The 'No Kings' Plan to Make Trump the Next Orbán

Welcome to Talking Feds 1-on-1.

Deep dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential

issues defining our culture and shaping our lives.

I'm your host, Harry Litman.

Welcome to another Talking Feds 1-on-1 except this is a Talking Feds 1-on-2.

It's with a high wattage powerhouse couple that have been instrumental in organizing

public opposition to the Trump administration, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, who are

the co-founders and co-executive directors of the Indivisible Project, the group most

powering the No Kings rallies.

Leah is a longtime political organizer and before Indivisible she worked on Capitol Hill

for former Virginia Congressman Tom Perry-Ello, Ezra worked in Texas Democratic organizing

in particular for former Congressman Lloyd Doggett.

He was also associate director of federal policy for a national anti-poverty nonprofit.

They've both been fighting Trump hard since he first took office over 10 years ago.

Leah, Ezra, really great to meet you.

Thanks so much for joining Talking Feds.

Great to be here.

Great to be talking with you, Harry.

So we're speaking in the wake of the third round of No Kings rallies that took place

around the country a few weekends ago on March 28th.

How do you think it compared with the previous two and how did you two spend your days?

It was bigger.

It was bigger than the previous one.

So for the third time we've had the largest protests in American history.

The first largest was No Kings 1, which had about 5 million people at 2100 protests.

And we had No Kings 2 last October, where we had 2,700 protests and 7 million people.

And this protest, I know when we were building out, we said this is going to be the largest

protest in history and it sounds like pervado, it sounds like bluster.

But look, it's the third time.

And I think it's a reflection both of how many people around the country want something

different than what we're seeing from this regime.

And how much organization has been developed over the last 16 months, this doesn't just

happen automatically.

We had 3,300 protests in every single congressional district on every single continent with more

than 8 million people showing up.

And that was at a time when the White House and National Republicans were very tight-lipped

about No Kings.

They were fused to even alter the words after the disastrous outcome when they spent three

or four weeks attacking us as extremists or as Antifa or violent agitators.

They called out the National Garden some states for No Kings 2.

They were very quietly leading up to No Kings 3 and it was still the largest protest in

history.

I agree with all that and one other thing that I think is really important to name when

we're looking at the overall impact is that we're reaching farther into red and rural

and suburban areas than ever before.

A lot of the growth that we saw was really coming from people who pulled together a protest

in a location that maybe has never had a progressive or an anti-chomp protest before.

And those are important to us, not just because it means we've got visibility in places

we didn't have, but because those often form the nucleus for local organizing on an ongoing

basis.

Yeah, that seems super important to me.

You know, I'm going to go off script already because when you said it, Ezra, I'm thinking

from the inauguration in 2017, you have these big demonstrations and there's huge debate

was it, no, 3 million, no, 11 million, what is the deal there and how do you get your

accurate estimates of crowds?

Great question and what I would say is crowd county is both an art and a science and

we are very committed to not drinking our own cool aid on movement strength.

I think that's really important.

I've seen estimates for every No Kings including this one where people come out and say, no,

it was 11 million people, it was 15 million people, I'm like, look, I want us to be bigger.

I think we need more people in the number in our heads when we're organizing is the number

that comes out of anti-authoritarian experts like Eric Chenoweth and Maria Steph and this

three and a half percent figure, the finding in other countries that have taken on authoritarianism

is that if you get about three and a half percent of the population not just showing up

on a single day but actively engaged in opposing the regime, something in kind of what we saw

in the Twin Cities when Trump tried to put his boot down on those two cities, then that's

enough.

It repells the regime in the US context that's 11 or 12 million people.

For us that means hands off last April with 3 million people, followed by 5 million people

for No Kings 1, followed by 7 million people for No Kings 2, followed by more than 8 million

people for No Kings 3.

That's growth and we're headed in the right direction but we still need more people in.

The way that we get these numbers is we do a lot of work talking to the organizers on

the ground.

