The day after the election, Anand joined Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, for a conversation with KALW Public Media’s “Your Call” on the way forward for people looking to challenge — or even just to carry on in — the Trump II era.
Anand and Ezra talked with host Ethan Elkind (and fielded questions from KALW listeners), covering everything from how to identify practical goals and focus political energy to achieve them over the next four years, to how to manage the information overload of Trumpism, to analyzing what’s wrong with the Democratic Party and what needs to change to build an opposition that reflects the power of the people. Click on the player above to listen to the conversation, or scroll down to read the full transcript below.
Let me start with a question for you both just to get a temperature check. It's been now about 24 hours since the presidency changed hands. And I wanted to find out how you both are doing and what sort of jumped out to you now about this moment 24 hours in.
Ezra, I'll start with you for that one.
Ezra Levin: Well, a lot of what we've seen over the last 24 hours is what we predicted Trump would do. He is moving forward with a deeply unpopular agenda that he did his best to distance himself from throughout all of last year.
He swore up and down that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, and that he was going to go in a different direction, and lo and behold, that wasn't the case.
Immediately upon taking office, he takes some of the most egregious actions that were thought up in that terrifying plan, and he's putting them into the world now. He is using the power of the presidency to pursue that agenda.
I think the real question for all of us now is, how does America respond? How do people respond? But he is doing exactly what we thought he would do.
Yeah. And Anand, what about you? What jumps out at you now 24 hours in, and how are you feeling about what's happening?
Anand Giridharadas: Well, yesterday was the inauguration, and I woke up today, and it was 10 degrees in New York, 22 below freezing, so thanks, Trump.
It does feel like a chill has come to this country. And I know a lot of people who didn't watch yesterday, and I can understand that the brain is an important organ to maintain the health and wellness of. But I did watch, even got, you know, my nine-year-old son to watch, even though he wanted to keep going to play. And I said it was important to watch this, to understand the context of what's going to unfold.
And, you know, I'll just say at the outset, that what struck me is we have truly entered not just a new political moment, not just a new political era, but I feel like yesterday was the triumph of a certain kind of culture. A culture that, as I wrote about in a piece this week, I don't think is actually some Russian plant, as a lot of people used to fantasize. I don't think of it as some strange alien invader. I think it is the triumph of a very deep American tendency, a miserly, cruel, callous, gatekeeping, hard-hearted, hateful tendency that is deep in our culture, deep in many of our own hearts. The triumph of that culture over an equally real American tendency of generosity and openness and hope and optimism. And it's going to be a wild ride.
But I think there's a lot for your listeners and citizens in general to do in this time. And despair is not an option.
And I'm also curious for both of you, just what is sort of guiding you now? What's your sort of philosophy here? And has it changed from how you approached the first Trump term, and Ezra, I'll go back to you for the first crack at that question.
Ezra: Well, at a very foundational level, the underpinnings of our strategy, they're the same. It's the basic idea that we still live in a representative democracy, which means that for the time being, every elected official at every level, local, state, federal, they wake up this morning like every morning thinking one thing, how do I get reelected? That's just a basic react. That's not a knock on politicians. That's just how the job is structured. If you want to stay in office and do good or bad, you got to get reelected. And so that's a powerful foundational piece of the strategy because it gives normal people power. It gives you power.
If you organize effectively and focus on your own elected officials, they have to care what you think because they need you to get reelected. Some of them might not need you. You know, I'm from rural Texas. Ted Cruz doesn't care if we show up at his office. He doesn't need me to get reelected. But if you're in Austin or if you're in a blue or purple county, your county executive might need you or your mayor might need you or your city council person might need you. So if there's a key thing that's the same, it's that we still live in a democratic republic.
If there's a thing that's changed, I think it's the solo focus on Congress and the White House that we saw in 2017, 2018 has broadened to encompass more than just federal policy. In 2017, we had just six Democratic state trifecta, states where Democrats controlled the governorship and the state legislature. Right now, in 2025, we have 15, California included. So instead of just asking, how is your senator voting? How is your representative voting? You should be asking, what is your governor? What is your state legislature doing to go on the offense against the attacks that are coming for your state from this overreaching federal government?
