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A conversation now on progressive activism during a second Trump administration.
Our guest is Leah Greenberg.
She's co-executive director of the group Indivisible.
Ms. Greenberg, what's the mission of Indivisible?
How'd you get started?
How long have you been around?
Well, Indivisible got started shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 when my husband and I, we were former congressional staffers, took everything that we had learned about how to operate on the Hill, how to organize locally, how to be effective in moving your elected officials, turned it into a kind of like do-it-yourself guide to organizing locally, and just put it on the internet as a Google Doc.
And in that moment, it caught fire with thousands and thousands of people who were horrified by the election of Donald Trump, who had already started organizing locally and who picked up the guide and its name, Indivisible, and started using that as their rallying cry.
And so we formed an organization to support this incredible grassroots movement of people who were standing up against Donald Trump, who fought to build the blue wave in 2018, who fought to save the Affordable Care Act, who fought to get him out of office the first time, and who are getting ready right now to fight back once again.
Why do you think Donald Trump won in 2024?
Well, I think when we're looking at Donald Trump's victory in 2024, we've got to look first and foremost at the global context, right?
This has been a year in which incumbent governments worldwide are getting pummeled, right?
If you look at people who presided over 2021, 2022, the post-COVID inflationary period, there's just very deep and widespread anger and frustration with how things have been going all around the world.
And we've seen that and we knew that that was the case heading in with fairly low approval ratings for the incumbent president.
I think we all hoped that the swap in candidates would give us a little bit of ability to outride that wave.
Unfortunately, in spite of a really valiant effort by a lot of folks, it wasn't enough to overcome that overall level of anger and frustration.
And I think fundamentally we let Donald Trump present himself as, or we hope Donald Trump was ultimately able to present himself as the candidate of a change, the candidate who was opposed to the status quo.
And he was able to portray us as kind of in favor of the status quo.
And that set up for an unfortunate result.
In retrospect, was it a good idea?
I absolutely think it was a good idea.
I think if you're looking at the approval ratings of President Biden at the time, I think if you are looking at what Harris was able to do, how she was able to harness an enormous amount of new energy, excitement, we personally have a ton of new people who came in out of sheer excitement for the ability to support her candidacy.
I think she ran about as good as one could ask for with 100 days left, which is a feat that nobody has been asked to do before.
Did she do everything exactly the way I would have done it?
No, but that's not a fair task to ask of anyone.
Fundamentally, I think probably the candidate swap helped us save three or four Senate seats and prevents a down ballot bloodbath.
So it was absolutely a good decision on the part of the party or on the part of President Biden.
Who's the leader of the Democratic Party come 2025?
That's a great question.
And I would answer, it is the people who start showing leadership.
Right now, we are not seeing a ton of leadership across the Democratic Party.
We are seeing some people put forward ideas, some people start to organize, but we're seeing a lot of people kind of go into Democrats in disarray mode, right?
Where we all start questioning everything about ourselves just because we have had an election loss, right?
And that is not a helpful place to be.
We should always be thinking critically.
We should always be thinking about what is our message?
What is our brand?
What do Democrats stand for?
What kinds of policies actually make people's lives better in ways that they can feel and see and trust us on?
That stuff is good and important.
But what we're seeing right now is a lot of Democrats who are kind of inching over to collaborating and supporting some stuff that is not helpful around Donald Trump's initiative.
And what we need to do is present a strong and coherent opposition party that's ready to fight back and that's going to articulate to the American people why Donald Trump's agenda is going to make their lives worse.
What are some of those agenda items that you think some Democrats are inching over and starting to support?
Well, I think what we've seen, for example, with certain Democrats flirting with the congressional or with the Doge effort, right?
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's effort to theoretically cut $2 trillion from federal government, which they absolutely cannot do without digging into Social Security, into Medicare, into Medicaid.
I think any effort that validates that as a real and good faith effort to try and address government reform, as opposed to a transparent cash grab by people who will benefit personally from gutting government services so they can hand themselves fat defense contracts and tax cuts, that's the kind of thing where we need to be really clear to people what is happening, that this is a scam.
Two weeks after the election, your group Indivisible published a new guide.