So there are one-on-one conversations between the organizer who is organizing the event and

our national team that has a big complicated spreadsheet that totals up everything.

But that's only ever going to be partial data hairy.

You know that.

There are 3,300 events that aren't going to be one-on-one conversations with every single

person.

So then you match that with other reports on the ground, RSVP data, and this all comes

together to say, what can we extrapolate and say with some level of confidence?

Yeah, we're confident we can defend that and that's how we get to for No Kings 3, more

than 8 million people.

For No Kings 2 and No Kings 1, they were also independently verified by outside sources.

What may happen again for No Kings 3, we're running our own poll, a national poll right

now, to check in and see how many people say that they participated, which is yet another

data point to say, okay, we can try to get it an answer that is indeed defensible and

believable.

You know, I want to return to your point and the efficacy, obviously it's hugely impressive

and it grows and grows.

I want to go to this notion of rallies in red areas.

We think of other important rallies in US history.

They've often been kind of small, but what they have been is catalyst for public opinion.

Some 600 people are marching over the bridge in Selma, for example.

Huge achievement to mount them at all in red areas.

Do you have a sense, though, of whether some of the people there and the growing numbers

are literally former Trump voters?

As we know, there's a cadre now of people that are powering his plummeting ratings that

literally, you know, have buyers remorse.

Does No Kings bring them in, or is it just a big demonstration of people who began the

day?

No Trump and ended the day.

No Trump.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I would say it's a little bit of everything, right?

Certainly a lot of our core organizers are people who've been opposed to Trump voted

in 2024, organized in 2024, the whole nine yards.

But what they are reporting, and particularly in places that are not super democratic

territory in general, is that a lot of people who identify as independent, as former

Republican, as people who don't vote normally, because that's a big population as well,

are fed up?

They are furious about the war.

They are furious about masked secret police coming into their communities and taking

their neighbors.

They are furious as their costs are rising.

And as it's very clear that the Trump administration's priority is on enriching itself and accumulating

its power instead of helping them with anything in their lives.

What we've seen, and this is actually true really almost since the beginning when we started

to see big crowds showing up at Ruby Red Congressional Districts at Town Halls back in March

and April of last year, is that there is a very powerful cross-partisan reaction to what

is happening going on across the country.

You look at the organizing that we were seeing in the Twin Cities, people showing up to help

their neighbors to push back against ice to monitor ice.

Those people weren't Kamala Harris voters primarily.

They weren't democratic voters primarily.

They were primarily neighbors, Harry.

And I think if we are building a responsible pro-democracy movement, we're not just trying

to juice up the democratic turnout.

That's not the goal.

The goal is actually to welcome everybody and to have an ideologically diverse movement

that might not agree on everything that should come next, but can agree on one simple

thing now, no.

And that is a big goal of individuals and of the broader No Kings coalition.

We want everybody who agrees on that fundamental foundational statement that we don't do

kings in this country to be welcome and to be absorbed into this movement because that's

how you hit the numbers that you need in order to successfully push back.

Yeah.

So it really is quite a paradigm and I think it's right that the administration realized

it totally overreached and it exactly incited or instigated the kind of neighborly personal

sort of, it made it real for a lot of people.

Leah, back to your point about people who don't vote and when I hear about that cohort,

I think always as a lifelong Democrat of the frustration of young people who are might

be, you know, on the hustings, rabble browsers and then what the hell happens at the actual

time.

Now, I've been to your rallies and I would say the demographic is much more my generation

than yours.

What do you make of that?

Is it accurate nationwide and what are you doing to have greater diversity of ages?

Yeah.

Well, I think first we've got to look really directly at some of the currents and some of the history

and some of the experiences of young people that are driving disparities in who's showing

up for a protest like No Kings, right?

A pro-democracy coalition in America is always going to bring together people who are trying

to, trying to preserve something, right?