And Anand, what about you? What are your sort of guiding approaches here? And how has it changed from the first Trump term?
Anand: You know, so, you know, Ezra is someone I have a great deal of respect for, and the lane he's in is a remarkable lane of organizing that emerged after the first Trump victory. I'm in a different lane as a writer, but we, you know, we think about a lot of the same things. I'll tell you what I see as a writer who talks to people about — this is less about my posture under Trump — but talks to a lot of people about how they are thinking about their posture under Trump too.
And I wrote a piece for The Ink a few weeks ago talking about how in the run-up to the inauguration it seemed to me that almost no one I knew — and thinking really of very politically committed people in general — almost no one was signing up for Resistance 2.0 to go with Trump 2.0.
And there are a lot of different reasons for that. Some of it is exhaustion, some of it is analytical, feeling that that didn't work clearly, and other reasons besides. People are in a different place now. This is the second time. There's a lot of different reasons.
So I was trying to think about what I was hearing from people. What were the postures that people seemed more interested in. And I think some of it, you know, rhymes with what Ezra was talking about a second ago. And I'll just mention kind of a few of them in particular.
I have been hearing a lot of people talk about a posture of retreat into the arenas you can control. Now, that does not mean retreat like in military retreat, doesn't mean surrender, but it means paying attention to the areas of life that you can make good, you can make better. Your neighborhood, your family, your community garden, your workplace, they're all places where we have real and clear agency, immediate agency to make things more humane and better. And I think that's gonna be very appealing to people.
You know, I think also for a lot of artists and writers and others I talk to, there's an idea of retreating to your art, which doesn't, again, not giving up. But I talk to a lot of artists who are like, maybe the thing I need to do is not give speeches about my politics, but make the kind of art that will make Americans more human to each other, right?
Is it more important for a film director to give a speech at the Golden Globes or to make a movie that causes a certain number of white people to see immigrants in a different way, right? I think the first time a lot of people spent time not doing their art to do politics. And I think a lot of people are gonna retreat to doing their art.
And then, you know, returning to the local is a big one, which Ezra was talking about a second ago. Local politics, I mean there. I would say a lot of people are, thinking about reorganizing, again, to build on Ezra's point, which is to say, we need a pro-democracy movement reimagined from the ground up. To be losing to the barbarian that is Donald Trump means that you are offering, frankly, diddly squat by comparison.
And I think there are gonna be very smart people like Ezra thinking about what does it mean to reorganize from the ground up a real pro-democracy movement that doesn't feel less appealing to people than fascism?
And finally, I would say rethinking. A lot of people, I think, feel liberated right now to truly be honest, radically honest about their own movements, about their own ideas, about the ways in which the pro-democracy cause doesn't really land with normie America, with millions of people who are not super political. I think there is a space in the ashes of the Democratic Party's loss in November to truly ask big questions and rethink deep assumptions.
And Ezra, Anand just referenced the organizing approach that you really helped launch in the first Trump term. That was really the cornerstone of how Indivisible got started when you published an organizing guide back in 2016, just after Trump's first election victory. And I know you published an updated version called Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, with some detailed strategies for the next two to three years. Any highlights that you want to talk about here and any changes from what you wrote in 2016?
Ezra: Well, I didn't write this in the guide, but I hope everybody is also picking up Anand's book, The Persuaders, which has an incredible set of recommendations for how we build, not just with people who agree with us, but people who don't agree with us. And I think we're successful over the next two years, which is what the strategy is built for. It's not a long-term solution for how do we solve all of the crises facing us. It's a guide for how we live to fight another day and make it through the ‘26 elections.
But a big part of that, as is covered so brilliantly in The Persuaders, is reaching out to people who aren't already in our coalition, people who didn't vote or people who even voted for Trump because they wanted lower prices on bread and eggs. But instead, they're getting the United States pulling out of the WHO and they're getting fluoride out of the water and they're getting tariffs that are going to raise their prices.
