Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
Greenberg: Absolutely. What I would say is that we are seeing a broad-based wave of opposition sweep the country, including in really deep red areas. We’re tracking town halls that are in very, very safe Republican districts where this is happening. One thing that’s important to name about that dynamic specifically is that the number of elected representatives who hold actual public open town halls has gone down significantly. And in this case, it’s often only happening in these very safe areas where folks tend to assume that they can have a public meeting without having a ton of people in opposition show up. So it’s not an accident that you’re seeing these happen in really red areas because those are actually the only people who are making themselves available to voters at this time. I can tell you if you had any of these folks in a swing district who were doing it, they would be experiencing as much, if not more.
Greenberg: That’s right. And we do our best when we work with Indivisibles because a lot of our folks are organizing to turn people out to these town halls in red areas. We’ve got a lot of folks in deep red areas—and what they see is deep and broad community opposition to what is going on, so it’s not a hard pitch. We’ve got folks who are on the ground working in places like Cliff Bentz’s district, like McCormick’s district, etc., but also we have people in swing areas actively organizing to popularize and make people aware of the fact that their own representatives won’t even face them. So [in] places where people are not actually agreeing to face the voters, folks are organizing empty chair town halls, town halls that invite the representative—and when they don’t come, you make a big deal about the fact that they won’t come and the fact that they won’t face the voters. And we’re seeing those events also get enormous turnout. I was just reading about one in Colorado for a safe district there that got 400 people over the course of the night, or the day.
Greenberg: Well, first of all, this was an obviously bananas management technique, and also a very, very obvious massive security risk. It’s not an accident that the folks who run agencies that have real concerns about what information is available to who are the ones saying, Please do not respond. So that is one element here that this is just a completely disruptive thing. And you’re seeing the interests of people who actually have to run agencies—malign as they might be—clash with the interests of someone who’s just an utter chaos agent. It’s Godzilla versus Mothra; none of these people are good, but they’re coming into conflict with each other.
Greenberg: That’s exactly right, and that’s actually been our strategy throughout the month of February as it’s become clear how far-reaching DOGE’s goals are. What we’re seeing right now is that they are demonstrating in an object way for Americans all over the country how much we actually all rely on and expect things from our government. And they’re demonstrating it by taking a chainsaw, quite literally in Elon’s case, to a bunch of the things that people take for granted in their regular lives: stability, everything from paying for farm, subsidies that cover foreign aid, everything from medical care and medical research into new cures and cures for cancer. These are all things that people assume that someone is taking care of and don’t necessarily understand as government until it goes away. So what we’re seeing is that they are upsetting a bunch of different potential members of a broader coalition for functional and stable and representative government.
Sargent: Absolutely. I want to try to bear down on this question of what to do with the working class here because I noticed something in some of the new polling we’ve seen which finds broad public disapproval of Musk on many fronts. In the CNN poll from a few days ago, a plurality of noncollege voters, 49 percent say Musk’s role is a bad thing. In the new Washington Post poll, again, a plurality of noncollege voters disapprove of Musk’s role. Is this something Democrats should use as a guide to how to proceed here? What would that look like? Can this begin to fix the problem Democrats face with working-class voters?
There’s a real opportunity here. And frankly, it wasn’t necessarily clear six months ago, but as Musk has gotten himself more involved in politics, his broad public perception has gone from a heterodox inventor-billionaire to a Nazi incel. And it’s also been more easy to make a very clear case that this is about a collective of billionaires, a collective of Silicon Valley neo-reactionaries who have come in with a vision of how they ought to be in charge and [who have] no interest at all in listening to or engaging with anyone else.
Sargent: Yeah, I heard that Trumpism is driven by anger at elites.
Sargent: It is almost like that. Politico reports that Republicans privately are in a panic over some of the DOGE firings, particularly ones laying off military veterans or crippling efforts to fight bird flu. I know it’s easy to make fun of this—they’re only complaining to the White House privately while publicly cheering Musk on. But still, this has to guide Democrats, right? They need to figure out ways of driving this wedge deeper and forcing Republicans to go public, don’t you think? What could this possibly look like?
