This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 18 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: This is Right Now, the The New Republic show on politics and policy. I’m Perry Bacon, the host, and I’m honored to be joined today by Leah Greenberg. She’s the co-executive director of Indivisible, which is one of the groups that put on, helped put on the nationwide, and actually international—I saw there were some events in London, too, some protests across the world calling for a democracy—called the No Kings events. So, Leah, welcome.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
Bacon: We’ll talk about where you were yesterday. First of all, what were you doing? Which protests did you go to yesterday?
Greenberg: I was in downtown Washington, D.C. with about 200,000 other folks in solidarity with the occupied city and in solidarity with folks around the country.
Bacon: And did you speak and what did you say?
Greenberg: I did speak. Ezra, my co-executive director, and I, spoke together. We talked about how this entire week has been an exercise in one of the most important things that we can collectively do, which is call the bluff of these would-be authoritarians when they threaten us.
There was a concerted effort over the last week to try to scare people away from going to these marches—to try to portray them as anti-American, to try to create the permission structure for a crackdown on dissent and opposition. And what we saw was that a big bunch of people refused to be cowed.
And so we talked about that. We talked about the need to go after both Trump and the enablers, who are making it possible. And then we intro’ed Bernie Sanders, who was the final speaker of the day.
Bacon: When you say they were trying to—you mean Mike Johnson made some comments specifically.... Part of the value yesterday, I agree, was that the Trump administration had tried to basically shame the protesters, but also in some ways to suggest it would be violent if you went.
So talk about what they were doing a little bit.
Greenberg: Yeah, well, I think a few different things are going on. The first is that congressional Republicans have been in a real mess on messaging for several weeks now, right? Because the shutdown has been going on. They have this totally incoherent position. People are blaming them. They know it. They’re in a very uncomfortable position on health care.
And they pivoted pretty desperately last week to a full-court press attack on No Kings and kind of claiming that this protest that was set in September—and had nothing to do with the shutdown fight—was why the shutdown fight was still going on, etc. It was not a very strong argument, but it was kind of a sign of their desperation.
The other part of this, though, that is more sinister, more troubling, and more indicative of the authoritarian creep that we’re experiencing, is that it feeds into this ongoing attack on dissent. Stephen Miller has been personally overseeing an effort to crack down on political opposition and protest since the Kirk assassination. I mean, it was happening before the Kirk assassination, but it’s clearly escalated since then.
And this was an organized effort by the top folks in the Republican Party to paint millions of Americans as some kind of sinister, violent force justifying repression—very clearly trying to feed into this ongoing cycle of claiming that the president is authorized to crack down on Americans, to deploy troops into American cities, to go after anyone who stands against him in the name of restoring order. So both of those things were happening at the same time.
Bacon: And in some ways, if the protests had been small, they were sort of suggesting there would be violence at them that they would stoke. And then if they were small, they’d say, “Look!” They were trying to have it both ways on some level, right?
Greenberg: Yeah, I think that’s right. And, you know, I think what you saw over the last 24 hours was a very abrupt pivot from, these are the scariest things you could ever imagine to oh, it’s just a bunch of old white people that we don’t have to take that seriously.
Which is—you’ve got to choose one. You can go with one or the other, but you have to choose.
Bacon: So talk about yours, the one you were at in D.C., Bernie Sanders spoke. Who else spoke?
Greenberg: So Ezra and I spoke. We had comments from ACLU, 50501, Free D.C., which is, and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, which are local actors that have been big in organizing D.C. to resist the National Guard occupation. Mehdi Hassan. Let’s see. Who else?
Bacon: That’s fine. But the idea is, like, it was sort of—it’s cross-ideological. Everyone’s not a socialist. Everyone’s not necessarily a progressive. It’s, like, broadly ideological, and people have different roles—like, Mehdi’s in the media, Bernie Sanders is a senator, you guys run a nonprofit.
So the goal is to assemble a big coalition of people who agree [that] Donald Trump is bad, authoritarianism is bad, but who may not necessarily—who may disagree on Medicare for All or something.
Greenberg: That’s right. I mean, Chris Murphy joined as well. And Chris Murphy is not somebody that I’ve always agreed with on every issue. And also he’s someone who’s been out front from the beginning of this year saying, we are dealing with the real deal authoritarianism and we got to pull out all the stops in responding. It is not intended to be a complete ideological policy platform that we’re all putting together here. It is intended to be everyone who can collectively agree on stopping Trump’s authoritarianism, corruption and attacks on our neighbors and rights.