We have a responsibility to focus on building community locally and then identifying where we have leverage where can we actually have impact. This can't just be a movement of people who are activists because they like to call themselves activists, because they like to see pictures of themselves raising their fists — it's not just about that.
The reason why we build power is to affect change and so as we're organizing to build power we should identify what change can we reasonably actually bring about in the short term? How are we responding to the threats of this administration and this Congress in the short term? Because those are the questions that we have to answer. Those are the demanding questions in front of us right now.
Your governor says, “I'm not gonna issue birth certificates to Americans that are born today because Trump issued an unconstitutional executive order ending birthright citizenship.” The question in front of you right now in this moment is, what are you gonna do about it as a resident of that state?
If your governor hasn't affirmatively come out and said, “I am going to oppose this,” like we've seen from like a J.B. Pritzker in Illinois, you've got to ask yourself, how are you helping bring about the conditions of change that you want to see in your own community?
The new guide focuses on impact. It's not just about doing it because you feel that you got to do it. It's not just going to the gym because you feel like it's the right thing to do, you're trying to change something. And that change always, when we're talking about building people power, it starts from where you live.
There's a quote from Timothy Snyder that we used to start out one of the chapters of this new guide. And Timothy Snyder, for folks who don't know, he's this historian of authoritarianism, brilliant guy, writes a regular newsletter as well, wrote the book On Tyranny. But shortly after the election, he's interviewed about what people should do in response to Trump's reelection. And he said they want you to be alone. Nobody is going to fix this alone. That's not how this works.
That is so true and so important for us to internalize as we think about the next steps. You're not gonna solve this entire problem by yourself. You're gonna do it in your community. You're gonna solve your piece of it. So it starts with gathering locally and then you gotta use your brain. Identify where you can actually have impact and then focus on that piece of the puzzle. And if everybody else focuses on their piece of the puzzle, we'll actually accomplish something together.
Anand, I wanted to return to something you were talking about, which is about this effort at persuasion and trying to reinstill democracy. But how much of what we're seeing now in this country is due to much more fundamental structural problems that can't necessarily be addressed just by messaging alone? I mean, especially when you look at large parts of this country and large swaths of the demographics, voters, for example, without college degrees, whose wages have been stagnant or declining for decades now, while we've seen prices increase. And so you effectively have large swaths of America who are doing much worse than their parents' generation. And we're seeing that really being the base for a lot of Trump's support. And if you agree with that assessment, what needs to be done here beyond just messaging, but to try to address some of the structural conditions that are eating away at this country right now?
Anand: Yeah, it's a great question. And to be very clear, when I talk about persuasion, I'm not talking about messaging. Messaging is to persuasion what the pinky is to your two hands. It is certainly involved and it's a part of it. But it's arguably a small part. And the bigger part, maybe the thumbs, if we're sticking with this analogy, are what you actually want to do, and what you actually propose to do for people, communicating that to them is secondary and down the list.
So yes, before I wrote my book, Persuaders, I wrote a book called Winners Take All, my third book, which was arguing that this structural takeover of the United States by oligarchs, a word that has now become a little more well-known, was, as you say, the background condition for so much. It was explaining inequality, but more importantly, to your point, it was that inequality in turn had other effects. It was corroding trust, it was making people not see a link between effort and reward, it was making people feel the game is rigged, all those things.
There's a link between those books, which is why the same guy wrote them. One thing is explaining why, how the system, how the American dream has been stolen by people at the very top. And then the question that The Persuaders set out to answer is, with background conditions like that, How can a movement of humanity, of justice, of greater equality, of a bigger we, of democracy as against authoritarianism, how can such a movement actually win given those terrible background conditions?
There were a lot of recommendations in the book, as Ezra mentioned, but I will say when I look now, at the wreckage of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement more broadly in this moment, there are three very hard truths that we need to stare at in the face that are obstructing that persuasion mission, right? And I think we need to look at these very clearly.