I also think there’s just a public confrontation element to this. What’s really clear is that Republicans do not want to be personally affiliated with this. They do not want to defend it in public if they are themselves in any way electorally vulnerable. So we’ve got to go on the offensive. We’ve got to get in those districts. We’ve got to make sure that every voter understands that whether or not your representative will show their face, they are actively enabling and complicit in this agenda.
Sargent: And I think Democrats play another role here as well. They have to go to every single microphone and forum they can find to just drum up noise. Make noise, create the impression, which is correct, that something is deeply amiss, that things are really going off the rails, that terrible things are happening. That draws more media interest, that creates a snowball effect in the information space. New revelations pop out, which has been a really big thing happening fairly regularly. And then that forces Republicans to do more publicly around this.
Sargent: I want to go big picture: In 2017, we saw Trump greeted by initial shock and anger. Crowds showing up at the airports to protest the Muslim Ban; the #MeToo march; rising public anger over other things. It then became clear over time though that this wasn’t just a passing thing. Organization and mobilization started to happen at a very deep level on many communities, a lot of it driven by middle-aged women who hadn’t been previously active in politics. We saw a lot of formerly apolitical people who really start seriously contemplating running for office, resulted in a lot of great candidates for House seats, then the 2018 House takeover. I know it’s early, but candidly, what do you think the prospects are right now for something like this? What are you seeing in the ferment right now? Something like that potentially, or not?
Shock was a dominant emotion in 2016, and it produced some of those big mobilizing moments very early on. People weren’t shocked anymore. There was deep anger, there was deep fear, there was deep sorrow, but people didn’t have that initial, I must take to the streets to demonstrate my disapproval because I think a lot of people understood instinctively that the way out of this was going to be the deeper forms of organizing. They were going to show up to their local Indivisible group, and ever since November we’ve had massive surges of people showing up locally all over the country.
Now, at the same time, we are seeing a bunch of new and exciting formations that are coming into being around the mobilizing side of this. If you look and track the rise of the 50501 efforts, which started on Reddit a month and a half ago and have been regularly calling demonstrations that are growing in strength, what we’re seeing is that people are organizing and people are mobilizing. The energy is just building pretty consistently, and it’s building across a bunch of different groups who are coming in under their own banners and who are collectively—I am very confident—going to be creating that patchwork grassroots infrastructure that powered the winds of 2018 that helped to get him out in 2020.
Sargent: It was a shame that it didn’t really come through in 2024 the way we’d hoped. But you’re optimistic that there’s really the prospect for something sustained now.
And folks continue to organize, but there are limits to what you can do as the grassroots when the decisions are being made by people who are not really interested in a ton of feedback on that front. So when I hear people say, Oh, the resistance didn’t keep Donald Trump out of office in 2024, I’m like, Who do you think was running the campaigns? Who do you think was making the core decisions in 2024? Because we will do what we can. We work with regular people who respond to the political currents that are set by some of the decisions that are being made. And our folks worked incredibly hard, but there are limits to what you can do when the entire population is very, very deeply frustrated with an incumbent who’s got a historically low approval rating.
Greenberg: Absolutely. What we’ve seen is we’ve got people who’ve been with us all eight years who’ve organized the kinds of grassroots communities that are capable of onboarding all of these new folks. We’ve got people who stepped away in 2018 or 2020 who are showing back up again in droves. We’ve got new people, young people who are showing up particularly, who are activated for the first time, who might not even remember the first Trump term but are certainly horrified by what they are seeing right now.
Sargent: As you said, they seem to be proceeding as if they’re not accountable to anyone, which means the craziness and destruction will only continue. Which really raises the prospects for what you’re talking about to come through. Leah Greenberg, thank you so much for coming on with us. Always good to talk to you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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