Jon Wiener: From The Nation, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: the crisis in LA around ICE enforcement, and the coming campaign around the country to stop the Medicaid cuts. Ai-jen Poo has our analysis; she’s a labor organizer and strategist, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and President of Care in Action. But first: the largest single day of protest in American history, and what comes next. Leah Greenberg of Indivisible will comment on ‘No Kings’ — in a minute.
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We’re still thinking about Saturday’s ‘No Kings’ protests, where 5 million people showed up. It seems to have been the largest single day of political protest in American history, and it also seems like it may have been a turning point. The protest was called by the group Indivisible, along with, in the beginning, 16 partner organizations. For comment and analysis of what happened and what’s next, we turn to Leah Greenberg. She’s co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. Last time we spoke here was the beginning of February, right after Trump took the oath of office, when she and Ezra Levin had just published a piece in The Nation on the Indivisible plan to “harness grassroots energy and hold “Democratic leaders accountable.” Leah Greenberg, welcome back.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
JW: Well, Leah, you did it. Indivisible gets the credit for launching the biggest single day of protest in American history; for providing a hub for more than a hundred allied groups; for setting the strategy and the tone. It was a day of cheerful defiance. It was a wonderful day. Thank you for all of that.
LG: It was an incredible day – and thank you. And also, a lot of people are being very generous with credit right now, but I’ve just got to recognize that there was an extraordinary coalition and movement-wide effort to make this moment pivotal. And fundamentally, all of this is dependent on thousands and thousands of people raising their hands in communities all over the country and putting in the sweat and the tears to make it possible. So thank you. It truly is a collective effort.
JW: And how many events did you end up with on the schedule?
LG: Around 2,150.
JW: 2,150. And how many partner groups? I said there were 16 in the original announcement in May.
LG: I think we were up to around 250 by the time of the weekend. And it’s a great coalition, it’s folks from across the civil rights community, our friends and organized labor veterans organizations, faith groups, as well as many of the big progressive movement mobilizers, so really a big and broad coalition.
JW: And where did you spend Saturday?
LG: I was in Philadelphia. We had a flagship event up there with livestream nationally, along with folks like Reverend Barber, with Martin Luther King III and Andrea King, with Ruwa Romman, with Randy Weingarten from American Federation of Teachers – just an incredible line of up there.
JW: How many people came to the Philadelphia event?
LG: We had an estimate of about a hundred thousand.
JW: Oh man. Monday night, the Monday night Indivisible call, Ezra said, “it is our duty to celebrate. Celebration is an act of defiance.” Did you do your duty after the success of Saturday?
LG: I celebrated initially by sleeping a lot, and I’m probably going to keep doing that for a couple of days. But I do feel a great deal of pride and a great deal of appreciation for everyone across the country who made this possible, because I do believe that this is a turning point.
JW: Of course, it was even more remarkable because the start of the day was worse than anyone could have imagined. ‘No Kings’ day began, just to remind people, Saturday morning, with the political assassination of a leading liberal, the top Democrat in the Minnesota State House, killed in their home in suburban Minneapolis, early Saturday morning: Melissa Hortman and her husband. The assassin, I guess we call them the ‘alleged’ assassin, was a Trump voter and an anti-abortion activist.
The Minnesota State Patrol on Saturday morning ask that people in the state stay away from the No Kings rallies in Minnesota out of “an abundance of caution.” And Governor Tim Walz canceled his planned speech at the No Kings rally, which had been scheduled for the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. So, so what to do?
The founders of Indivisible Twin Cities, Rebecca Larson and Lisa Herbs said they thought about canceling for ‘about 15 seconds’ – and then they announced, ‘we are proceeding with the No Kings event at the State Capitol. We think it’s important to gather peacefully in the face of this horror. We will mourn and mark our determination for a peaceful, just, democratic future.’
And while Tim Walz canceled, a huge crowd showed up at the state capitol — this is my hometown of St. Paul – maybe, they say, 80,000 people. Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison gave a great fighting speech.
Obviously afterwards it was clear that the decision to go ahead was the right one. But at the time, I wonder if that was clear to you. Tell us about your thinking that morning when you first heard the news.
LG: Well, I’m just going to be honest. I was not part of the conversations on that, and it’s always going to be a complicated set of calls that folks have to make, especially in a situation where somebody like that is at large. What I can say is we’re all really heartened by and appreciate the courage of the folks who made the decision for the Twin Cities to go forward.
