things are not going to be sufficient, and what we are going to need is mass civil resistance that targets not only our elected officials but actually every facet of power in American society and says you have to take a side.
Bacon: Let me ask a couple of follow up based on that. The first thing I think you said was something along the lines of, In 2017, it was useful to oppose the health care bill ’cause it was one policy, versus, Now the goal is maybe to oppose Trumpism writ large in a certain way because the situation is different. Is that what you said?
Greenberg: Yeah. And I would say in general, a lot of the model of protest in 2017 was something bad happens and we do a rapid-response mobilization in response to it. And some of that was about pushing back on that specific thing, and some of it was just about escalating the story more broadly. The way that harm has unfolded in this administration is so overlapping and so rapid and so catastrophic that individual stories that would’ve prompted that level of backlash in 2017 don’t even get the front page treatment on day one. And so we actually had to create overarching umbrellas that allowed us to collectively show up. I’ll give the example. The Department of Education—they got rid of the Department of Education. That’s crazy.
Bacon: And did it fairly quickly without much controversy actually, yeah.
Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. And that’s just because of the sheer scale and speed at which they are moving makes it really hard for individual stories to break through. So we have to articulate collective meta-stories that we all show up for instead. Not that we don’t also do things on the side as well on different issues. I do think that there is strategic campaigning on particular things that are important for driving home the stories we need in order to build a bigger majority on our side. So we campaigned quite hard along with a lot of folks on the reconciliation bill, in part based on all kinds of evidence that it is a wildly disastrous bill for regular Americans and a massive transfer from normal people to the wealthy and to security services.
That was a strategic move both to try to stop and mitigate harm there but also to make it as well-known as possible. So there’s still strategic advantage to doing that kind of campaigning. It’s just that when we’re actually thinking about, How does the structure of protest work? right now, we have to build the biggest tent we possibly can to all push back together rather than saying we’re going to come out on one issue and one issue and one issue.
Bacon: It’s interesting you said the tent thing. When the No Kings and the Hands Off protests were happening, there was also these Fighting Oligarchy rallies—and they had very large audiences as well. And I assume you oppose oligarchy, I know something about your politics. In a certain way, I don’t want to say there are Democrats who are for oligarchy, but I’m guessing that the No Kings, the whole party could agree to versus Fighting Oligarchy with Bernie Sanders and AOC maybe is not as 100 percent unifying. Is that part of a way that you would think about this?
Greenberg: That’s an interesting question. So we picked up No Kings in part because it was something that was emerging organically as a rallying cry. We saw this with the 50501 movement, which is this organic movement that evolved out of a Reddit protest page. And we were seeing it resonate with a lot of folks and a lot of populations and able to express a “you’re not the boss of me” sentiment that united the different factions of resistance and opposition to the Trump administration. And so we felt like it was a frame that could hold a lot. One of the things that then happened was that there was this side debate within the Democratic Party that was [about] kings versus oligarchs.
Bacon: Right, exactly.
Greenberg: And we were like, Oh, we don’t actually want to be part of that at all. We think that an effective telling of the story of No Kings involves a really clear understanding that this is a guy who is raiding the government for his own self-interest and for the interest of his billionaire buddies, rather than purely a story that’s totally delinked from an economic analysis of what is going on. What we did think was important about the Kings frame—and particularly in light of American history—is the idea of somebody who’s unaccountable, imperious, making decisions without your input, doing things that are going to harm you with no feedback mechanism, which can land as it relates to stories about corruption, as it relates to stories about billionaire giveaways, as it relates to stories about tariffs—which are a little bit of a complicated story to land within some of the Oligarchy frame, right? Because there’s plenty of business interests that are not actually in favor of what they’re doing on tariffs. And so the hope was that we can hold all of those within the No Kings frame, but it’s definitely not intended to be in opposition or in tension with the No Oligarchy frame. And frankly, a lot of regular people don’t see any tension between these.
Bacon: I agree with you obviously. OK, so we talked about elites and I want to come back to them—but talk about the Democratic Party. The first few months, all I could think about was—I think was January 20, that first week—Cory Booker, who I like and think is a good person, said something along the lines of, My job is not to oppose Donald Trump. My job is to help the people of New Jersey. And the implication being that I’m going to be.… And I understand those words all seem true, but I worry the implication was problematic. And I think those first few months, it seemed like the senators were debating how many of us could vote for as many Trump nominees as possible. Do you think the Democratic Party has gotten further along in resisting from when they were on February 1, let’s say? Are they in the right posture now or close to the right posture now?
