When Donald Trump reassumed his presence in the Oval Office, doomsayers and scolds wondered if ordinary liberals would greet his return with anything more than apathy and exhaustion. Having worked so hard to bring the first Trump era to an end, did people have it in them to mount up and do it again?
Yes, and then some. Hitting the streets under the “Hands Off” and “No Kings” banners, last year’s anti-Trump forces surfaced energy, patriotism, and perhaps more importantly, joy—a simmering movement is now roiling, with millions taking to the public square, and perhaps millions more waiting in the wings.
So what do they do for an encore? And how can this burgeoning movement play a role in fostering the electoral shifts necessary to bring change to Washington, D.C.? To get a sense of this, The New Republic turned to Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, the affiliation of progressive organizations that has been a prime mover in last year’s Hands Off and No Kings protests.
Indivisible was both a response to and inspired by the Tea Party movement. But in 2025, it eclipsed the Tea Party’s most expansive count of public participation, which never topped 500,000. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, April’s Hands Off brought in around one million protesters. June’s No Kings rallies netted at least two million and maybe as many as 4.8 million. The consortium has yet to count October’s No Kings rallies, but one nonpartisan estimate put it between five and 6.5 million.
The groups behind the No Kings coalition, including Levin at Indivisible, are aiming for the goal articulated by researcher Erica Chenoweth: Authoritarian regimes can be toppled if 3.5 percent of a population engage in nonviolent resistance. Chenoweth’s unambiguous estimate is disputed in some academic circles—but Indivisible is determined to put it to a real-world trial. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
So, is this the year?
It’s probably gonna get worse before it gets better.
We saw a lot of mobilization under Trump’s first term, but nothing like this. What’s different now? We can say, “Well, he’s worse,” but that is the kind of thing that could dampen turnout.
What we saw in 2017 was “Protest is the new brunch.” I think the opponent is much scarier this time. Trump was limited back then, in a way that he’s not now, because he’s functionally taken over the whole party. And I think especially with No Kings 1, compared to Hands Off, you saw younger and more diverse audiences than you saw in Hands Off. I think that’s largely in response to the attacks on immigrants.
What has this movement learned from progressive movements of the past?
One of the cautionary tales that lives in my mind is Obama. It’s 2008, and Obama’s built an incredible grassroots force; it’s historic. Marshall Ganz was one of the architects of his field program, and he was Cesar Chavez’s organizing director. You had this wondrous thing, new in American politics. It was ready to back up an incoming trifecta Democratic administration, because we had just taken the presidency off, obviously by a landslide, but also had major majorities in the House and the Senate.
And then, because Obama for America [as an independent force] was a threat to the Democratic Party, it was largely snuffed out. I remember being a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young volunteer for the Obama campaign, where they did a follow-up call for the volunteers on the campaign saying, and we’re definitely going to need you going into 2009, and then it was crickets.
We were told to go home or not told anything at all. And what came in, in the absence of any kind of organized infrastructure on the left, was the Tea Party.
Can you go back to how No Kings feels different from the “Protest is the new brunch” sensibility of Trump I?
There was more of a sense of guilt for not having taken Trump seriously to begin with. He won, and then we saw them coming out in droves for the Women’s March and then to found Indivisible groups.
Now a lot of those who got involved in organizing stayed involved. They tried to push to get Kamala Harris over the finish line. And what they saw in 2024 was not that the normal everyday people failed to push back. It was that both the Republican Party, which has fallen off a cliff, and the Democratic Party, which has proven itself corrupt and feckless, fail us.
And so there’s a sense of anger at the establishment now. Before, there was a sense of loss—it was surprise when he won in 2016. In 2024, it was, “Fuck this. Everybody has failed us. Our leaders, who should be on our side, don’t have what it takes to lead.” We’re coming up to do what has to be done because, clearly, institutions aren’t going to save themselves.
It feels like normal people are angrier at Democrats because this time, they know they did their part but Democrats didn’t.
We saw this with Dianne Feinstein being senile in the Senate, and nobody standing up and saying she should step down. We saw this with Ruth Bader Ginsburg making what I think it was a pretty selfish decision to stay on the court instead of dropping off. We saw this with Joe Biden deciding to run again.
What is the point of a political party? Why does a political party exist? We moved heaven and earth to get Trump out of office, make him the first one-term president in a generation, and not just do that, but deliver a democratic trifecta. We took both Senate seats in Georgia in early 2021, and what did we get out of it? We got Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema writing the legislation that could actually get through.
People thought 2016 was a fluke. Shouldn’t have happened. It was an accident. Maybe Comey was to blame. [Trump] didn’t win a majority or a plurality. They thought, this is a footnote of history that we’re going to correct, and we’re going to correct it through our own actions. And 2024 revealed, oh no, there’s something truly broken here.
I’ve been calling 2025 the year of the normie protester.
I mean, I think the heroes of 2025 are the folks who actually stood up and risked something in order to push [back on] authoritarianism. And that’s not the elites, that’s not the media, that’s not law firms, that’s not universities, by and large. It’s normal everyday people who said, “Fuck this. We’re not going along with it.” Just very stubborn people. I think those are very clearly the heroes of 2025, and in doing so, [they] have started shifting the political system and the broader, broader society, and the direction Trump at the end of 2025 does not look inevitable. He does not look unstoppable.
