The following is a lightly edited transcript of the Oct. 7 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this video here.
Perry Bacon: Welcome to The New Republic show Right Now. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m joined by Arkadi Gerney today. Great great to see you, Arkadi.
Arkadi Gerney: Great to see you, Perry. Thanks for having me on.
Perry Bacon: I’m going to introduce him a bit, he’s—I’m going to use the term Democratic strategist, and he actually does real strategy. He’s worked for a lot of organizations: He worked for [The Center for American Progress] (CAP), he worked for Michael Bloomberg’s gun organization for some period. But in the last few years he’s worked on thinking about how to take on Trump and how to use the powers of, let’s call it, blue America, from cities to states to liberal institutions.
He’s done a lot of thinking and writing, and even before Trump became president the second time, he wrote a very detailed report about how we should prepare for Trump. The report actually argued that Trump 2.0 would be different, and therefore, the protest model and the [approach of] getting the Mitt Romneys and John McCains to vote against Trump would no longer exist, because the moderate Republicans on the Hill are essentially gone.
And the protests probably worked the first time better because people were stunned by Trump, but now that he won a second time, we’re in a different period. So, welcome—thanks for joining us.
Gerney: Thanks for having me on, Perry.
Bacon: So let me ask in a broad sense first: the resistance to Trump. How would you define how that’s going?
Gerney: Well, I think, as you were describing the setup, the second version of Trump is harder than the first version. And I think there are three principal reasons why it’s harder: They’re different, we’re different, and the environment and some key institutions are different.
Let’s start with them. They’re much more organized. They had a plan—they had Project 2025. They’ve defeated the internal opposition in the Republican Party, so the kinds of people like John McCain who were around in 2017 are not anymore.
We’re different—with “we” being small-d democrats and big-D Democrats. I think there’s a lot of exhaustion. Some of that comes out of COVID, some of it comes out of having done this once before. And there’s a lot of division among Democrats about where to go, and I think that’s an understandable, and in some ways healthy debate, which is: What’s the right story for our party going forward? What’s the right coalition? There’s a lot of anxiety, understandably, about how the Democratic Party coalition seems to be falling apart.
And then the third thing that makes this very challenging is that the environment is different. Some of the key institutions that were pillars and guardrails in 2017–2020 are not there in the same way. One of those is the courts—in large part because of Trump’s first presidency. There’s been a much more profound takeover of the federal courts, especially at the Supreme Court level. The other one is journalism—your industry, Perry—where the years and years of stress on local journalism, national journalism, you see the consolidation happening, you see people who have more of an
“Opinion” background like Bari Weiss taking over CBS News.
It’s very different from what we were in. So we shouldn’t be surprised that resisting Trump and finding a path forward is much harder this time around than before. But obviously that makes the project all the more important.
Bacon: So you were talking about what states could do even before Trump took office. What did you imagine—let’s go back to the initial writing you were doing. What did you hope [for] states specifically? Why states, why governors—obviously I mean blue state governors. So talk about what you saw the in the potential for states. Why were they an important mechanism for resistance?
Gerney: Well, I think states are obviously fundamental in our structure and the structure of democracy, and I think we don’t think about it every day, but the United States is a creation of a bunch of states. It’s sort of the outcome of a contract between states, and we think of divided power as between Congress and the Supreme Court and the presidency, but another critical part of the constitutional structure is the divide between federal power and state power.
And if you look at American history, for better or worse—and for probably most of American history, it’s been for the worse—states have been an enormous source of power and resistance to the federal government. You saw after the Civil War, there was a hundred years where a group of states were able to resist civil rights, and it signals the sort of structural centrality that states have.
And if you think about—California’s economy is the fourth-largest economy in the world, and in an enormous number of policy areas—schools, sanitation, things that are our daily life things—most of that is done at the state level. And so there’s an enormous source of power.
I think the other reason I think about states is if you look at the Biden years and try to think, “What was the MAGA opposition that put Trump back in power?” We can think that the center of gravity was at Mar-a-Lago and on Trump’s Twitter or Truth Social account, but I think the true centers of gravity were in state capitals, where Republican governors and attorneys general and treasurers were using their power in a coordinated way—in an unprecedented way—to undermine the Biden administration and to sort of push their policy prerogatives forward, interfere with blue states.