Bacon: So I saw an estimate, five million, seven million. Do you have an estimate? Maybe that’d be the kind of thing. How many people, I want to know how many people we think attended and how many protests there were across the country?
Greenberg: So we have got 2,700 registered protests. We are still hearing about protests that were not put on the map, for whatever reason. Sometimes people don’t want to have the national promotion. They don’t want—if they have bad actors in their area—they might want to promote it locally but not have it be visible on the national map.
So, 2,700 registered events. Our estimate, based on kind of what we do, is: We take that number of RSVPs we have, we look at the places where we can get a really accurate crowd count, and we kind of develop out a multiplier-effect theory based on that to try to get to a total.
Our estimate, based on all of the crowd-counting data that we’ve got in that multiplier assessment, is around seven million. We’ve heard from the rapid-response crowd-counter people that it could have been as large as eight and a half. So we’re satisfied with that number.
You know, if you look at the trajectory of the last year, we had about three million folks out at Hands Off in April. About five million people came out for No Kings in June. We are now at seven million people. So each time we do one of these, the numbers are rising. The numbers are rising in a real way.
Bacon: You said 2,500 protests, you said? Just to make sure.
Greenberg: 2,700.
Bacon: And that’s in all 50 states?
Greenberg: In all 50 states, in the territories, in Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, in like 18 countries around the world. So, yeah.
Bacon: For the audience, there are not 2,700 big cities in the country. So that means that there had to be some in rural areas, in small towns, in Montana, in Wyoming. This is not just ... D.C. is important and New York is important. It’s not just protests of liberals in big cities, right?
Greenberg: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And look, the footage of—you know—the drone footage over the huge crowds in big cities is incredible. And I recommend watching it if you want a little bit of an emotional boost.
But I think what is so amazing is the smaller protests in smaller areas. There were 11 different events in Mike Johnson’s district in Louisiana, which is a very safe Republican district. We are seeing coverage—dozens of events in Montana, in West Virginia, in Nebraska. There is so much energy and so much backlash that is manifesting across the country to what is happening right now.
And it is reaching—and this isn’t just us; you don’t have to take our word for it—Erica Chenoweth and the researchers on nonviolent social movements just published a piece talking about how we have reached further into Trump country in this term than at any point in the first Trump term.
Bacon: OK, so seven million. Help me understand that number. I think—I guess there are about 330 million people in America. There’s about a ... about 80 million voted for Harris, something like that. Because there’s 75, 80 million voted for Harris over Trump. So it’s not every person who voted for Harris.
At the same time, I think I’ve seen this might have been one of the largest protests in U.S. history, or in modern U.S. history. So talk about, how do you quantify seven million?
Greenberg: Yeah, based on everything that we’ve seen, we feel comfortable saying that this was the largest single-day protest in modern American history. That is, you know, just to compare—so we had a questionable ability to say that for No Kings One, and we didn’t want to push it. But based on the numbers that we have coming in, we are looking at the single largest protest in modern American history.
There’s kind of an asterisk about whether Earth Day counts, because that was kind of a teach-in, in the 1970s, that was really huge. And, you know, we’re not going to be able to get to that number anytime soon. But certainly, when we’re looking at anything that’s taken place in the last 10 years on a single day, this is the largest.
Now, you know, I think the important one flag to have there is the racial justice protests—the uprising in 2020. Larger number of events over the course of an extended period. But when we talk about a single-day event that has been called for nationally, this is the single largest one.
Bacon: All right, so big protests. Let me understand that. So what does it mean? No policy changed yesterday. There was not an election yesterday. So what does it mean for—I’m happy there were protests and people were there. What does it actually mean concretely for it to be such a big protest day all over the country?
Greenberg: Well, I think you’ve got to put it in the political context of the moment that we’re in. We have been in an authoritarian breakthrough moment for the last 10 months. Donald Trump took office, he was elected, and he has been rapidly attempting to consolidate power—to push his formal powers to the max, to do a bunch of illegal and unconstitutional things and see what he can get away with, and to crush alternate sources of power and dissent across society, right?
You see this with his push on corporations and billionaires, on media, on law firms, on higher education, and now on civil society. And so, in this moment, part of the reason why we ourselves shifted our strategy to start doing some of these bigger tentpole mass mobilizations is because the act of bringing together millions and millions and millions of people in this moment holds open space for public dissent in a way that is really important for a thousand other actors making decisions about how much they are going along and how much they are pushing back.