JW: Big picture here: when you first called for a June 14th demonstration, the invitation came out back on May 6th. Of course there were no national guardsmen in LA. There were no Marines in the streets of LA. And then Trump sent the National Guard and the Marines, against, of course, the wishes of the mayor, against the governor, against the chief of police. Trump’s goal was to intimidate his critics with a giant display of military force, illegal of course. I wonder if you think that affected the plans for No Kings protests? Were there any protests canceled because Trump was mobilizing the military against protests in the streets of Los Angeles?
LG: On the contrary, we had about 500 new protests planned in the week between when Trump made that announcement and ‘No Kings’, and we saw attendance and RSVP surge. People were outraged, people were horrified, and people instinctively understand that when a bully is threatening, you cannot back down. We have a right to protest, and if somebody’s threats can prevent us from exercising that right, then we no longer functionally have a right to protest. And I think people instinctively got that.
JW: On May 5th, when you called for this National Day of Defiance on June 14th, the original plan from the beginning was “the actions will take place during Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington DC. Instead of allowing this military parade to be the center of gravity, activists will make action everywhere else the story of America that day.” So that was always the plan, to challenge Trump’s military parade on his birthday with demonstrations everywhere else. And the demonstrations everywhere else were unprecedented in size and scale. But how did you manage to get his birthday parade to be such a pathetic flop?
LG: [Laughter] That was a surprise to us too. We thought that this intervention was going to be important in part because we did assume that they were capable of having a pretty good parade. And that was a surprise. And when we first started getting the reports of – we had reason to think that there was not going to be a huge crowd. There were plenty of signs in advance that Washington DC was not filling up the way that it does for a marquee event, but certainly the actual optics and the visible sense of depression on the stage with Donald Trump and his cabinet members, that was not something that I can take credit for myself.
JW: Okay. As Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times last week, “what really made No Kings feel like a potential turning point was the juxtaposition with Trump’s anemic parade in Washington. Those videos showed tanks squeaking down the street in front of viewing stands that were more than half empty.” The Wall Street Journal described the crowd as “sparse and subdued.” A display that was meant to be bombastic and menacing instead looked pathetic. So your original idea back on May 6th for this juxtaposition turned out to be a terrific idea.
LG: Well, any moment like this, when you’re organizing, there’s just going to be an enormous number of unknowns. There’s going to be a lot you can’t plan for. You’ve got to try and make the best calls you can with the information that’s available to you. And fundamentally, we saw this as a moment where there was potential one way or another, and we just did our best to build the coalition that could take advantage of it, and fundamentally, it all, it came through.
JW: The other part of the big picture here is a completely different idea of organizing protest. My whole life, we thought the mass march was the pinnacle of protest. The March on Washington was sort of the gold standard that you aim for: Martin Luther King in 1963, the Vietnam mobilization in 1969, the Women’s March in 2017. But Indivisible has been developing a radically different strategy: decentralized resistance. Hundreds of protests, then thousands, simultaneously, in every state. This is really a huge shift in strategy and tactics. It turns out to be a great one.
LG: Well, I would say that it’s actually a culmination of sub-trends, right? Because I think when we think of the Women’s March, we think of the massive mobilization in DC, but there were hundreds of sister marches around the country as well. And so, really throughout the first Trump term and deepening and broadening this term, we have been cultivating the ability to mobilize in communities across the country. Now, the scope of what we’re seeing this time around is growing. I think the biggest mobilizations that we saw during the first Trump term were in the neighborhood of 600 to 700 protests in different places on a single day. ‘Hands Off’ was around 1300. ‘No Kings’ was over 2100. What we’re seeing is that the resistance is everywhere and that it is organizing in ways that signal both the ability to project a large group of people in one place, but also deepen capacity to organize in many, many places, including places that we, or at least Democrats, often write off as red.
JW: The big question of course, is what’s next? Monday night, Indivisible had a call about what’s next. How many people joined that call?
LG: I believe we came in around 60,000 with the call and the streaming platforms.
JW: So you’ve given us this escalating chart from a few hundred, to 700, 1300, now 2000. What’s next? Just more and bigger?
LG: Well, I think we’ve got to think about it not just in terms of bigger, but in terms of developing capacities, in terms of bringing new people, in terms of forging and deepening community connections, right? Because protest is a tactic, it should be applied within the context of a strategy.
Now, the strategy here has been really oriented for the first six months that we’ve been in operation, this Trump term, it’s been oriented around puncturing the aura of inevitability. It’s been oriented around trying to make people feel less like Donald Trump is inevitably going to consolidate power. And more like there is a massive pro-democracy movement that they can be part of, whether that is organizing locally to push their elected officials or whether that is as consumers within a boycott, or whether that is in relation to their faith institution, their higher education institution, there – all the different places in life where we have leverage and power.