It was that original guide that put your group on the map back in 2016.
This new guide for supporters, what's the message that you're sending in this new guide?
Well, the message is really simple.
Donald Trump is made very clear that he intends to come in and govern as a dictator, but that's his intention.
And that is not how power works in American society.
Power is distributed.
It lies at the local level.
It lies at the state level.
It lies at the federal level.
If we all organize locally and if we use every lever that we have got, right?
Our counties, our cities, our mayors, our state legislatures, our governors, our elected officials at the federal level, and we all play our roles because we each have a different role to play based on where we are in the country.
We can block some of the worst of Donald Trump's agenda, some of the harm that he intends to do to us and to our neighbors.
We can hold off that harm.
We can make sure that people understand exactly how dangerous and damaging and personally harmful his agenda is going to be for them.
We can protect elections so that we're actually able to have elections in 2026.
And then we can beat them in midterms in a way that will allow us to have a real check on them going forward and set up for 2028.
So the guide is about what you as a regular person, wherever you are who is appalled by what is happening, can do to exercise that power.
Organize locally, never give an inch.
use your own elected officials to exert the power that you have.
How do you block that agenda without control of the House or the Senate and of course the White House?
Well, I think we should be, I think we should be real about a couple of the underlying conditions here, right?
So Donald Trump got elected by putting as much distance as he possibly could between himself and his actual Project 2025 agenda, right?
He like literally disowned it in a number of different settings.
And he was elected.
And one of the things that we saw in focus groups was a lot of voters literally didn't believe that he was going to do some of the things that he said he was going to do.
So his coalition is not stable.
There's a bunch of people within that who voted for him because they are frustrated about inflation, but did not vote for anything about a Project 2025 agenda.
So that's one, is that he's not actually got as stable a coalition as people are making out.
The second is he has a teeny tiny majority in the House of Representatives, right?
When we were able to successfully block the Affordable Care Act for the first time, he had a majority of 43 Republicans in the House of Representatives.
They are looking at a three-person majority right now.
So that pits all of the members of Congress who want to get re-elected in 2026 and can't do that if everything that they're doing is incredibly unpopular against the extremists in the House, the people who are like, this is our chance to slash every single government program and get rid of Social Security once and for all.
That's going to be a real fight.
And as long as we hold Democrats united, then they are going to have to fight that out themselves.
And a lot of the things that they want to pass, we might be able to stop with enough pressure, enough outrage, enough summoning of all the power that we've got.
And if we make sure that people know exactly how dangerous these things are ahead of time.
Leah Greenberg, our guest, the numbers to call in in this last segment of the Washington Journal, 202-748-8001 for Republicans.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
Joining us until the House comes in at 10 a.m. Eastern.
Of course, the Senate is in as well at 10 a.m.
You can watch that over on C-SPAN too.
You'll go to the House if you stick here on C-SPAN.
Leah Greenberg, as folks continue to call in, let me just bounce this off you.
This is Congressman Richie Torres, Democrat of New York, in the days after the 2024 election.
He writes this, Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos and blacks and Asians and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like defund the police or from the river to the sea or Latinx.
There is much more to lose than Twitch and TikTok.
There's much more to lose, excuse me, than there is to gain politically from pandering to the far left, which is more represented of Twitter and Twitch and TikTok than of the real world.
The working class, he said, is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.
Look, I think this has been one of the strains of the discourse and the hot takes post-election, right?
And we should be real that anytime you lose an election, certain people who are making one argument on Monday are going to say on Wednesday, yeah, that's why we lost.
That's my pet issue.
That's why we lost.
I think it is a completely transparent exercise to kind of continue to grind the acts that you were grinding before the election to go in and say a campaign that ran a really aggressive effort to reach out to centrists, a really aggressive effort to flip Haley voters that did very intentional and very aggressive outreach on all fronts to try to broaden that coalition, to look at that and say, you know, somehow, some way,
this is the fault of the people who are totally not making any of the decisions in the Democratic Party.
Don't look at the people who, you know, made decisions about deploying a billion dollars.