Trying to fight for democracy, trying to fight for something about the existing order and

people who don't experience the existing order is working for them at all, people who don't

believe in the system, people who feel like they've been pretty screwed by American democracy.

That is those feelings are not going to be equally held across different generations.

What we tend to see with older people who are showing up, I don't want to generalize

too much, but much more likely people are going to come in and say, I want to save democracy

whereas if I'm talking to an audience of young people, if I'm talking to Gen Z and I go

and I say, we've got to save democracy, they're going to be like, what the hell are you talking

about?

What part of my experience in the last few years feels like democracy?

That's before we even get to some of the most formative experiences of this generation

which have been massive protests against the Biden administration's policies in Gaza,

the genocide in Gaza and very visible on campus and off campus repression of those protests.

I think there's in the very recent memory of a lot of the people who should be the next

rising generation of organizers within a pro-democracy fight and who are in fact often doing that

work in one way or another, there's a lot of reason to be skeptical of the big mass

protest as the major model for change.

It doesn't mean that they're not doing work.

We've seen a lot of young people who are very heavily involved in ice watch, in neighborhood

protection, in really direct engagement to try and mutual aid.

But it might mean that the big protests are going to draw more from the people who are

more bought into the idea that expressing their outrage translates into some reaction

from the political system and grow over time as more people come to that conclusion.

You know, I feel this personally in my little nerdy world because I, not just from my age

but from having been in DOJ so long and completely outraged at what's happening with the rule

of law and democratic norms, but it feels a bit abstract and trying to render in a way where

the stakes are clean, I think, is a challenge.

You've made a sort of general point, both of you here, about kind of divide between what

you've called cultural elite opinion and really so many of the people who are in the

rally, they don't care or see it in those terms, they just want to fight fascism.

In what ways would you say, I'm interested in that divide, and do you think it's just

a tinier on the part of the cultural elites, do you just sort of set them to the side?

How do you try to actually coalesce those kinds of opinions with just the ones who like,

I don't want to talk about that, and this is much more basic.

I would say that, again, just to take it a step back, right, I think what we saw immediately

after the election of Donald Trump was a sort of collapse of elites.

Somebody, somebody who's in political science, yeah, somebody in political science will

come up with a better version, a better articulation of this at some point, but you know, when

in 2017, Trump was elected, you saw businesses throwing in to collectively push back, you

know, the issuing the statement saying, we're going to protect our employees and filing

suits and all of that stuff you saw in the university.

Did my rearaged democracies die in the dark?

That was the slogan of the Washington Post.

Exactly.

You know, you saw across me.

My own influence.

Law firms, yeah, people had had spine, right?

Yeah.

Right.

You saw a bunch of different elite actors across various parts of American society, not

just partisan parts, but like, you know, business, law firms, media, higher education, et

cetera, all rushed up, hold some set of basic principles.

And that was almost entirely absent in 2024 into 2025.

And so I think it's important to understand the reaction that we are seeing and the mass

participation and the no kings protests in partly in reaction to that, the sense that,

you know, the parts of society that are supposed to be doing their part to uphold some portion

of American norms, American democracy are not doing it.

And so we've got to collectively come out and push back and create for everyone the

understanding that this guy's not inevitable, that he's not going to consolidate power,

that he is, in fact, in a face a very powerful opposition for us as people who are organizing.

That was apparent from pretty early on.

And there was this like very weird dynamic where people, reporters would call us in November,

December, January, and they'd say, where's the resistance?

And we'd say, they're everywhere.

Are you kidding me?

We cannot cope with how many people are flooding in.

They're having meetings that are overflowing.

We can send you to one, et cetera.

But until you get the big moment of protest, none of that counts for folks.

And so there was this disconnect between the absolute sea of organizing and protest that

was actually starting on the ground level.

And the elite discourse about kind of, you know, Trump's got this, he's consolidating

power.

He's inevitable.

We got to get out of the way.

Two things to add to that because that's all very true.

One is some of the elites that collapsed were within the Democratic Party itself.