Number one, The Democratic Party in particular, but I think the political left more broadly, has a donor problem. It is not a people's movement and people's party with a donor problem. It is a donor party with a people problem. And this is something that you can't really say in October before the election, everybody kinda tries to hold it together because fascism is clearly much worse. But at the end of the day, the Democratic Party and the political left more broadly is edited and gate-kept by billionaires, maybe not as vicious and maybe not as many as the Republicans have, but it is. And a Reid Hoffman Democratic Party is never going to be convincing to working-class people and is never going to come back against fascism.
Second, there is a cultural problem, particularly among progressives, which I write about in The Persuaders, of being in love with smallness. Okay, politics is not a record collection. It's not your personal record collection. It is not bad if more people find out about your favorite band. You want more people to find out about your favorite band in politics. And in too many progressive spaces, there is a kind of view that if you get more people in, people who say the wrong things are kind of not experts or not, steeped in your exact culture or way of looking at things, you're losing. That's actually called winning in politics. It's a giant cultural problem, a problem that Ezra has been a leader in pushing back against, but it's a giant problem, too big even for one movement called Indivisible.
And third, I would say there is a problem of the Democratic Party, and again, the left more broadly, becoming less and less tethered to the labor movement. In many countries, the political left goes under the banner of the Labor Party. It has become untethered from organized labor, which has been decimated anyway, and it has become too adjacent and enmeshed with academia. The Democratic Party today is not a labor party, and it is arguably an academia party in the way it sounds, its concepts, the way it comes off, its sneering quality to people who don't fully get it.
I do not think a donor-controlled, gatekeeping, academic-adjacent Democratic Party or political left is going to win. These are deep-seated cultural behaviors that need to be overthrown. And, frankly, everybody who was involved in losing to Trump all these times should probably retire early, and we probably need new voices. And I hope Ezra will be one of them.
There's some strong medicine there from Anand. And Ezra, I'm really interested to hear your thoughts and response to what we just heard from Anand on that recipe for trying to cure some of the ills here on the democratic side. But also I wanted to get your take on if you agree with the sort of structural conditions that are giving rise to this moment of distrust and cynicism, abandonment of a lot of our democratic ideals, and what can be done about it? What can individuals do to address some of these structural challenges?
Ezra: Look, I'm persuaded, Anand, and it's not just because I read your book. I think his diagnosis is largely correct. And also, I would, for my own political analysis, I am somewhat humble about the future direction of the Democratic Party and how we win in 2028, and how we can save democracy in the long term. I think these are fascinating questions and deeper thinkers like Anand should be digging in and providing some guidance to how we build that future we want to see together.
I am just a short-sighted, narrow-minded organizer right now looking at the threats at my doorstep. And so my focus is pretty darn short-term in its outlook. It is saying, we are going to have a proto-fascist administration and an enabling Congress. And the question in front of us is, does democracy survive and in what form?
And that's a question that's going to be answered in the coming days and weeks and months. And the outcome of these fights over those days and weeks and months are going to directly impact what kind of world we can build. But the answer to how do we push back against ending birthright citizenship or how do we push back against pardoning cop killers who assaulted the Capitol on January 6th or how do we push back against putting into power an anti-vax wackadoodle to head up the Department of Health and Human Services? Those are all short-term questions. And based on where you are, you might have a role in those fights or you might not.
When I think about the challenges in front of us right now, we've got this extremist government that just came into power, but how did they come into power?
You look around the world at every single Western democracy that held elections in 2024, and without exception, doesn't matter what their geography was, what the ideology of the party in power was, how long they had been in power, if you were a Western democracy that held an election in 2024, you lost power in 2024. You lost power. And that's because there is a global backlash against ruling parties in this post-Covid, post-inflation era that we're living in.
I think there needs to be a come-to-Jesus moment around the failure of Western democracies to actually provide for the people the capture by billionaire elites as Anand said, the perversion of democratic, lowercase-d democratic parties, and the infiltration by donors and corporate interests that distract and mislead those parties and ultimately lead to their political demise. These are all big problems but right now I want to make sure Americans who are born in California become American citizens full stop and my question is how do we fight back against that right now.