You saw migrant bussing where Texas moved 125,000 migrants, undocumented migrants, into New York and Illinois and other states, that precipitated a sort of logistical crisis, a political crisis. So I think you have a little bit of a model of what states can do to push forward their own prerogatives, to work together, and to undermine a federal government that they disagree with.
Bacon: So that model, while I don’t agree with its policy vision, was a model that was coordinated. You’re talking about Greg Abbot, you’re talking about attorney generals and various other states. So you had written before Trump took over, “Here’s a model we should use.” So how is that going? Are the are the Democratic governors in democratic states doing something—let’s tell the good story first. What are the parts of that model or [according to] that model they have used?
Gerney: Well, I think a lot of it is happening. First of all, let’s not pretend this is an easy pathway or some sort of silver bullet. This is a very hard, challenging position that these governors and attorneys general are in.
But if you look at, for example, the attorneys general, they’ve filed hundreds of cases to block Trump administration initiatives, to block the Trump administration from stealing money from states that they’re obligated by statute to provide. Many of those lawsuits have been successful, at least at the preliminary stages.
I think you see among governors, many of them finding their own way to push back and push against the Trump administration. Obviously, a big one is, you know, Trump basically ordered Republican governors, particularly Greg Abbott in Texas, to redistrict their states to try to get an advantage in the 2026 congressional elections, which Texas has proceeded to do. Other Republican states are looking at doing it. The Texas legislators—the Democrats—left the state to try to temporarily block it.
But the real response that’s available to blue states is to counter, and that’s what California has done. Gavin Newsom has led an effort to get an initiative on the ballot to allow California to override its independent redistricting for several cycles of elections to counter Texas. And that’s not because Democrats are against independent redistricting, but I think they have to understand that if you have one side that is trying to steal an election because they can’t win—talking about the OBB mega bill that takes away healthcare for millions of people, and cuts taxes for billionaires—that you need a way to respond when they are stacking the deck in their favor.
And so I think you see more of that happening, and I think the redistricting thing was something of a mind shift, where you saw some of the governors becoming more active. Obviously, an area of big challenge, I’m in Chicago today, is the issue of ICE and federal agents and National Guard troops who are in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. (which of course is not a state, which ties their hands a little bit in how they can push back). And clearly, this is over the will of the people in those states, over the will of the governors of those states, and trying to provoke a crisis.
And so I think that the governors are working on how to respond to this challenge. It’s not easy, but I think there are a lot of tools and levers that they’re beginning to use, and more that they can use, to take the initiative narratively, but also using legal power, economic power, political power.
Bacon: One thing I didn’t anticipate, maybe you did, was how aggressively Trump has gone after blue states, blue cities, particularly. I don’t think I expected—maybe the ICE raids I expected, but the combination of the ICE and the National Guard. In some ways, the Trump administration is really taking on cities in a way they didn’t the first time around. Is that fair to say?
Gerney: I think that’s fair to say. I think that it’s not just that—One way to interpret it would be that blue states have a bunch of policies that Trump and his allies don’t seem to like, things like Medicaid expansion that gives more healthcare to low- and middle-income working people, and that the reason that blue states are getting targeted more is because they’re going after policies they don’t like.
But even if that’s part of it, if you look at what they’re actually doing, they’re clearly picking fights and trying to really target blue states, even on things that would seem to be more neutral. So, for example, the Department of Transportation is rewriting its grant funding formulas to take into account a bunch of factors that will lead to blue states getting less funding and red states getting more funding.
And it’s really interesting, because in the Biden administration you saw Democrats kind of do the opposite of this, which is, in the construction of the IRA—the big Biden bill that put a lot of investment in clean energy infrastructure—the structure of the bill actually sent more money to red states and red districts. And part of the political strategy behind that was like, “Hey, let’s get representatives from people who don’t agree with us as much on this to see the benefit of this policy.”
What you see with Trump is the opposite, which is reward your friends, punish your enemies, and beat them into submission. But I think there’s a strategy to counter that.