The conventional wisdom, the conventional thinking within national Democratic Party leadership

was, Trump was all powerful.

The Democrats needed to demonstrate how reasonable they were by cutting deals with Trump and

moving over to his side.

And that the reason that they were going to blame on Kamala Harris's loss was because

of the grassroots, because of the groups.

And so it was not just that they were strategically taking this direction.

They felt like they had to.

They had to put the groups in their place.

They had to put the grassroots in their place.

And that was them doing their job.

When for those of us who were organizing on the ground against America's Mussolini, after

the election didn't suddenly come to the decision that, well, we'll just going to work with

him.

And that's where normal rank and file Democrats were too.

To Leah's point, there were masses of people who had never been engaged in politics

before that were driven to start organizing one because of how heinous Trump's project

2025 agenda was.

But two, because of this sense that the Democratic Party was entirely unprepared for this

moment, an unwilling to fight back.

Keep in mind, the day that Trump came into office, he had at his desk, Lincoln Riley,

a bill passed with bipartisan support to strengthen ICE and weaken the hand of civil society

to protect immigrants from a terrorizing force.

That was on his desk when he was sworn in.

And it came from this place of, well, we can't fight back too much.

We've got to show that we can work with Trump.

And I do think that's why there's been this surge of engagement of grassroots organizing

at historic levels.

The goal of that is in part to drive home the point that democracy is indeed going to

reassert itself.

The pathway through which you do that is to convince Democrats they got to play catch-up.

They can't keep on playing this game that they were playing back in January 24.

They see the crowds and they say, oh gosh, that's where the people are.

I guess I've got to go there.

And I do, I think the story of 2025 is in part, as Leah was talking about, the story of

elite collapse.

It's also the story of normal everyday people coming together, organizing and dragging the

opposition party in their direction day by day, week by week, month by month to the

point that right now we exist still in a DHS shutdown because Democrats are holding

firm in the Senate.

For the first time in the last 60 months, they're all the firm, finally, finally they're

playing catch-up to where the grassroots has been since Trump got elected again in

24.

Yeah.

I mean, it does feel like two sides of the same coin.

And the teeth gnashing definitely continues among potential candidates or others.

How much do you have to let him have his way?

And there's been so many ways in which he's been able to influence civil society.

I think you're right.

Well, actually, let me, let's, let's follow up with that.

So it does feel like to me, part of the blowback powering no kings is more than anger at

Trump, but also anger at Democrats in Washington that voters think are not doing enough to fight

Trump themselves.

I know you two feel some of that anger you called for, or indivisible, called for Chuck

Schumer to step down a Senate minority leader over a year ago.

What part of your overall program is specifically designed to foster a new, more assertive brand

of democratic leadership?

Yeah.

Well, so I would, I would say it's two pieces, right?

The first is our ongoing advocacy work, right?

In between an event like no kings, indivisible is consistently giving people strategy guidance

on what is going on in the hill, what our best analysis is, how you can plug in based

on, you know, are you in a red state?

Are you in a blue state here?

The targets for the current thing here are the senators that were worried or a little

squishy on this, and you know, this bill that's coming up, et cetera.

So continuing to just keep people in formation.

So much of our original founding theory was, you know, corporate interests have lobbying

groups that pay a lot of attention, decipher all the stuff that's going on and make that

information legible to their clients.

And we want to make sure that regular people have the same level of understanding of what

is happening on Capitol Hill.

So, you know, when we get to a call like asking for Chuck Schumer to step down, that's partly

because of an ongoing cycle of regular engagement from folks in New York and folks around the

country that's been ongoing on for a long time.

And so continuing to hold people accountable on stuff like the shutdown, push people to

stand up on stuff like holding DHS funding, on war funding, et cetera.

That's ongoing work.

The other thing that is big, this cycle is primaries.