Now I do think there has been a lot of discussion post-election about how could we have won in 2024 — that's that's kind of what we're talking about here, we're facing this problem, how do we how do we win in 2024 and my answer that is 2024 is over. We lost. We need to recognize right now we are in a different political reality. And the main question of this political reality right now is not what is our big, grand, proactive vision for America in 2025. We don't have agenda-setting power. We actually can't even get a vote on bills that would make up that new reality. What we can do is choose how we respond to the agenda they put on the table. And how we respond will directly impact whether we even have the opportunity to put forward the vision like Anand is describing. And I want to get there. I want to get there. But we're not going to get there if Democrats instead engage in activities that make them look like Republicans-lite like they vote for an immigration bill this year.
The Laken Riley bill that has made its way through the Senate is going to the House for a vote. It is a MAGA messaging bill that directly targets marginalized communities, directly threatens DACA recipients, Dreamers. And Democrats don't have a firm position on it. And in the absence of saying, this is what we stand for, MAGA stands for that, pick a side, you know what voters are going to do?
They're going to pick the side that actually has a clear vision, even if they don't fully agree with that vision, because at least they can trust that when they say they're going to do something, they're damn well going to do it.
We have an email from Jordan in Berkeley who asks our guests, “How do you advise listeners, readers, and people in your lives to engage with daily media coverage of the Trump presidency?”
And Ezra, let me start with you on that one. What do you tell people about how to essentially imbibe information now at this point in time?
Ezra: Well, you gotta do some work at the outset to identify the writers, the journalists, the researchers who you actually do trust. And in my last newsletter, I actually sent out a survey to Indivisible groups asking who are the pro-democracy sources that you do read? Where do you get your information? So if folks are curious, they can find that over on the Indivisible website to access it. But it's not as simple as just tuning into the cable news at night or reading the San Francisco Chronicle in the afternoon. You got to do some work to identify where are the sources of information that you can indeed be informed by and actually trust or give you information that is useful for yourself. So I would start there.
All right. And Anand, what about you? What is your recommendation for media intake?
Anand: A few quick points. I mean, I think first of all, with the experience, with the benefit of the experience of the first go around of Trump, I would say your brain deserves as much curation as an art gallery gets. But we don't often treat our brains with that kind of dignity. And I think during a lot of the first Trump term, we just exposed our brains, which is again, a very delicate, sensitive organ, which not only takes in information, but also makes you keep breathing. We exposed this very delicate organ to a kind of uncurated fire hose of Trumpism. Every update, every twist, every development, every take, every outrage, every reaction to the outrage.
I think for a lot of people, it felt like you're not being a good citizen. if you weren't putting your brain in the fire hose. I think this time around with more maturity and distance, people can and should realize that they don't need to do that. That not doing that does not mean disengaging or not being a citizen. People were citizens in 1840 without an ability to be updated every second.
So I think you need to just, first of all, curate the experience of politics and choose. What updates are you getting and what are you not? What do you choose to react to and what are you not? When do you wanna read deeper long form stuff that actually helps you understand something versus not? I don't think citizenship means microsecond updates. I don't think it's the only way of being a citizen. So I think that would be one overall thing.
And then the other point I would make is, it's not just about what you choose to read or watch. I think we are living through a giant media transition that a lot of regular non-media folks out there don't understand or don't make sense of because it's not your industry. It's just something you consume.
There has been an oligarchic war against media. There's also just been disruption of business models, et cetera. There are so many fewer reporters than there were a generation ago. The business models are collapsing, but there are also new things like newsletters and podcasts and crowdfunded things and all kinds of emergent things. And I think you can't just deplore media, but not be part of building the next media.
So I and many other people who came up training in in legacy media and still do things like, you know, public radio shows, are also trying to feel through new forms of communicating with people that are more personal, you don't have to check with eight people whether you can use the word “demagogue” or not. And I would encourage people to really be part of, to support new media movements. Give them your patronage. Give them your attention, most of all. And maybe create some for yourself. This is going to be a moment that takes a different kind of media to cover and understand.