Don't look at the people who set up for the conditions that forced Vice President Harris into this like last minute, you know, mad dash attempt to present herself to the voters.
Look at somebody who's totally out of power and completely not, you know, wasn't making any of the decisions involved in the campaign.
So, you know, again, I think hot takes are going to hot take, but we should be serious when we're actually looking for answers about what is really going to transform the Democratic Party.
Let me get you some of those callers.
We'll start on line for Democrats out of the battleground state of Michigan.
It's Holly.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Morning, Holly.
What's your question or comment for Leah Greenberg?
So David Hogg was on yesterday on another newscast, and he was very frustrated with how the Democratic leadership was responding to his questions and comments about the previous election, about the Harris campaign.
And now with the shooting that we've had, I feel like the Democratic Party really needs to embrace some of the things that you guys are talking about, but they're just not listening.
Leah Greenberg.
Well, I think that the Democratic Party is a lot of different people and a lot of different places, right?
When we talk about the Democratic Party, we're talking about all of our own elected officials.
We're talking about the DNC.
We're talking about the president and everybody in his administration.
I think what I would say is that we're going to be in an intra-party conversation for the coming years about who we are, what we stand for, what we want to be.
And the single best way that we're going to make people listen is we are going to organize and we're going to show our own power.
And then we're going to be at the table and say, this is what we are seeing work on the ground.
And ultimately, we're going to be able to push people in that direction by virtue of that power and that organizing.
The caller mentions David Hogg.
Do you think David Hogg should be in DNC leadership?
He's running for one of those vice chair spots as reported this week.
So I represent a network of thousands of local indivisible groups.
And when we're going to make a national endorsement of any kind, we want to talk to our indivisible groups first.
What I would say is that I think that the Democratic, you know, the conversation over the DNC is absolutely a healthy time to be talking about the future of the Democratic Party, the ways that it can and should be doing better outreach, messaging, reaching people in non-traditional ways, all of the stuff that's being brought up by this conversation.
This is Patricia in Minneapolis, Republican.
Good morning.
Thanks for waiting.
Good morning.
Ms. Greenberg, didn't you learn anything from the election?
How did that lie about Trump being for the Project 2025 workout for you guys?
How about that lie about the dictator thing you said?
And the other lie, quit trying to scare Americans.
Quit lying to us.
They're not going to get rid of Social Security.
You Democrats have been saying that for decades.
It's the biggest lie.
You're trying to instill fear.
You're trying to divide Americans.
We're sick of it.
We're absolutely sick of it.
You and your far left, crazy, insane ideas and lies.
Leah Greenberg, give you a chance to respond.
Sure.
I think what I would say is that I could have heard somebody call into this show and say the exact same thing about abortion five years ago.
They're not going to get rid of abortion.
Don't be ridiculous.
That's all lies.
That's the kind of thing that people were saying.
And in fact, very smart people across the establishment were telling us, like, you know, don't worry about the right to abortion.
You don't really need to be concerned about that.
Then they got a majority on the Supreme Court and they did what they'd been planning to do for 40 years, which was get rid of the right to abortion nationally.
And now women are dying for lack of ability to access basic reproductive care.
So when we say they mean what they are saying, they mean what they're promising.
They mean what they're promising.
And they have been absolutely clear if you look at conservative writing and reading in theory over the last few years that they 100% intend to come for the basics of the great society, the basics of the welfare state, the basics like Social Security, like Medicare, like Medicaid.
One of our viewers on X as Tech wants to know how you're paid, how your group is funded.
Sure, we're funded by donations.
Our single largest source is small dollar donations.
We get them through our emails, through our website, through social media.
So if you are inspired, feel free to go to indivisible.org and sign up for our weekly email updates on what you can do to be strategic or, you know, help support our work.
And is this your full-time job?
This is my full-time job.
Mark is in Wisconsin Independent.
Good morning.
Yes, sir.
Hello.
Thank you very much.
I just wanted to comment on the representative cited the reasons earlier you played.
The Democrat representative said why the Democrats lost the election.
And I think it's wise for the Democrats to invest early now in accepting why they lost.
And if they don't, 2026 is going to be a big problem.