We are seeing a lot of people who are getting more involved than they've ever been before

in open primaries or in primary challenges around incumbents, you know, all oriented around

this basic idea of like, we need to have fighters in the Democratic Party.

And one thing that I would need that I think is important for us to call out is that, you

know, we're a progressive organization, but we recognize that a lot of what's happening

right now is not inherently ideological.

It's about your orientation to fighting for democracy.

It is about, do you think we are in a crisis that merits the use of all of the possible

tools or not?

Are you standing up and rejecting corporate money, fascism, funders, or are you not?

Are you actually doing things differently in response to what is happening or is it business

as usual?

And what we're seeing is that people are gravitating around the country to candidates

who are really speaking to that need.

Harry, and I would add to this, this isn't a problem that just we have with the Democratic

Party.

I think for those of us who are in the pro-democracy camp, a hard truth that we shouldn't

shy away from is that the Democratic Party is less popular than the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party is less popular than Donald Trump.

At a time when we have an authoritarian in the White House, we have leading the Democratic

Party in the Senate, literally the least popular political figure in the country.

Chuck Schumer is literally the least popular political figure in America today and he leads

the Democratic efforts in the Senate.

Now regardless of what your ideological position is as a Democrat, you probably want to win

in November.

I sure do.

I want to defeat the regime thoroughly.

I want massive majorities in the House.

I want to get a victory in the Senate.

That's what I want to do.

It is very difficult to do that when the Democratic Party has such a damaging, brand-new

and problem that it takes into every single district.

Now when we're talking about primaries right now, disproportionately what we're talking

about are safe districts.

I just did a kickoff call for voter contact in Georgia 13.

This is Jasmine Clarke is challenging David Scott.

This is a district that went for Kamala Harris by 42 points.

It's going to have a Democrat.

The question is what kind of Democrat, David Scott, hasn't voted in the last seven elections.

He voted to thank ICE for their service last year and he represents a Democrat plus 42

district.

What are we doing here, Erie?

Why don't we have Democrats representing Democratic districts that act like Democrats?

That's something that we can do to improve the Democratic brand, but we'll also improve

their strategy when they get in.

It means that they're not going to be searching for ways to agree with Trump.

They're actually going to represent a position and like it or hate it, at least you're going

to know where Democrats stand.

You know, back to young people, it really is remarkable.

You've got to think that if you're 25, your whole adult life has been in the Trump or

Biden, which is still a kind of a Trump era.

You can see how the tumors of the world, it's all different shades of gray and breaking

out of that.

I can see it's quite a challenge.

Let me ask, how has the war changed the kind of dynamic of the No Kings rallies or just

generally the mission of Indivisible?

Yeah.

Well, what we are seeing is a lot of people are horrified.

It is reaching and allowing us to reach new people who do not want war, do not understand

why you would be putting American troops in harm's way, why you would be harming innocents

people abroad.

Certainly, don't understand why you'd be paying a billion dollars a day, money that's

going from, you know, healthcare and roads and schools to bombs abroad that are going

to blow up to girls schools.

The, you know, what we're seeing in general and what we saw with the No Kings coalition

was there was this pivot around making sure that this was a really clear front and center

part of our messaging.

A lot of times what we saw with Protester on the country with people were kind of moving

to this informal hashtag of No Kings No Ice No War.

There was a real, you know, collective effort to bring this to the front and to use No

Kings as a moment to collectively show that there was mass anti-war sentiment in the country.

And I think we were able to successfully land that message, you know, I'm thinking of

the, with San Diego where they did the, you know, the giant sea from space, no war sign

and where they arranged the crowd.

They've done that a shot.

The note for San Diego note, for No Kings, they've always done that incredible spell out

with humans.

Correct.

Right.

Yeah.

And so, and that's continuing on.

Right.

Like what we're seeing particularly today, we're talking on a day when, you know, Donald

Trump is threatening in the most horrifying terms, like genocidal war crimes against

Iran.

What we're seeing is people, people are horrified.

They are shocked.

