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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 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 kind of like a do -it -yourself guide to organizing locally, and just put it on the internet as a Google Doc.
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 hope.
We're good to go.
Donald Trump was ultimately able to present himself as the candidate of 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 every Who's the leader of the Democratic Party come 2025?
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, you know, 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?
We're good to go.
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, you know, 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 the midterm.
I think?
Well, 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 his, 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.
We're good to go.
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...
He writes this.
There is much more to lose than Twitch and TikTok.
There is 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 tower 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 in line.
Four Democrats out of the battleground state of Michigan.
It's Holly.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Good 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 he was, how he was, the Democratic leadership.
Leah Greenberg.
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...
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 would have, I could have heard somebody call into the 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, for lack of ability.
One of our viewers on Aztec 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...
The representative cited the reasons earlier you played.
Democrat representatives 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 take on Monday or Wednesday or whatever, that's kind of denial to me.
Mark, I'm trying to remember the representative from last week.
Was it Tom Suozzi 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...
Oh, you're talking about Richie Torres, the comment.
Gotcha.
Leah Greenberg, you talked about Richie Torres.
We did have Tom Suozzi 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 Suozzi's district to elect him and who worked really closely with the campaign to get him through.
And 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 elect pro -democracy candidates and to defeat would -be fascists or fascist enablers.
So regardless of whether we've got ideological disagreement, We're good.
Fundamentally, if what we take away from that is kind of about the ideological spectrum, right, left to right, versus the 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 in terms of 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 boat.
Are Democrats no longer the establishment party right now?
Well, I think that 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.
Thank you so much.
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, is 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...
Are you finished, Nancy?
All right, we'll take the question.
Go ahead, Leah Greenberg.
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 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 an irreparable.
We're good to go.
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, or a seat by the Supreme Court that has been captured by extremist federalist society hacks.
And how are we going to move forward?
You could talk about ethics reform, right?
Because we have seen enormous ethics scandals involving members of the court who are not reporting large amounts of money.
uh large amount large gifts luxury vacations etc that they are getting from donors you can talk about term limits right because you know we operate in a modern society and we don't have to consistently stick with the system of everyone stays on until uh you know 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 uh supreme court positions are Sorry.
Because you'd want to create a system where, you know, who adds, 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 are 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 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 it 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 the 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.
Albuquerque.
This is David Democrat.
Good morning.
I've been a Democrat all my life, and it's kind of amusing how the Democrats are saying they are, 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.
We're good.
The government helped us.
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.
You say we need all these immigrants to do the work that the Americans won't do.