Bacon: Talk about the—I’m leery of of these terms, but there’s a piece in Mother Jones that I haven’t got to read yet, but it talks about the idea of California is doing a soft secession. Some of my other guests have used the term “civil war,” not that we have an issue like slavery, but more that the Civil War had a big element of states being in conflict with the federal government. Is there a real level of conflict between the blue states and the federal government right now, and resistance from the states to the federal government? I don’t love the term “civil war,” but we’re in something like that kind of conflict, right?
Gerney: I think we want to be careful with these kinds of terms. Probably the metaphor that I’ve thought about the most is sort of a cold civil war, and really, a cold war, which is something like the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. There are flashpoints, there are moments of actual, I guess, violent conflict or violent outbursts, but it’s really about two opposing ideologies and sort of a battle for relative power.
And I think when you view it in that lens, one of the best pathways—I think that [for] most big-D Democrats and small-d democrats who want to save American democracy, the objective is to get through this era and to get to some sort of new normal, some sort of more stable agreement between the various factions and states in our country, and something that is durable and, frankly, more united. But how do we get from where we are to that?
In my mind, a critical set of approaches are deterrence and hardball. I think you see this in the redistricting context: If you don’t like partisan redistricting, if you let one side unilaterally do it, they’re going to keep doing it. The way to get to some sort of compromise is to credibly convince Republicans, hey, you can do a mid-cycle redistricting—which, by the way, costs money, it’s sort of a mess, it’s not good for voters because one election you have one representative, another election you have another representative, it messes up accountability. It’s not a good way to run a country. But if they think they can get a political advantage or partisan advantage, they’re going to do it.
But if you can credibly show that you’re not going to let that happen, you’re creating the conditions where some sort of détente or compromise is more possible. And I think we need to think in that mindset in a lot of different areas. Because, number one, I think it’ll be critical to get through the next three years—but this is not a three-year problem. Even if a Democrat is elected in 2029, even if Democrats win the House and Senate, I don’t think this is going to reset to normal on its own, in part because MAGA has taken over the federal courts.
There [are] decades of federalism jurisprudence which essentially pushes power down to the states. And I think we should be interested in state and local power, because that’s where we’re going to solve a lot of the problems that our country faces, too. For example, inside the Democratic coalition, a big debate in the last year has been the so-called “abundance” theory of where Democrats should go—Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote a book by that title, but others have been talking about it. It’s sort of a critique of blue states and how they’ve governed, and tied their hands on building up clean energy and housing and things like that.
I think that is, whether you like it or not, something to think about: We need to be more focused on how we can leverage our power, make progress, attract people to blue states. Because I think there are essentially two competing worldviews in this country, and if people who want to save democracy want to do that, we have to both counter the interference in our own states where it’s happening, but we also have to grow and build places that people want to be part of.
A big challenge for blue states in the last five years, for example, is that there’s been a net population loss from blue states to red states of five million people. That’s driven especially by affordability—and that’s something that’s got to change. There is no political future for blue states or Democrats in this country if it becomes a collection of very nice, upper-middle-class, suburban, super-liberal places where only a handful of people can afford to live. That’s not going to work.
So I think there’s a lot of work to do—both to counter red states and the hostile federal government, but also to reimagine how we govern in blue states and cities to make them really great places to live across the board.
Bacon: Let me drill in a couple of things you said. Cold civil war. Did that start in 2015, or 2025, or—what’s the time period? Because it’s not just about Trump. In some ways, these competing ideologies existed a little bit longer. Define that term a little bit, or define what we’re talking about.
Gerney: If you look at a few different indicators in data and research, it’s probably been going on—or growing—for about 30 years. I think it kind of started in the 1990s.
For example, one measure of differences between blue states and red states are the laws they end up adopting on different issues. A few researchers have looked at what I would term “policy divergence”—which the trend of blue states and red states adopting more divergent, different, policies across different issues: guns, abortion, taxes, you name it.
And if you look from the New Deal to basically the year 2000, across all these issues, there isn’t growing differences between blue states and red states in the policies they were adopting. If anything, there is some convergence—the policies are becoming less differentiated across these blocs of states. But in the last 25 years, that difference just keeps growing and growing and growing. So the difference between living in a blue state and a red state has become much more consequential.
For example, if you go to some other country and somebody asks you, “Hey, Perry, tell me—what are the laws on guns in America?” It totally depends where you are. It’s pretty different in Massachusetts and Kentucky. “What are the laws on abortion in America?” We used to have a somewhat consistent set of rules on abortion. Now we have wildly varied rules.