They are also, you know, baffled at how we could have a political system that is allowing

him to, you know, pull this mad king act where he's taken the country to a war that nobody

wants.

And just in a real for a second, the people are, but are they new and different and adding

people?

Not Harry.

Right now, as we talked to you, who is out against Trump and this war right now, Marjorie

Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, his own coalition is fracturing over this.

I don't want to get dinner or drinks with those folks.

They're not people who I think of my ideological best friends, but you cannot deny that they

were core aspects of the Trump coalition and this war is driving them away.

And what I would say is, we do not have to be best friends with Trump's opponents.

We can make common cause right now and then go back to fighting each other afterwards.

But I think it is undeniable that there are a set of people who voted for Donald Trump,

even though they didn't really like him, maybe they didn't agree with some of his policies,

but he promised to be the no more worst candidate.

He explicitly promised not to start a war with Iran.

And right now, people's prices are jacked up, whether it's healthcare or eggs or bread

or anything else.

And he is saying we can't afford to pay for that, but we can't afford to spend more than

a billion dollars a day on a war that nobody wanted.

That absolutely is driving people over our side and we should welcome them in.

I would also make a bit of a distinction cause sometimes I think we talk about, does this

bring people out into the streets and does this allow us to reach new voters in the same

breath?

Exactly.

You know, most of the voters we are hoping to flip are never going to show up to the big

protest, but something like this might both bring out some new people to the streets

and also allow us to reach a totally different set of folks who are activated.

I would also just note.

Talk about that.

How does that work concretely because that really is.

That's partly what I meant by the impressive numbers, but what does it translate into?

So there's political science research on this and there are two studies recently that

covered the protest during the Tea Party in April of 2010 looking to see where those

protests were ringed out.

So there were small sizes of protests or there were no protests in those areas, which

was one of your, you actually took some pages from the Tea Party, right?

There are, there are anti-inspiration living in the very first chapter of the original

end of visible guidance.

What did the Tea Party get right?

Look, they were bigoted.

They were racist.

They were sometimes violent, but gosh, they knew how to organize.

They were smart about some things here.

So absolutely.

So the Tea Party had lots of protests in April and the political science research, where

were there rainstorms during those protests so that there weren't big protests there?

As turnout worse, was it the same?

Was there any different?

And what they found is places that had Tea Party protests in 2010 had better Republican

outcomes in the 2010 shellacking, where the Republicans took control of the House.

Same basic dynamic in 2017 to 2018, where there were large women marches in 2017.

You saw better Democratic outcomes.

But more recently, look to last November, where Democrats ran the table from everywhere

from New York City to the Deep South at California.

Where did that take place?

In the same places where we had the largest protest in American history two and a half weeks

earlier with those kings too, I think there is a direct well-documented connection between

non-violent widespread protests and electoral outcomes.

To Leah's point, the people in rural Texas or rural Georgia or in Alaska who are going

to determine whether or not we have a Democratic center or not, they are more likely to live

within 30 minutes of a no-king's protest now than they were last year.

That means more people are going to be activated because they see they're not alone.

They see that there's a community that agrees with them and maybe they show up at that

protest, maybe they don't, but they know that they're not weirdos for having the beliefs

that they believe.

Right.

As they tried to say, or anyone who goes to the Israelites, our dorks, I think, was the

latest maga mantra.

But no, it's a lot because it's important, not only communities, it seems to me, but communities

they recognize because with the hyperpolarization in the country, you know there are people

fomenting out there somewhere, but these guys shop at the same hardware store and go to

the same diner and that kind of stuff, and even if they're different, they're much harder

to dehumanize.

I'm Michael Waldman, host of the Briefing Podcast.

I'm a former White House speechwriter, lawyer, and a constitutional scholar, and I'm president

of the Brennan Center for Justice.

We work to repair and strengthen American democracy from gerrymandering to abuse of presidential

power, from supreme court reform to congressional corruption and more.

What fun.