And I believe that the Democrat representative you had, I can't remember his name, but that was a very accurate take on what happened.
And to say it was a particular hot cake on Monday or Wednesday or whatever, that's kind of denial to me.
And so that's all I really have to say about it.
Mark, we were talking about, I'm trying to remember the representative from last week.
Was it Tom Swazi of New York?
He was talking about concerns about Democrats on the issue of immigration.
And that's one of the reasons why Democrats lost.
Was that what you were referring to?
No, just about two minutes or four minutes ago, you're talking about Richie Torres' the comment.
Gotcha.
Leah Greenberg, you talked about Richie Torres.
We did have Tom Swazi on this show, and he talked a lot about Democrats not trying to understand why people voted for Donald Trump and talked a lot about the issue of immigration.
What would your response be?
Well, look, we've got a lot of folks who organized in Tom Swazi's district to elect him and who worked really closely with the campaign to get him through.
And, you know, we are an organization that collectively is really clear that when it comes to general elections, we're going to get in line behind the Democrat and make sure that we are collectively pushing to defeat, to elect pro-democracy candidates and to defeat would-be fascists or fascist enablers.
So, you know, regardless of whether we've got ideological disagreements, we're always behind the person who ultimately we need to get into office at the end of the day here.
What I would say overall is that, you know, I think we got to look at the terms this election was fought on.
Donald Trump did a very effective job of being the anti-system candidate, right?
And he appealed to people who do not trust that the existing system is working.
And fundamentally, if what we take away from that is kind of about the ideological spectrum, right?
Left to right, versus the like pro-system, anti-system spectrum, people who don't trust the establishment, people who don't trust the institutions, people who don't think that the status quo is working for them.
And we talk about it in ideological terms and they're talking about how do we actually reach people who are sufficiently frustrated with how things are going that appeals about preserving democracy, preserving institutions did not resonate with them, then I think we're missing the vote.
Are Democrats no longer the establishment party right now?
Well, I think that when you are, when your president is a Democrat, you are kind of de facto responsible for the context and the outcomes, right?
That is the thing about running as an incumbent.
We are about to no longer be the incumbent party.
Donald Trump is about to become the incumbent, and he is going to switch from a challenger candidate, from a change candidate, to a guy who is responsible for everything that his administration is doing.
And his administration will be stocked with radicals who are doing extreme and harmful and dangerous things that are directly impacting regular people's lives, security, and well-being.
And so, what I would say here is a coalition that is built on frustration with the status quo is not a stable coalition.
That is an opportunity for us to demonstrate that we are actually on people's sides to fight for their benefits, fight for their well-being, fight for their safety, and actually reach out and peel some of those folks off of the Trump coalition, as well as re-energizing our own base.
Because that's the other piece of this equation that we're missing: who was not sufficiently motivated, excited, ready to show up in November on our own side.
And who were those people, in your estimation?
Well, disproportionately, I mean, we saw that cities tended to underperform.
I really don't want to be the person who has very informed takes before we get the voter file back and we're able to speak in real and concrete terms about exactly who did what, which demographic group did what.
So, I don't like to get too into the details there until we have the data to really speak about it.
But what we know is that, you know, we had some real drop-offs in turnout.
And so, that's the other side of this equation: who did we lose to Donald Trump?
Who did we lose to third-party candidates?
And who did we lose to the couch?
To Ohio, this is Nancy, Line for Democrats.
Good morning.
All right.
Good morning, everybody.
I would like to know: should the Democrats use the filibuster to fight back?
Yes, absolutely.
Oh, sorry.
Is that your not done?
Are you finished, Nancy?
All right, we'll take the question.
Go ahead, Leah Greenburn.
Look, I think we've been really clear that we think there are a lot of things about the existing institutional system that are pretty flawed.
And also, while we're in the existing institutional system, we think you should use all the tools at your disposal.
And so, absolutely, I think a really core part of our work over the coming period will be blocking some of the most harmful stuff that we can in the Senate by holding the Democratic, holding the Democratic caucus united to stop it via whatever tools are at their disposal.
Do you think Joe Biden should have appointed additional members of the Supreme Court?