And I think that’s made this contest more consequential, which is part of what these blocs of states and parties are looking for when they take power in the federal government, is, “Hey, can we take our way and impose it on the rest of the country?”
Ideologically, conservatives used to talk 30 years ago about small government and devolving power to the states. But you see in Trump—probably the most maximalist president in terms of executive power—it’s not just about putting power in the executive branch. It’s about trying to intimidate the Federal Reserve, get rid of the independent agencies, and put all the power in the president himself.
That’s a real danger in terms of the risk of autocracy. And I think there’s a playbook about how to respond to that, and I think state power—and a state response—is at the center of that playbook.
Bacon: You mentioned some highlights of the coordinated lawsuits. OK, those are the highlights of the “Blue America” response. What are some things you wish there was more [of]? Some lowlights, or things that have not happened the way you wish they were in terms of the blue state response?
Gerney: Well, I think that there’s one thing from the red-state response in the Biden years, is you saw a lot of activity trying to push corporate decision-making. Red states didn’t like ESG—that’s environmental, social, and governance investing strategies. They didn’t like DEI. And they started using their pension fund investments and state procurement power to push companies out of those kinds of practices.
For example, Texas took $8 billion from the teachers’ pension fund and pulled it out of BlackRock, a big Wall Street financial firm that was the biggest promoter of this environmental investment strategy. BlackRock pulled out of ESG investing. They eventually have gotten off Texas’s blacklist. And they’ve really used that power—as investors, as procurers—to change corporate America.
That’s a battle blue states should be more effective in fighting, in part because blue states have larger economies, higher GDP, higher GDP per capita. They have larger state governments, and they have larger state workforces with more generous pension benefits. If you look at pensions, blue states have 75 percent more money invested than red states. So it’s like a middleweight fighter taking on a heavyweight fighter—but the heavyweight fighter hasn’t responded.
Republicans talk a lot about “woke capitalism” and how the government is interfering in the marketplace, but in the last few years, they’re the ones who’ve been doing it. You see this now at the federal level, where Trump is going company by company, and investing money in Intel. And if we wonder why there’s been this widespread corporate capitulation to Trump, I don’t think it started right after the election—it started a few years ago when the states started using their power.
And again, this may not be something we want to do. What we probably should be doing with pension fund investments is trying to get the best return possible so that firefighters and teachers can retire securely and safely. But if red states are going to use that power to try to push around companies, and control their practices, and turn them into people who will fund their campaigns, I think blue states need to use powers like that—places where they actually have more power—to respond accordingly.
Bacon: You used the words hardball and deterrence a few minutes ago. So I think part of this is—and even when we’ve talked a few times—every time you talk, I’m sort of like, “Do I really want California to be using their pension to, like, force…” But the answer to these questions has got to be yes—part of what you’re saying is, things that make me queasy in sort of a liberal way, are gonna [happen]. We’re in a fight over power, and that requires hardball. Is that the subtext here, or the actual text?
Gerney: I think that’s right. For example, in the last 24 hours, Governor Pritzker and Governor Newsom sent letters to the National Governors Association, which is the bipartisan coalition of all 50 governors—and they said, “Hey, if you’re not going to say something about National Guard troops coming into our states without our request, we’re going to drop out of this organization.” And I think that’s a healthy response to something that’s not working anymore.
I think we have to be able to look squarely at what we have. At the end of the day, yes, we want to have a national bipartisan governors association where they talk about ideas across party lines. But if the red-state governors are not going to say something about something that is an across-the-board violation of the Constitution and of the role of states, what’s the point of being in something like this?
And look, I’ve talked about some of the challenges that blue states have around affordability and this sort of net migration toward red states. But blue states have a lot to be proud of too. If you look at educational outcomes, if you look at life expectancy—there’s a big difference. If you look at crime in cities—Republicans talk a lot about crime in Chicago and cities like that, but if you look at crime across states and control for urbanization, there’s more crime in red states. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think there’s a lot that’s going reasonably well in blue states, and part of what you want to do is tell that story.