Greenberg: I think they’re closer?
Bacon: Closer. Alright.
Greenberg: Yeah. And also, my gosh, I think we’ve still got a long way to go.
Bacon: OK.
Greenberg: Immediately after the election, there was just this fervor that swept electeds within D.C., this perception of we lost because we did not talk enough about lowering prices—and Democrats went too far to the left, etc. How they managed to get there [is] a pretty tortured logic in my opinion, but the basic takeaway was, We need to dial down the anti-Trump stuff and we need to dial up just saying lower prices, lower prices, lower prices, and everything else should be filtered through the frame of, This is a distraction from the real problem, which is the need for lower prices. And I think it’s a misread of how the media environment works in this moment. I think it’s a misread because if you say something boring, you’re not going to travel and nobody’s going to hear you. You may be incredibly on message—but if that message doesn’t get beyond you giving that quote to someone, it’s not going to matter.
I also think it’s a misread of how political conflict works. We actually needed a fighting party out there in front making the case for why each individual terrible thing that Donald Trump was doing was bad in order to successfully catalyze the level of backlash. Because people take their cues from their electeds sometimes. If they see electeds who are acting like things are mostly normal, then a lot of them will assume that things are mostly normal. Now, we were tapping into a backlash from basically November on and experiencing this massive insurge of people who were saying, Where is the leadership? What the hell is happening here? One of the very early signs of that was the Laken Riley Bill. This was a immigration bill that was a Republican MAGA messaging bill that got passed by a set of Democrats in their desperation to look like they were also cracking down on immigration. We saw a big backlash amongst our base—a lot of people—and continued, continued pressure. We got Mark Warner at a town hall a couple months ago admitting that he shouldn’t have voted for it. This is something that’s going to continue to live on with folks.
I think Democrats understand that they misread the base at this point. They understand that that’s not where people are. I don’t think they understand what to do about that. I don’t think that they have any coherent analysis of what that means for how they operate. And frankly, you can see that with the funding fight, right? We are not far out from a new funding fight, a rerun of the March situation where Democrats in the Senate collapsed pretty unanimously under Senator Schumer’s leadership. And there’s not a strategy right now. We need a strategy. And if you had a party that understood that their job is to use every lever that they have and to use every tool in their toolbox, then you would be approaching this with a lot more clarity about how you use the one actual moment of power that you have for the rest of this year.
Bacon: We talked about elites at the beginning, newspapers, business owners. Is that story the same? I feel like I read about a college every week folding. But the incentives there are hard, I would say. So how do you feel? Has the elite capitulation declined? Or it is high, is it low? Is it higher? It’s hard for me to assess, but what’s your sense of it?
Greenberg: I think it’s continuing a bit. I think we’ve got some examples of pushback and I think we’ve got stuff we can build on. And also, I think you are seeing a bunch of stories of colleges folding. It is not an accident that they’re trying to fold over the summer in order to avoid student base backlash, right? And we’ll see what happens when students get back in the fall. But I think if you look at something like the CBS/Paramount situation where Stephen Colbert’s been pulled off the air, where there’s been a deal with the administration, you see all of the different pieces of this. You see corporate executives continuing to focus primarily on what’s going to advance the short-term interest of their company. You see meaningful pushback that can have some culturally galvanizing effects. And also, we haven’t yet altered the fundamental underlying incentives of folks like the CBS executives making these decisions.
Bacon: What has happened positively in terms of.… What have we resisted? Let me ask it that way.