Well, I think that court reform is absolutely a topic that we should have been trying to move with more speed and alacrity across the Democratic Party.
I don't know if it would be realistic to say that the conditions would have been ripe in this term.
The realistic, you know, Joe Biden doesn't have the ability to do that unilaterally, right?
You need to have 50 senators vote for it.
That means a real organizing effort across the Democratic Party to move Democratic senators and the broader set of stakeholders into alignment with the understanding that the courts are fundamentally and irreparably captured by right-wing interests.
That's taking some time.
Unfortunately, we were not able, that was not something that we were able to like get broadspread Democratic appreciation for and agreement with during this term.
But I do think that as the years go by and as we see repeatedly devastating decisions, as the courts are simply moving to roll back some of our greatest legislative achievements over the last few years, some of the greatest protections for Americans for clean water, for clean air, not to mention our own fundamental rights like reproductive freedom.
I think we will see a groundswell of people who are asking, why are we treating this court as legitimate when it does not treat itself as accountable to us?
What does court reform look like?
Court reform could look like a lot of different things, right?
You know, if you start with this fundamental question of why do we have a right-wing court that's been our SEPA Supreme Court that has been captured by extremist federalist society hacks and, you know, why are we, how are we going to move forward?
You could talk about ethics reform, right?
We have seen enormous ethics scandals involving members of the court who are not reporting large amounts of money, large gifts, luxury vacations, etc., that they are getting from donors.
You can talk about term limits, right?
Because we operate in a modern society and we don't have to consistently stick with the system of everyone stays on until they are no longer physically able to do so.
You can talk about adding members to the Supreme Court, that is, or expanding the Supreme Court, because you would want to recognize or create a system whereby Supreme Court positions are because you'd want to create a system where which president adds how many seats to the Supreme Court is standardized rather than kind of a matter of chance.
All of those are things that aren't options that one might consider under the bucket of Supreme Court reform.
But fundamentally, I think the first thing is Democrats have got to recognize that the existing court is fundamentally captured by the Republican Party.
And then we got to talk about what we should be doing about it.
To the Granite State in East Kingston, this is Norman, Republican Line.
Good morning.
Good morning, Ms. Greenberg.
I've enjoyed listening to you, and I'm glad you're participating in the system by forming a group.
However, you seem to be completely against the incoming administration.
I would like to know what do you think about the immigration policy of the current administration that allowed so many people into this country and put them into the states so the states have to support them.
And those people that are American citizens don't get their what they should be getting as American citizens.
Thank you.
What I think is that we have got a broken legislative system that creates the kind of checkpoints that mean that Congress is not able to flexibly adapt and respond to crises in order to address real and pressing needs for Americans and immigrants alike, right?
What I think is that if we had the kind of functioning system that was able to adjust and recognize that a significant number of people are coming in to make sure that cities had the support that they needed to handle that influx, and that was able to craft a coherent response that both observed our obligations under international law and helped to support the people who are working collectively to support this folks arriving, then we would be in a really different situation right now.
But fundamentally, I think that is one of many ways in which the difficulty in making government work for regular people is leading to a level of cynicism and frustration that is causing folks to look for solutions outside or opposed to the system.
And that is part of how we ultimately ended up with Donald Trump.
But it is a broader and systemic issue with how government not being able to deliver and flexibly address our problems is prompting a level of frustration that's driving some of the current conditions.
Albert Kirky, this is David Democrat.
Good morning.
Yes, I'm a 77-year-old man.
I've been a Democrat all my life.
And it's kind of amusing how the Democrats are saying they're, you know, for the American public people, which they are not.
I mean, it's evident, seriously, you know, they don't care about us and letting in millions of immigrants that has harmed, murdered, frightened people to stay in their own house or apartments, and we're taking care of them.
And as far as concerned, Biden and Democrats, they should be held responsible for every rape and murder.
They should be prosecuted too.
And if I may, real quick, you say that you're taking care of people or you are taking care of people.
Let me rephrase that.
I grew up with a mom and and four siblings and uh the the government helped us and they said the Democrats helped to help the poor people.
And I thought, okay, I love the Democrats.
You don't help people no more, you take care of them.