There are some places where you can leverage those differences: there’s insurance regulation at the state level. Should people be subsidizing Florida property insurance when there’s all this home-insurance risk in Florida because the policies are not doing anything about climate change? I think there are a lot of tools that are potentially available to create economic pressure to get the kinds of policy incentives that more of us would like to see.
Bacon: I think we’ve talked about Pritzker and Newsom a few times. We’ve talked about Democratic AGs. Are the other Democratic governors involved in resisting? I don’t know, but part of it is Newsom and Pritzker are presumably running for president, so I think that’s part of what’s going on. That’s why the media covers them. But are the other Democratic governors involved in resisting?
Gerney: I think different governors are taking different approaches—and of course they represent very different states. I think, Perry, you’re from Kentucky, so you’ve got a Democratic governor, Beshear, who’s in a very red state. And, you know, I think the right answer for governors is that you can’t—you can’t do it [where] everyone does the same thing.
I do think you see a number of governors who are creatively pushing back in different ways. For example, President Trump was talking about sending the National Guard to Baltimore, saying Baltimore’s out of control with crime, when in fact crime has been going down there for many years. Wes Moore, the governor there, said, “Hey, why don’t you come to Baltimore and walk around with me, and come see for yourself.” I thought it was a creative, kind of playful response that shut the president up.
Another governor who I think has handled this era pretty well is Kathy Hochul, the New York state governor. After the November election, she had the second-lowest favorability rating of any governor in the country. Now she has a positive favorability rating. I think part of that is that she’s counter-punched, in different ways, at different times, with the Trump administration.
She’s done that even though there are things the state has to negotiate with the Trump administration around. For example, there’s a congestion pricing plan for New York City that has to do with how cars are tolled to reduce congestion and raise revenue. The Trump administration tries to block it. But I think she’s both been punching at times, negotiating at other times, and I think that’s the best strategy with Trump—which is, if you put your hands up right away, he’s just going to bowl you over and keep taking.
Bacon: Let’s move to other institutions and then before we close here. I want to talk about cities ... Let’s talk about cities first. Are there any are there good—are there useful things cities are doing, useful resistant cities, and are there things that cities could be doing better.
Gerney: Obviously, cities vary enormously in their size, their budgets, etc. A huge—
Bacon: Let’s take the 50 largest cities—Boston, Chicago—let’s take the 50 largest cities, for now.
Gerney: I think that cities—they’re on the front lines of these questions, whether it’s crime or education—and so they have real choices to make about how much are they going to facilitate things like the ICE raids, or not participate, or try to protect people. So I think there is a lot for cities to do.
I think their hands, constitutionally, are a bit more tied up than states’. Cities don’t exist in the Constitution, states do. And cities are basically creations of states. So in some states, cities are very powerful. So New York City, for example, has a massive budget—New York City’s budget is the size of the state of Florida’s.
And right now, there’s this mayoral campaign, and Zohran Mamdani seems like he’s the favorite to win the general election. I think that will be a real bellwether for other mayors, and I also think it’ll be a real point of contestation with Trump. Trump’s from New York, it’s the biggest city, and he’s definitely wanted to use Mamdani as something of a foil. I think you may see a lot of confrontation shifting to New York in the new year, with a new mayor.
Bacon: We mentioned corporations a little bit earlier, but I mean, it’s corporations. I wish they were doing more, but is that probably the most logical place where, of course, they’re falling in line? Maybe there’s nothing to expect beyond that, or ... ?
Gerney: I think there’s been a massive capitulation by businesses, and they’re going to look at their bottom lines and take the path of least resistance. That’s what businesses are mostly going to do. But I also think there’s been some mistakes and overreactions.
For example, in the capitulating law firms, there were a lot of big law firms that were under pressure from Trump to settle with the Trump administration and offer free legal services to president Trump’s preferred causes. The firms that settled—a lot of them have lost lawyers who’ve left, they’ve lost some clients. And then the firms that fought back, based on what accounts there are, seem to be doing quite well.
And part of that is, if you’re in a dispute with someone, do you want to hire the lawyer who might be cowed and give up because there’s a little pressure, or do you want the lawyer who’s never going to back down? I think it’s a real problem for them—big businesses, global businesses. They have to recognize, yes, who’s the president of the United States matters, and what the policies of the United States are matter. But they also have to sell across these 50 states—and who the governors are, what the policies are in those states matter, what the policies are around the world matter.