You're going to hear new ideas in this podcast and you're going to hear about the strategies

and legal and political fights that will shape the next phase of American politics.

If you care about our democracy, the Briefing is a podcast for you.

I want to give you a chance, especially to respond to criticism as I was preparing for

this that I know is often leveled, which is maybe this goes with the territory of the

huge numbers you're drawing, but no kings or indivisible.

There's not a concrete goal or demand.

It's bigger than that.

I've heard you say in response, that's intentional, that's an asset.

Can you explain why you think that and what your response is when you hear that kind of criticism?

Sure.

I would root us in a strategy, because fundamentally, no kings is a tactic.

It is often kind of approached because it gets so much attention as if it is the whole

strategy, whereas in reality, it's actually one tactic within a strategy of fostering

mass defiance to oppose and defeat and restrain consolidation of authoritarianism.

The basic idea when we launched the first no kings back in June of 2025 was there is

this broad societal chilling effect that is happening with a would-be authoritarian who

is cracking down on alternate sources of power, who is on the verge in this moment of throwing

himself a birthday party show of force with the military parade in Washington DC.

What we are going to do is get as many people out as possible in as many places as possible

to dispute that aura of inevitability, to dispute that sense that he is powerful, that

he is representative, that he is inevitably going to consolidate the ability to roll over

us.

That was the core idea.

And part of the thinking behind that was that we had found in past efforts that one issue

protest wasn't working quite the same way that it used to be, that there was a need to

actually pull people together collectively and hold up each other's issues rather than

trying to rapid response mobilize on every individual outrage because if we were showing

up for every single horrible thing that they did, we were going to be showing up five

times a day and we were going to burn ourselves out.

So the basic idea was let's build the biggest possible coalition within this umbrella

container of a story, a story about unaccountable, imperious governance that is ruling over

us that is harming us and that's manifesting in all kinds of different ways at the same

time, where we're all coming together and holding up that story together.

And so that was the core idea behind the first no kings and carries over where we're just

trying to basically show American society is not folding to a would be authoritarian.

There are more of us.

We're growing every time.

We're building our strength every time and we are collectively capable of pushing back.

And you should be whoever you are in American society, whether you are a democratic politician

or a Republican politician or the head of a university or the head of a media company.

You should be as worried about the rest of us as you were worried about Donald Trump.

That's the core idea.

Now the other piece of no kings that's really important is that it is a mass catalyst of

local organizing because the entire theory all the way through was we're not going to

try and do one single place.

We're not going to try to all mass in Washington or in one city for a show of four.

So although there will certainly be very big protests in a lot of this meter cities,

we're going to ask people to organize where they are and we're going to ask people to

use those organizing moments as the catalyst for ongoing local engagement.

So when we do a no kings, we have indivisible groups and 50 51 groups and you know,

League of Women voters and DSA and really pretty much everybody across the full ideological

spectrum of the broad popular front who are using these as moments to bring more people

into ongoing activism engagement cycles of absorption that allow them to do all of the

work that fuels that mass, mass resistance, mass defiance on an ongoing basis.

So the people who organize this stuff, the next week they're doing mutual aid.

They are doing ice watch trainings.

They are doing community support activities.

They're doing advocacy to stop the war.

They're doing voter registration and electoral organizing, but because they did no kings,

they've got twice as many people who are doing it now.

So there's this ongoing cycle of both, you know, the mass show of defiance and then the

reinforcing cycles of absorption and local activism that builds power.

If the Supreme Court fails us and if Trump is able to go forward and I mean, do you see

an end game where the republic is saved literally by popular resistance, even, you know,

if the if things are perloined at the ballot box and the like or, you know, at that point

are we, I can say this, it's my damn podcast true, well and truly fucked.

I think we should expect that Trump is trying to sabotage the midterm elections and we

should expect that because he is telling us that.

Yeah.

I think we should believe that the reason why he is sending ice agents out to the airports

is not just to terrorize immigrants.