Absolutely. So many new trends, new developments, not just on the political side, but certainly on the media side, especially when you realize that so many people don't get their news from news sources. They get it from all sorts of social media sources.
We have another email question in from Greg in San Francisco who writes, “I feel like a lot of people spent too much time panicking during the first Trump term, maybe wasted energy. What do you think we shouldn't do that we did during the first Trump term?”
Ezra, maybe that's a question for you to start off. What are you making an effort not to do now in 2025 that maybe you did back in 2017 and maybe realized wasn't as worthwhile a use of your time and energy?
Ezra: Look, what a great question. Trump is, if nothing else, he is such a fantastic entertainer, right? Isn't he so good at commanding attention? And that is a superpower, given all of the possible forms of entertainment, from Netflix to TikTok to social media to just daily news to games and entertainment. There are so many ways to be entertained, and yet Trump is so good at focusing attention where he wants attention. And I think getting clearer on what is the information that you actually need to be focusing on and want to be focusing on now.
But from my point of view, as somebody who wants to organize to impact things in the near term, it's focusing on the information that is actually actionable. How do you actually look at what can be done to change some outcome in the world? And what is it going to take to achieve that outcome?
I think in 2017, there was just this wave of energy, this righteous anger and disappointment at the incoming Trump administration, the failure of the political system broadly to allow this guy to come into office. And the way that often manifested was just knee-jerk. Let's do a march. Let's do a big action. Start with a tactic. Let's show that we're out there.
And look, there is a place for marches. There is a place for public action. That is a tool in the tool belt. But I try my best to avoid starting with a tactic. I really think you should start with a goal. Start with what is it that you're trying to achieve? Maybe it's a goal about recruiting an elected candidate. Maybe it's a goal about getting a group together. Maybe it's a goal about pushing an existing elected at the state or the local or the federal level.
But figure out what is that thing that you and your group is trying to achieve. And then ask, what are the strategies that will help us achieve that goal? Do we need broad public support displayed to push that person? Do we need to crowdsource funds to encourage a candidate to run for office? What is it that is our strategy for getting there? And then at that point, you ask yourself, what are the tactics that help us implement that strategy which will help us achieve that goal ‘
So I do think, just to repeat, starting with what are we trying to achieve, what are the strategies that are going to help us achieve that, and then what are the tactics that will implement those strategies is the best way to avoid wasted energy and to actually spend your time doing things that actually have an impact.
Anand, what is your response to that question? Is there something you regret doing back in 2017 that you want to do differently now in 2025 at the start of this Trump term
Anand: Yeah, there are many things probably, but the biggest one I would say is that Trump creates what feels like a giant burden to react and to deplore. It almost feels, and I'm not just saying if you're an organization, like regular people, I think, feel some kind of moral obligation, you know, when he says immigrants are animals or when he says that women, a moderator of a debate has blood coming out of her wherever. Like, it feels like you should say something. And organizations feel they should say something. Governors and senators feel like they should say something, but also you feel like you should say something.
And while that instinct is noble, comes from the right place, what it led to the first time is a lot of us, to quote something I talk about a lot in The Persuaders, a lot of us having his conversation the whole time, right?
In a conversation, we are usually focused on what our position is in the conversation, what side of the debate we're taking. And we sometimes can be distracted from — oops, what conversation did we allow ourselves to be having in the first place?
So if Trump says immigrants are animals, then I would imagine a lot of listeners to this show might feel like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Immigrants are not animals. Well, first of all, ding, ding, ding, correct. You have taken the correct position in this debate. Immigrants are not in fact animals. However, You have unwittingly consented to enter a conversation about the animalness of immigrants. We are now not talking about healthcare. We are now not talking about the pro-democracy movement. We are now not talking about how our societies are more fun, more thrilling, more innovative when we have more people with dignity and education and justice. We are now talking about the things that we don't want to be talking about.
We spent those four years, if we look back, in his conversation most of the time. And his genius, maybe his supreme genius, is to make you have his conversation. And so I really urge people to think about that this time.