Greenberg: Yeah. Well, let’s start with a really big part of the threat in January, which was that you had an alliance between the richest man in the world and Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. You had this fusion of an entire strain of tech anti-democracy thought with the right-wing MAGA anti-democracy thought. And one of the things that we identified very early on within the ecosystem was that we desperately needed to either fracture that alliance or create major political costs for that alliance. And so one of the very early strategic moves that a bunch of us made was to focus in on Elon Musk and his role in federal government, recognizing that he had a totally different set of assumptions, favorables, etc., attached that caused people to have less trust in what he was doing, and [using] that as an entrée into driving down the favorability of Republicans more broadly, culminating in both Musk seeing his own interests directly impeded by protests at Tesla dealerships [and] also in the defeat of his preferred candidate in April with the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
I think the combination of protest as part of the way that we both drove down a administration and Musk approval ratings and also created the conditions in which that relationship could fracture—that’s a really big deal. And it’s easy to.… The news cycle moves so fast at this point that it’s easy to be like, Oh, that was ancient history. But the basic premise of the richest man in the world is [in] lockstep with and basically living out of the White House with the president and they’re both implementing this incredibly terrifying agenda together was like existential-threat level. And we are now in a position where that relationship is fractured and Musk has withdrawn to … I don’t even know what he’s doing now, but he’s withdrawn to a meaningful degree. I think that’s a really big win. That’s a really important part of the overall picture that we were actually able to fracture that alliance. And Republicans still have a massive money advantage. They will for the foreseeable future, but it’s categorically different than having a supervillain/Bond villain situation on your side.
Bacon: Let me ask. I think in terms of the numbers a lot. I feel like by this time in 2017, there were a lot of evidence suggest that the Democratic Party would win the midterms and that Trump was fairly unpopular. It doesn’t feel.… Trump’s numbers are not great, but they’re not at the worst levels possible despite him being so horrible. Trump’s poll numbers are not that bad, and the Democratic Party is very, very unfavorably viewed right now. What do we make of those? Those two data points worry me, but I think there’s reasons maybe I shouldn’t be too worried. How do you view those two data points?
Greenberg: Well, first I would say Trump’s approval ratings are pretty bad. You want to be above 40 percent consistently if you are a president. And also agree, Democrats’ approval ratings are also pretty bad. It’s worth noting, a big part of that is actually ’cause Democrats are mad at Democrats.
Bacon: You think that’s because of the lack of urgency and fight.
Greenberg: Yeah, I think that there’s frustration with Democrats on the leadership gap. I think there’s frustration with Democrats for having lost 2024. I think that a lot of what’s happening in the current moment is an anti-gerontocracy backlash that is a delayed reaction to the Biden decision to run again and the fact that we were all put in this situation in 2024 with him having to step down and Kamala Harris having to step in in the very last minute. So I think when you dig into who is mad at Democrats—they don’t have great ratings with anyone, but part of the reason why their ratings are so bad is because actually deeply committed Democrats are also quite frustrated with Democratic leadership. I think that it’s going to be really, really important for us to figure out ways to make the story of both the primaries and the general election of 2026 about something that’s more than what it’s currently shaping up to be.
I think that we have this basic challenge: Donald Trump is the most historically and shockingly corrupt president in history and we ought to be able to capitalize on that, [but] we actually really struggled to do so. When you look at the polling, people think that both sides are corrupt and Republicans are just better at it. And we also have a real feasibility credibility gap with Democrats where we’ve got policies that test really well with people and we also have a lack of trust that Democrats will actually enact and do those things. And so my takeaway from all of that is that you actually have to have a step back and have a real orientation around how Democrats [can] rebrand themselves as people who mean business and who are making tangible demonstrations to show that they mean business.
And some of that’s going to be about primary challenges, right? There’s going to be some set of people who are clearing out folks who are not on board, but I also think we should be thinking about, What are tangible commitments that we could make about our relationship with money? Our relation with corporate money? Our relationship with money and politics? The ways in which Democrats do business that can give people some reason to think that there’s going to something different about how people operate once they’re back in.… We’re fighting Republicans, but honestly at this point we’re also fighting people’s total distrust and disenchantment with the system.
Bacon: I want to end here because I wanted to ask a question about what the Democrats should do. We’ve talked around that, but I guess you’re saying rebrand. I worry that we’re having intense debates about housing regulations in California and in New York. I don’t know how.… I’m not saying those are not important, but I worry we’re in this “Medicare for All” versus “Medicare for More.”… I think what you’re saying is the rebrand should be along different lines than center-left versus left. It’s not a ideological rebrand. Is that what you’re getting at? Your framing is a little bit different, I think, in terms of money and politics. Is that the kind of issues you’re getting at?
