Yes, and then some. Hitting the streets under the “Hands Off” and “No Kings” banners, last year’s anti-Trump forces surfaced energy, patriotism, and perhaps more importantly, joy—a simmering movement is now roiling, with millions taking to the public square, and perhaps millions more waiting in the wings.
Indivisible was both a response to and inspired by the Tea Party movement. But in 2025, it eclipsed the Tea Party’s most expansive count of public participation, which never topped 500,000. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, April’s Hands Off brought in around one million protesters. June’s No Kings rallies netted at least two million and maybe as many as 4.8 million. The consortium has yet to count October’s No Kings rallies, but one nonpartisan estimate put it between five and 6.5 million.
So, is this the year?
We saw a lot of mobilization under Trump’s first term, but nothing like this. What’s different now? We can say, “Well, he’s worse,” but that is the kind of thing that could dampen turnout.
What has this movement learned from progressive movements of the past?
And then, because Obama for America [as an independent force] was a threat to the Democratic Party, it was largely snuffed out. I remember being a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young volunteer for the Obama campaign, where they did a follow-up call for the volunteers on the campaign saying, and we’re definitely going to need you going into 2009, and then it was crickets.
Can you go back to how No Kings feels different from the “Protest is the new brunch” sensibility of Trump I?
Now a lot of those who got involved in organizing stayed involved. They tried to push to get Kamala Harris over the finish line. And what they saw in 2024 was not that the normal everyday people failed to push back. It was that both the Republican Party, which has fallen off a cliff, and the Democratic Party, which has proven itself corrupt and feckless, fail us.
It feels like normal people are angrier at Democrats because this time, they know they did their part but Democrats didn’t.
What is the point of a political party? Why does a political party exist? We moved heaven and earth to get Trump out of office, make him the first one-term president in a generation, and not just do that, but deliver a democratic trifecta. We took both Senate seats in Georgia in early 2021, and what did we get out of it? We got Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema writing the legislation that could actually get through.
I’ve been calling 2025 the year of the normie protester.
He’s probably going to do a lot of damage in 2026, but I think [the everyday protesters] are to be credited with the world that we’re in now versus the world we started out in [at] the beginning of this year.
The Democratic Party is weak. It obviously is. Its approval rating is far lower than Donald Trump’s and lower than the Republican Party’s at a time of the least popular federal policy agenda in modern history. So that’s bad. The question is whether, although they are weak, they are entrenched enough to survive in its current form, and that’s what primary season is for. I truly hope the answer is no, that they are weak and can be reformed and made better and more responsive to their own constituents, and that’s the goal of a primary program.
You were inspired by the Tea Party. What have you taken from that movement?
I also think the Tea Party smartly focused on saying no, beyond everything else. They said no. They didn’t have the House, they didn’t have the Senate, they didn’t have the presidency, but they could yell, “No.” About health care, about Dodd-Frank, about national service, about the stimulus. They could yell, “No.” God knows, it’s pretty attractive: No.
Look, the goal is to do good that you can in the moment. We’re not talking about what happens in 2029. Should we have a Democratic House and a presidency? I’m interested in that. I’m a policy nerd. I like talking about Earned Income Tax Credit refundability. We’re not near that right now. We’ve got a fascist in the White House who is systematically trying to attack other sources of power. And the question is, do you allow that to continue, or don’t you? That’s it. That’s the political question of the day.
The one mandate that can come to legible demand coming out of No Kings, in terms of policy advocacy is, “Stop this shit.” No more to this unconstitutional legal behavior. Do not reach out and normalize him. Do not work on some immigration bill or tax bill or infrastructure bill [with him]. Let the subpoenas fly. Let the hearings start. Rein in this regime.
I mean, LBJ is, despite all his failures, a political hero of mine. He was an out-and-out racist in his interpersonal life, and he also passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. He was a cheater, he was a coward, he was a bully, and also the most effective political leader since FDR. There was pushback from his advisers that he was going to get political hell from [his reforms]. And he said, What the hell is the presidency for?
You need different allies for different timescales. I think it is important for us to have as huge a “Coalition of No” as possible over the course of the next 12 months. And what we know from international fights against authoritarianism that are successful is that building that big-tent coalition of no is critical, because in the absence of that, you lose … you lose. The regime’s strategy is divide and conquer. So if you divide yourself—game over, they’re gonna win.
We need a cultural-level shift where we start thinking of democracy as a participatory sport that we’ve got to engage in. And we should stop thinking of it as, “Well, if we elect the right leader, whoever it is, then they’ll solve it for us.” It just won’t happen. It will not happen. I have long since lost faith in political leadership. I think there are better and worse politicians, and there are better and worse elected officials, but they’re all constrained by the same forces, and if you want to bust through those forces, you need mass involvement. You need mass participation.
Now Trump is looking more ridiculous. He is looking like the wheels are coming off the bus. That doesn’t mean it’s over. There’s money that’s flowing down to ICE. The camps are being constructed. The planes are being purchased. The Proud Boys are being hired. That’s happening now. And as he feels more and more like a cornered animal, he is going to lash out. These are not people who are used to having to face the prospect of real accountability. So when I say I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better, that’s what I mean.
I mean, we are winning, but the more it appears obvious that we are winning, the more police power will be used against us. So I worry about that. And I’m not taking for granted what happens in 2026. I’m currently operating under the assumption that he will try to pull some sort of shenanigans around the elections. If we don’t utterly stop him entirely, they’re gonna try to throw out some kind of results. You don’t win that fight with a one-day protest. You win that fight with real societal disruption, which we currently can’t pull off. We can pull off historic levels of protest. We can pull off multiday strikes.
We’re going to have to get there if you’re going to stop an attempt to steal an election. Everybody showing up on a Saturday is nice. Fifteen million people showing up on a Saturday would be nice. It’s not going to be enough.
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