You know, some of the deploring needs to be done, some of the reacting needs to be done, but 80 percent of your energy and organization's energy and movement's energy should be prosecuting a case not defending against him, prosecuting an affirmative case for what kind of world you want to build, what kind of problems you want to solve, what the world looks like when you win. If that number is dipping below 80, I think we're losing.
We have another email in, from Lindsay in San Francisco, who writes, “Yes, the country is divided, but families are divided too. Any advice on how to talk to or not to family members and friends about politics these days?”
And Ezra, since you're on the organizing side of things, this is probably the first place some people might want to start with organizing, right? Your friends and your family, or maybe not. What is your response when people ask about whether or not we should be bringing up and how we should be bringing up politics or responding to politics within our close circles?
Ezra: Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on where is the person that you're talking to ideologically and with respect to current events. You know, I'm from rural Texas. My spouse's family is from Alabama. We've got a lot of folks as part of our close-knit community who are very far right or independent or who don't particularly care about politics at all.
And let me tell you, the vast majority of people just don't care about politics at all. That is where most people are. And for those people, you can engage them on what do they care about? What are they concerned about? Do they think both the Democrats and the Republicans are both corrupt? They're both feckless? That neither of them responds to the needs of the citizenry? What is it that floats their boat, that catches their fancy? And you can engage them on those grounds.
I think the assumption that we have made in building our strategy for the next two years is based in two basic ideas. One, I've already talked about, is the idea of constituent power, that organizing locally works and represents democracy.
But the other is a political analysis, and it's a political analysis of the agenda that we've seen part of in these first 24 hours. That Project 2025 agenda is not popular. And that's really important in a democracy, right? If Trump were pushing very cruel but popular ideas, we would be in a worse place. It would be harder to organize against that. But instead, he's pushing ideas that have 15, 20, 25, 30 percent popular support. These are not popular ideas.
So your family members, your friends, your neighbors who don't particularly care about politics, might even lean conservative. They don't lean conservative because they want to pardon January 6th protesters. They don't lean conservative because they want to give corporate handouts or give tax cuts to billionaires. That's not why they lean conservative. That's not why they're independent. That's not why they don't pay attention to politics.
So there's actually an opportunity in this moment to bring people along in their own political journey by listening to them and asking them, what do they care about? And do they see those interests reflected in this administration, in this Congress, in this policy that is rolling forward?
I don't think they're going to see their interest in that. And so that is an opportunity. That backlash is an opportunity. That sense of disappointment and betrayal is an opportunity for those of us looking to organize. We just got to welcome them in.
All right. And then Anand, for you, what are your thoughts about how to talk to family and friends about politics in such a divided time?
Anand: First of all, you know, I wrote a bunch about this in The Persuaders. And, you know, first of all, this is like, do this if you want to do this, right? I think, and that was an important kind of proviso that several activists and movement people I spoke to for the book said. Like, no one has to do any of this. You don't have to go convince your uncle that you have the right to exist as a trans person. Like, if you want to do that, God bless you. And like, you're helping the Republic. You also don't have to do that, okay?
That said there are a lot of remarkable people in all kinds of groups that are put upon, who have done that over the years and have moved this country forward so you know you don't have to do anything in particular but this country inevitably is going to need some people to get uncomfortable and some of that is in family relationships.
I'll just say one kind of error that i wrote about in the book talking to two people who think a lot about this work. One of them was a cult deprogrammer, the other one studied climate change denial and really started in his own family, became a climate change scientist, a scientist of cognition and how people receive disinformation on climate through his own dealings with his father and father-in-law.
And the biggest error is what smart people do. Maybe I would venture to say people in the Bay Area who might listen to an intelligent radio show in the middle of the day tend to do is fact check. Rebut lies with facts. Say, no, no, no, it's not true that X. It's not true that Y. The numbers are not right. That's not in fact what inflation is. It's not actually Biden who did that, whatever.
That's what we tend to do. That's what we're educated to do. That's what gets you good grades in school. Unfortunately, it does not work in the context of fighting people who have been manipulated by, to your earlier structural point, powerful actors and wealthy media oligarchs. And so what does work much more effectively is explaining to people who you have some love and affinity and trust with, the ways in which they might be being manipulated.