And they have to think about what’s rational for their businesses. So as it relates, for example, to climate change: Donald Trump may decide that climate change is a hoax, that he hates windmills, and that he wants to push businesses out of that. And he’s had some success in bullying businesses so far. But they have to think, what is the real challenge here? What are the other markets and actors that are ultimately going to set the rules around this? What is strategy that ultimately makes sense?
There’s a lot of power in influencing those decisions, especially among blue states. If you can coordinate your regulatory incentives, you may see businesses begin to behave differently. And I think you may see them begin to behave differently as we get closer to the end of the Trump administration. Despite his threats to run for a third term—which he’s not constitutionally allowed to do—someday this is going to end. It doesn’t mean the challenges are going to end, but every actor is going to be assessing, “What makes sense for me this month?” But also they’ll be remembering that what they do this month may have consequences 12 months, 24 months from now.
Bacon: Let me close—I want to hit four other institutions, and I’ll give you my four other parts of our [side], and I’ll let you—I’ll give my views on them and then see what you think.
So my sense is: Congressional Democrats started off pretty poorly in terms of this, but they’ve gotten more aggressive now. I think you’ve been urging me, when you and I have talked, that states might be a better venue for this in any way because they have more actual power. But I think congressional Democrats are getting better, but are not great.
I think the public has been there from the beginning. If you look at the No Kings protests and things [like that], the public—and Trump’s approval rating has gone down a lot—the public seems to be resisting and opposing pretty strongly, I’d say.
Higher education I’ve been very disappointed by, and surprisingly so — another place where I think capitulation has been too fast and really bad. And then the news media is another place I’d say has been generally disappointing—though you’ve got great work at ProPublica, The New Republic, some of the more left-wing publications have done pretty well, I’d say—but the sort of mainstream.
So—news media, higher ed, congressional Democrats, the public. Any of those you want to take, disagree with me about, or want to amplify?
Gerney: I’ll try to do a little bit of each. Congressional Democrats—I appreciate what they’re doing right now with the standoff on the shutdown. I think they’ve settled on a clear ask around health care that makes a lot of sense.
I also think their actual leverage and power are quite limited, so they have a hard hand to play. Part of the reason we’ve been more focused on states and governors and attorneys general, is that they just have a lot more they can do to successfully obstruct and offer a different path forward.
On media, it’s a huge challenge, as you know, and it started long before the Trump administration. Because of changes in social media platforms and how advertising works, there’s been incredible stress in this industry that’s driving some consolidation. But what’s really of concern, is that the Trump administration using its leverage as a regulator to influence—to make news organizations to capitulate.
There was the bogus Disney–George Stephanopoulos settlement. Then there was the 60 Minutes bogus settlement and lawsuit. And I think what you’re seeing—Republicans have complained for a long time about mainstream media. I think what’s going to be left of mainstream media in a couple of years is very consolidated and largely aligned with Trump.
So I think it’ll be really important in this environment for there to be more alternative media—and for people to become part of the media more. I think it’ll be a lot of Substack video chats, and newsletters, and different places that will be essential. It doesn’t mean that all the pillars of media are falling apart. A lot of people complain about The New York Times, but I think they’ve probably handled this last ten months reasonably well. But it’s a real challenge.
Bacon: And on that note, I think it’s been a great conversation. You’ve given us some positive things to think about, which I think is important, in that the states are resisting. I think it’s an important story that you’re explaining. Anything else you want to finish on, anything else you wanna add?
Gerney: My advice for regular people who are trying to figure out how to get involved and make a difference: People have often said, “Think globally, act locally.” I’d really look around you, and your city councils, your state legislators, your state comptrollers, offices you may not be paying much attention to, and start thinking about what you want from them.
How could it make where you are work better and be a better place to live? But also, how can they do something—use your power, to help them use their power, to push back?
Bacon: That’s great. Arkadi, where can people find your work? I don’t think you do a ton of social media, but are there things you’ve written that you want to highlight?
Gerney: I had an op-ed in The Washington Post, something in Democracy Journal, the American Prospect—if you Google my name, you’ll find it—but hopefully more coming soon.
Bacon: Good. Arkadi, thanks for joining us. Good to see you.
Gerney: Thanks, Perry. Bye.