He’s probably going to do a lot of damage in 2026, but I think [the everyday protesters] are to be credited with the world that we’re in now versus the world we started out in [at] the beginning of this year.
Is a protest movement that also targets the opposing party self-defeating?
The Democratic Party is weak. It obviously is. Its approval rating is far lower than Donald Trump’s and lower than the Republican Party’s at a time of the least popular federal policy agenda in modern history. So that’s bad. The question is whether, although they are weak, they are entrenched enough to survive in its current form, and that’s what primary season is for. I truly hope the answer is no, that they are weak and can be reformed and made better and more responsive to their own constituents, and that’s the goal of a primary program.
If you don’t push them hard, if you don’t keep pressuring them, if you think of it as “we’d all be at brunch now,” you get some pathetic, watered-down version of Build Back Better, instead of an actual policy agenda that reforms the economy and our democracy.
You were inspired by the Tea Party. What have you taken from that movement?
We’re less violent or bigoted and racist than the Tea Party was. But look, they passed out Rules for Radicals to the Tea Partiers to teach them, hey, here’s what community organizing actually is, and here’s how you should do it.
I also think the Tea Party smartly focused on saying no, beyond everything else. They said no. They didn’t have the House, they didn’t have the Senate, they didn’t have the presidency, but they could yell, “No.” About health care, about Dodd-Frank, about national service, about the stimulus. They could yell, “No.” God knows, it’s pretty attractive: No.
“No” also papers over a lot. You are not asking for people to agree on an agenda.
Look, the goal is to do good that you can in the moment. We’re not talking about what happens in 2029. Should we have a Democratic House and a presidency? I’m interested in that. I’m a policy nerd. I like talking about Earned Income Tax Credit refundability. We’re not near that right now. We’ve got a fascist in the White House who is systematically trying to attack other sources of power. And the question is, do you allow that to continue, or don’t you? That’s it. That’s the political question of the day.
Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to have a fight over the next year about whether Trumpism, in its current form, should continue or not, and if we’re successful, he will be thoroughly destroyed electorally in the House and in the Senate, and we’ll have Democrats leading both.
The one mandate that can come to legible demand coming out of No Kings, in terms of policy advocacy is, “Stop this shit.” No more to this unconstitutional legal behavior. Do not reach out and normalize him. Do not work on some immigration bill or tax bill or infrastructure bill [with him]. Let the subpoenas fly. Let the hearings start. Rein in this regime.
Use the power you have. The purpose of political capital is to spend it.
I mean, LBJ is, despite all his failures, a political hero of mine. He was an out-and-out racist in his interpersonal life, and he also passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. He was a cheater, he was a coward, he was a bully, and also the most effective political leader since FDR. There was pushback from his advisers that he was going to get political hell from [his reforms]. And he said, What the hell is the presidency for?
You mention the ugly aspects of LBJ, and I wonder if the tent can get too big?
You need different allies for different timescales. I think it is important for us to have as huge a “Coalition of No” as possible over the course of the next 12 months. And what we know from international fights against authoritarianism that are successful is that building that big-tent coalition of no is critical, because in the absence of that, you lose … you lose. The regime’s strategy is divide and conquer. So if you divide yourself—game over, they’re gonna win.
Are there any other challenges on the horizon?
We need a cultural-level shift where we start thinking of democracy as a participatory sport that we’ve got to engage in. And we should stop thinking of it as, “Well, if we elect the right leader, whoever it is, then they’ll solve it for us.” It just won’t happen. It will not happen. I have long since lost faith in political leadership. I think there are better and worse politicians, and there are better and worse elected officials, but they’re all constrained by the same forces, and if you want to bust through those forces, you need mass involvement. You need mass participation.
What will grow this movement?
Now Trump is looking more ridiculous. He is looking like the wheels are coming off the bus. That doesn’t mean it’s over. There’s money that’s flowing down to ICE. The camps are being constructed. The planes are being purchased. The Proud Boys are being hired. That’s happening now. And as he feels more and more like a cornered animal, he is going to lash out. These are not people who are used to having to face the prospect of real accountability. So when I say I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better, that’s what I mean.
So, back to the central question: Is this the year you get to the magic number? And what do you do with that?
I mean, we are winning, but the more it appears obvious that we are winning, the more police power will be used against us. So I worry about that. And I’m not taking for granted what happens in 2026. I’m currently operating under the assumption that he will try to pull some sort of shenanigans around the elections. If we don’t utterly stop him entirely, they’re gonna try to throw out some kind of results. You don’t win that fight with a one-day protest. You win that fight with real societal disruption, which we currently can’t pull off. We can pull off historic levels of protest. We can pull off multiday strikes.
Are general strikes the goal?
We’re going to have to get there if you’re going to stop an attempt to steal an election. Everybody showing up on a Saturday is nice. Fifteen million people showing up on a Saturday would be nice. It’s not going to be enough.