In other words, explaining and illuminating the con, the grift, more than fact checking the false belief. So one is, and the reason is that there’s two forces within people that vie for our minds.
One is the desire in a complex world to make easy sense. We all have that drive. The world is very complicated. Your eyes see millions of data points every second. You need some signal from the noise. Easy narratives — it's the immigrants doing it — those really work on the brain, right?
But there's a second human drive, which is the desire not to be anybody's dupe, not to be anybody's fool, not to be anybody's pawn. That's a very strong drive. If you have little kids, you will see these two drives even in little children.
And what I learned from these disinformation researchers is that what you have to do is not rebut the false beliefs, but play up the second force, the desire not to be anybody's dupe. Play that up against the first force, which is the desire for the world to make facile sense.
All right. Well, some practical advice there on maybe how to open up some conversations with folks within your family.
I want to end with some positive thoughts from you both. I know these can be trying times for those opposed to what Trump and his administration is doing. But Ezra, as an organizer, what are you seeing happening right now, kind of behind the scenes? Maybe it's different from what happened in the first Trump term. What are some of the stirrings of life here from those in opposition that's giving you some hope and that maybe you'd want to clue our listeners into?
Ezra: Yeah, we are seeing some strains of hope. Look, since the election, we've had about 210 new local Indivisible groups form and register. These are local volunteers bringing their friends, family members, colleagues, community together to say, hey, how do we organize to start pushing back? 210. These are local groups all around the country. That brings us to over 1,000 local Indivisible groups, all volunteer-led and started and run and operated by folks who are trying to do what they can where they are with what they've got.
I find that incredibly inspiring. And I know that this loss is very painful. And I'm not here to say everything is going to be OK. Not everything is going to be OK. A lot of damage is going to be done. But I would encourage people to reflect on how dark the times felt in 2016 and 2017 as we were headed into that Trump-led Republican trifecta, how dangerous that moment felt, and how hopeless it felt for many of us. In 2017, we prevented the demise of the Affordable Care Act. In 2018, we built the largest midterm margins in the history of the Republic to retake the House. In 2019, we pushed the Dems to impeach Trump, and in 2020, we defeated him. In early 2021, we built a Democratic trifecta that was able to pass the largest climate bill in history. In 2022, we prevented a supposedly inevitable red wave.
Organizing to push back against an unpopular authoritarian movement can indeed work. And the reason why we know it can indeed work is because in recent history, it worked. So I would just encourage folks to focus again on what you can do with the people around you in your community. When we all do that, we actually make change.
And Anand, how about you? Thoughts, hopes, and stirrings of life that you're seeing?
Anand: You know, the difficult thing about living in a Trump presidency is that you may be lulled into thinking that this is the protagonist in the American drama, that Donald Trump is the future, is driving history forward, and that you are living in opposition to it or in reaction to it. So allow me to just completely reframe that for a second.
Donald Trump is a classic authoritarian figure who rises amid backlash to social progress. The word “backlash” is very important. It's not called “frontlash.” It is not a movement of marching forward. It is a movement of reaction to what has been done, and who has done what has been done. The progressive cause, broadly defined. Movements that have allowed more of us to have more voice, to have more participation. Movements that have changed this country to allow a bigger we to be at the table, to be educated, to be in the workforce, to be participating in politics.
We have changed more in the status of women in the last several decades than in the previous few thousand years. We've changed more in the status of LGBT folks. We've changed more to allow America to be true to some of its founding commitments, finally brave enough to be what the founding documents promised. And as history has often shown, when you make progress like that, there are moments of pushback. There are moments of backlash. We are in one now. Sometimes they last a long time. Sometimes they don't. And so we have to remember Donald Trump is not steering the ship of state right now, even though he is the president. He is a barnacle on the hull of our progress. And we have to buck up, frankly.
And remember, we're going to have two-year and four-year periods where we don't have the presidency. But we have to remember we have the future. This is a revolt against the future and the future will prevail.
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