Greenberg: Yeah, a little bit. So I guess what I’d say is I think there’s definitely a very lively debate about abundance and housing policy, and somehow that’s gotten tied up in the debate about moderation on Twitter. And it’s almost impossible for me to stress how disconnected that is from anyone who is doing actual anti-Trump organizing. I host a weekly Q&A with our folks, and we’ve got like 5,000 people join and they upvote all the questions. I have never once gotten a single question making it in above the hundreds on any of this stuff. There’s a whole conversation there and it’s just hard to stress how disconnected it is from the actual concerns of the people who might actually take up some of that policy—because they just view it as not relevant to the current moment. The current moment, the question is, What are you doing to stop fascism? And in terms of what Democrats can—
Bacon: Yeah. What is a “stopping fascism” agenda look like? That might be a question I’m driving at here.
Greenberg: Yeah. Well, I think part of it would be real and aggressive commitments around accountability and investigations, right? We don’t yet have any commitments from Democrats about what they will do with the House investigative powers if they win a majority, right? So for the base, part of it is literally, If we put you into power, will you do something differently than you’ve done this year? Because what we’ve seen you do this year is fumble the ball when you actually have meaningful leverage. So there’s one piece that’s that. I think that there’s also a piece about, What’s the set of policies and the set of commitments that breakthrough to people who are fundamentally disenchanted with the broader two-party system, with government as a whole, who, even if they like Democrats, don’t have much faith in their policies? I think there’s a very significant overlap with people who are deeply distrustful of Democrats after following the Biden administration’s mishandling of Gaza. There’s this whole set of questions around how do you reach people who are actually simply just not.… It’s not about just saying a policy that they like. It’s about giving them some reason to believe that this time is going to be different.
My take here is: You can’t just promise new policies when you get into power, knowing that you’re also not going to actually have the majorities to make that happen. You actually have to change something right now about how you are doing business in order to signal that you’re going to be different this time around. What’s within our control right now? What’s within our control is how we use money to advance our own interest. What’s within our own control is our relationships with lobbyists and with corporate interests. What’s within our own control is, Are we actually unilaterally stepping back, cleaning our own house on stock trading? How do we actually signal to people that there is a real and genuine and substantive difference between how the Democratic Party treats corruption within its own ranks versus how the Republican Party treats corruption? So that would be my pitch. Think about the things that are within our own control, that we can do differently without federal levers of power—because we’re not going to have them on the timeline that’s necessary to convince people that they need to believe in us again.
Bacon: And I guess I’ve been dubious. I’m been a little skeptical of the run younger candidates because a young person is not inherently better than an old person. Bernie Sanders is great. We could name some members of Congress who I don’t love who are young. But I think the point you’re making is if you wanted the party to feel different to people, it has to be different in some way. And younger people or newer people might be part of that.
Greenberg: I think that’s absolutely part of it. I think the generational fight right now is a double-edged sword. It is not a win to me to replace like Jerry Nadler with somebody who’s getting funded by the MFI, right? And also, net-net, it is better to have newer faces. We have a lot of data suggesting that the current faces that representing the Democratic Party are not causing people to have more faith in the Democratic Party. With all due respect to Senator Schumer, he has an approval rating that is.… I can’t even call it up to mind, but it is not the kind of thing.… He’s not going to be welcome on in any swing state, let’s put it that way. So I think there is a piece of this that is absolutely about running younger people, running people who are more accessible, running people who are digital media natives, running people who are capable of communicating with voters in the ways that voters actually are willing to hear right now. It’s not just having press releases and interacting with your traditional legacy media. It’s like, Can you do a TikTok and look like you’re doing it willingly and not in a hostage video? Right? I absolutely think there is a generational element to it. I also think we’ve got to be careful about just a purely generational element without a clear overlay of, We’re trying to clean a house here. This hasn’t been working. We need to do things differently.
Bacon: And I’ll end it there. Anything you want to.… I think the word “plug” is wrong. Any way people can plug into Indivisible groups? Or talk about how, if you’re in Community X and you want to get more involved, what you can do through Indivisible.
Greenberg: Yeah, absolutely. So Indivisible is a nationwide movement. We have local groups all over the country. There are about 2,800 of them right now. So there’s probably one that is near you. If there is not one that is near you, congratulations. You might just be the new founder of an Indivisible group. If you go to INDIVISIBLE.org, you can find where local groups are. You can sign up for our emails and we will send you updates including when events are happening in your area that you can attend as well as regular actions that you can take. And yeah, just encourage you to find a local organizing home, whether that’s Indivisible or somewhere else.
Bacon: OK. We’ll finish up there. Leah, thanks for joining us. More importantly, thank you for all the work you’ve been doing.
Greenberg: Thank you. Always a pleasure.