Because the fundamental thing that an authoritarian is trying to do during this time is convey that they are inevitable—that they will win, that they will consolidate power, and that resistance is futile. And so having very visible mass demonstrations everywhere in the country—that actually millions and millions of people are in no way planning to allow you to consolidate power and that you have to factor those people into your calculations—that is an important piece in and of itself.
The second thing we try to do is really create that shared sense of identity for people who are coming out, right? We are part of a big, powerful pro-democracy movement because, you know, it’s not just about showing up on one day. It’s about feeling that sense of identity that gives you the power and the agency and the connections to take more action on a regular basis, right?
We know there are a zillion new Indivisible groups that have formed because somebody in a small town in Arkansas raised their hand and said, “I’m going to have a No Kings protest in June.” That turned into a local organizing hub, and now they’re actually holding it down, for our values, in a place where we might not have had anybody organizing before.
That’s happening all over the country. Each of these marches—the people who are putting them on, you know—they’re not just sitting at home and then having a march every three months. They are the folks who are showing up to protect immigrant communities. They are folks who are showing up to provide, or just to support with mutual aid, for people who are being decimated by the Trump cuts. It’s actually an ongoing cycle for organizing, absorption, and putting the new people who get involved into work.
Bacon: I want to respond to two criticisms of yesterday I saw from people on the left—sorry, people who voted for Harris, let’s say. I guess one is that there’s not necessarily a single policy demand. There’s not a, “ICE must ... take off their masks.” There’s not necessarily a full, one policy demand.
The second is—I think you alluded to this—sort of like it’s a protest of, let’s say, let’s call it older white people. Let’s call it wine moms. I’m not agreeing with these terms; I’m just giving them out. So just talk about, like, the demographics of the protests and respond to that, and then also the sort of lack of one policy demand, or two policy demands?
Greenberg: I would say, look, different people have—you do protest for different reasons. Protest is a tactic, not a strategy. It is not the be-all and the end-all. And if it is, then something’s gone wrong. We are not in a period where we have the legislative agenda power, right? We are not trying to pass—we are fully aware that we do not have the ability to put an affirmative legislative demand on the table.
What we can collectively do is build the biggest possible tent of people who are opposed to Donald Trump. And that’s going to say—we’re going to center some issues as we do that. We’re going to talk about the attacks on our neighbors and ICE. We are going to talk about the First Amendment violations. We’re going to talk about the ways they’re decimating health care. And we’re going to also invite people to bring whatever is motivating them at the same time into that tent.
Because fundamentally, we’re not trying to come up with the 10 things, 10 policy platform ideas. We are actually trying to signal to a broad set of stakeholders across society that there is massive popular resistance and that Trump has no mandate for any of the things that he is doing. So that’s the first thing—it’s just a difference in strategy, is the answer.
On the demographics, I think we’ve got to be real about the fact that we’re in a moment where we’re trying to stitch together a pretty complicated coalition of people who are coming out because they want to save something about America as they understand it, right? They want to protect American democracy. They want to protect our institutions and the rule of law. They’re upset about something that has been taken away as Trump has laid waste to massive parts of the federal government—from USAID to the CDC.
And people who don’t have a ton of faith in democracy or our institutions or our rule of law—often for really good reasons. And those are not necessarily, demographically, evenly distributed sentiments. There’s some ways in which that tracks. One of the things we saw and had really honest conversations about when we were getting involved as Indivisible was, we were pulling from people who were willing to engage with the existing system, based in some amount of faith that they had agency to affect it.
And that’s—which is different than if I’m, for example, trying to talk to an audience of Gen Z kids. I’m kind of going to start with, “Yeah, you guys have gotten screwed. The system sucks. All of this sucks.” And I think that’s before you even get to the fact that there has been an incredibly active and engaged young people movement over the last couple of years that’s been repressed with extreme force—which is the Palestine movement, right? The anti-genocide movement.
A lot of people, you know—one of the things that we hear from folks is, like, young people have reasonably been extremely distrustful of both parties or anything that looks like it’s getting involved in a partisan thing because of the very valid perception that both parties collaborated in a disastrous Gaza policy that they viewed as profoundly damaging.
And so I think that we’ve got to be real about a few of the pieces that are happening right now, which is that you might start with the people who are kind of coming out and activated by Trump, and you might make inroads into a broader set of people as Trump’s ravages get worse, as their attacks on people get worse. One of the things that we’ve seen over the last nine months has been that demographics have shifted, in part, as we’ve brought to the fore the fight against ICE’s attacks on our neighbors. That’s an issue that speaks to more young people. That starts to get at a more diverse coalition.