It's partly that, but it's also as a dress rehearsal for what he intends to do in the

midterms.

He ran and told us that directly, right?

Yeah.

He ran and is telling us directly.

And look, we are at the place right now in our republic where we, I can't change Trump's

mind directly.

I can't change the fact that he is an authoritarian and the fact that authoritarians do not willingly

give up power and that a traditional flashpoint for authoritarians is indeed national elections

where they have to decide and the public has to decide and the institutions have to decide

what are we really?

Are we still a republic?

Are we still a democracy or are we in competitive authoritarianism now?

That is a fight that is coming.

What we know about those fights around the world is they are determined as much by whether

people get engaged in that moment as by what the institutions do because ultimately all

power.

This seems like a high school textbook, but it is true and it's probably important

for us to remind ourselves, all legitimate political power in this country comes from

the people.

That is where everything comes from.

So if we want a democracy, we've got it.

We've got to do the work to keep it, but we've got it.

The reason why we do things like no kings is in part to send a message that democracy

is going to reassert itself.

But to Leah's point, a big part of it is to recruit more and more people with an easy

on ramp into local organizing because when that moment comes, Harry, it's not going

to be enough for us to hit 11 or 12 million people on a Saturday and then all whistle the

work on Monday like nothing happened.

What it's going to require is matching the breadth of organizing and mobilizing that

we've seen with no kings with the depth of oppositional organizing that we saw in a

place like the Twin Cities where you saw 3, 4, 5% of an entire city organized, linking

arms against an authoritarian force.

This is why the main action item coming out of no kings 3 was not.

And here's the next no kings where we all show up again in a big protest.

No, it's in fact made it on May 1st, a day without businesses usual, a day modeled on

the Minnesota Day of Truth and Action where there were tens of thousands of clergy and

teachers and nurses and neighbors coming out together in sub-zero temperatures to say,

no, this isn't normal.

We're not going to put up with this.

We're not going to just move on like it's fine.

And that was what's preceded the regime basically announcing defeat as best it could and more

or less stopping what its campaign was against the Twin Cities.

We're going to have to build towards that and Mayday is what's known in some quarters

as a structure test for the movement to understand where are we?

Are we able to pull this off?

What numbers do we need and where?

What capabilities do we need?

We don't have.

Where do we need to focus on building because we're going to need it come November and

we don't want November to be a dry run.

Okay.

What's the general scope then between now and November?

So that's the next big landmark.

We're seven months away.

I assume you've given real thought to an overall architecture of effective use of the

movement you've built and the movement that's growing to dovetail with the midterms.

What's next for no kings?

Or indivisible, I should say.

Well for indivisible, what we're building towards Mayday, we think that is going to be

a cruise day for us to collectively come out and to push back against the war against

this out of control government against its billionaire cronies, put workers first and

flex our power.

That is going to be a crucial moment.

And also, you know, we're heading into an election season and we both have to win that

election and we have to protect that election.

And so we're going to be continuing to double down on that hyper-local organizing that

actually builds up the strength that is necessary in the event of election, subversion, election

sabotage.

And we're also going to be making sure we throw everything that we've got at winning

this election because fundamentally the way that we are going to stop Donald Trump from

trying to go for his, you know, third term is if he suffers the most resounding historic

epic midterm defeat in American history.

And then he is unable to steal the election afterwards.

That is where we got to go.

It does seem to me that his strategies in 2020, but now worse because he has levers of

power and he's able to get more sort of tools, but really do depend on, you know, for him

11,780 votes can be a close election, but really the issue is will he have operating room

and I think he is seeding the ground to wherever it's close to go forward.

But if there's very few places or overall he can't affect the national verdict, then

that's I think a big difference.

As we're final thoughts about what's next for no kings, including after Mayday?

I think Leah said it brilliantly.

I was tempted to mention you guys are married.

I'm biased, so but I think Leah did the perfect job on that one.

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