And also, I think we’ve just got to be real that we’ve got to continue to build, and we’ve got to continue to try to activate, and we’ve got to reach out to people and be opportunistic about moments that might bring more folks into the “people who want to show up and march right now” coalition.
Bacon: Last time we talked, you and I talked a lot about how we felt like the population—even earlier on, you could see there were the rank-and-file Americans, particularly on the left, who were obviously—or, specifically liberals, Democrats, were protesting, were flustered by Trump—but the elites were sort of complying, capitulating.
I feel heartened by two things this week that are happening, and I want to ask you about them, just sort of beyond the protests. One, a bunch of universities—the administration asked them to sign this compact, basically agreeing to all these nonsense Trump ideas—and a few of them have been very explicit in saying no, and hell no, in very academic ways. MIT, Penn—a few of them have been very explicit.
Two, the Pentagon demanded all the reporters sort of change the rules and sign on to some kind of weird agreement to cover the Defense Department. And they also said no.
Are we seeing more? Are the elites kind of cashing out finally? Maybe not. And the Democrats are doing a shutdown. So there’s that.
Greenberg: Yeah, I mean, like, I think we’re seeing more green shoots is what I would say. And it goes in waves, right? Like, over the summer, we saw some really alarming levels of capitulation, in the last month. And, you know, I think frankly, I think there’s been a bit of a vibe shift even since the Jimmy Kimmel situation, right?
Where it was like, this is a guy who wants to—
Bacon: One of us could get canceled. One of our friends, you know, yeah.
Greenberg: Yeah, to a certain extent. We’ve definitely seen a shift in kind of who’s willing to speak out in certain public spaces because it’s sort of like, oh, well, if they go after Jimmy Kimmel, who is going to be safe in the long term?
But then also, a guy who wants to be a dictator tried to go up against a talk show host—and he lost. Like, that’s a little bit of a vibe shift, right? I do think that it’s going to be a muscle, and it’s going to be an exercise in ongoing reinforcement.
And not every company is as vulnerable to a consumer-facing push as Disney is. There’s a bunch of the most troubling and problematic enablers of this administration—you know, Palantir, Oracle, right? Like, these are business-to-business enterprises that are, you know, somewhat—It’s harder to land a consumer campaign that’s really going to get their attention.
But I do think that what we’re seeing is more, more signs of more people in higher places pushing back. And I think the more Donald Trump’s approval rating drops, the more people will do that because, you know, all these folks are not—some of them are making moral decisions, but some of them are just making decisions based on who they think is going to win in the end.
Bacon: Last question. So what happens next? So the people who went to these protests, what should—and the people who watched them and who were happy about them—what should we all be doing? You’re not going to have No Kings three weeks from now. You know, what happens next?
Greenberg: Well, the first thing I’d say is, get involved locally. If you are not already hooked up to an Indivisible group, or a 50501 group, or your local community organizing hub, do it. Because, fundamentally, so much of the action that we need is going to be hyperlocal, and it’s going to be rooted in your own leverage where you are.
But the second thing that I would say, is join our national movement call tomorrow night—Monday night—and we’re going to be going over next steps. And we’re going to be launching some ongoing actions that folks can take to collectively start to go after the enablers of Trump and MAGA, so that we’re pushing not just on Donald Trump directly, because we know he doesn’t—he does care about our pressure, we saw him air his incredibly offensive video last night, and that’s a pretty good sign that he did not like how yesterday went for him.
Bacon: He also literally said, I’m not a king, I’m not a king, you know, which the words get in his head. So, yes.
Greenberg: Within 24 hours, he’s like, “I’m not a king.” And then he shows a video of himself as a king launching poop at American cities and protesters. So I think he didn’t like it very much. I don’t think that he appreciated yesterday, is what I would say.
But then the other thing is, we’ve got to go after the corporations that are making money off of suppression. We’ve got to go after the institutions that are making decisions to collaborate in this moment. And so I think, when you’re talking about universities, when you’re talking about corporate enablers, we actually have to have more consistent action that focuses on what people are doing to back up Trump and the MAGA regime.
Bacon: OK. On that note, Leah, thanks for joining us. Thanks for organizing and helping organize the protests, and great to see you.
Greenberg: Great to see you.