So that’s been what we have been doing so far, but we also have to deepen those ties locally.
And so the next thing that we’re really pushing on is local popular education about the moment that we’re in, about what authoritarianism is and how it functions and how movements build to oppose it. We’re going to be asking folks, get the people who came out to that march and come together for a house meeting, come together for a community training. Let’s all collectively deepen our understanding of what’s going on and how we’re going to push back together. And we see that as an opportunity both to have more alignment across the movement around what we’re dealing with, but also to strengthen those community ties. Because fundamentally, it’s great if people come out to a march, but we need them in ongoing relationship with a sustainable local organizing home if we’re going to build the capacity that we need.
JW: Puncturing Trump’s attempt to project an image of inevitability was the theme of Paul Krugman’s column about why the No Kings protest may have been a turning point. Let me just quote him a little bit here. “The defeat of Trump will depend to a large extent on which side ordinary people believe will win. If Trump looks unstoppable, resistance will wither away, and he will win. If on the other hand, he appears weak, resistance will grow, and American democracy will survive.” So what we saw on Saturday was more than just the juxtaposition of a pathetic military parade for Trump’s birthday and a massive wave of enthusiastic protests. We also saw, Krugman writes, “a body blow to Trump’s image of invincibility in a demonstration that millions of Americans are willing to stand up for democracy.”
And then he says, “this isn’t the end of Trump’s assault on democracy. It isn’t even the beginning of the end, but it may well be the end of the beginning. Trump spent his first 6 months in office trying to steamroller over all opposition and to create the impression that resistance is futile.” We now have proven that he is a failure at that. Invincible and its ally group showed Saturday that the resistance is spreading and becoming stronger.
What’s Trump going to do about this? He’s going to become more aggressive as he becomes more desperate. He’s going to try to intimidate his political opponents. He’s going to increase his efforts to suppress dissent, including using force. And that’s a challenge that now we have to get ready for.
LG: That’s exactly right. What we know about authoritarians is that when they feel weak, they escalate. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that what we saw immediately after the No Kings marches was Donald Trump on Truth Social announcing that he’s applying additional aggressive ICE-style raids in blue cities around the country, very obviously attempting to escalate so that he can further create this immigration authoritarianism nexus and justify further deployments of troops in this ongoing quest to project strength. And also, what I think we have shown is there are in fact regular people everywhere in the country who are deeply opposed to what is going on.
And one thing that I would note on that is that I actually think as somebody who has been in conversation with regular people all over the country about this and organizing with them for the last six months, I think there’s this kind of sense that everybody gave up in the same pace, in the same level.
And my experience was that actually what was really shocking about the last six months was the degree of elite collapse in relation to regular people. Regular people were not confused about whether they supported this or opposed this, back in January, there were a lot of people knocking down our doors being like, ‘what do we do?’ ‘’What’s the plan?’ ‘How do we organize?’
What was really different than 2017 though was the number of business leaders, higher education leaders, people at nonprofits that have ostensible lofty missions and that make massive $500,000 salaries — to uphold some part of the norms of democracy. Those folks, let alone political opposition, we can talk about the Democrats, those places were quiet.
For us, it’s this moment where regular people are saying, ‘Hey, we need you to have the courage that we have.’ We need you to put your careers on the line the way that we are because we have so many people in this movement who are risking their jobs or risking their own personal wellbeing in order to organize in really red areas, in places where there’s a very real and active threat. And we need to see elites have the same level of courage.
JW: So, thanks to the work of Indivisible and its 250 allied groups, the tide may be turning. Trump is weaker today, and we are a lot stronger. Leah Greenberg is co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, the lead organizer of the No Kings protest on Saturday, the largest one day protest in American history. Leah, thank you for all your work – and thanks for talking with us today.
LG: Thank you.
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Jon Wiener: We want to talk about the immediate crisis in LA around ICE enforcement, and about the coming campaign around the country to stop the Medicaid cuts. For that, we turn to Ai-jen Poo. She’s a labor organizer and strategist, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and President of Care in Action. Her writing’s been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Glamor in Cosmopolitan. She’s author of the book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. She’s been a guest on CBS, PBS and MSNBC. She went to the 2018 Golden Globe Awards with Meryl Streep as part of the launch of #TimesUp, which raised tens of millions to support victims of sexual harassment. Also, she’s won a MacArthur Genius Grant. Ai-jen, welcome to the program.
Ai-jen Poo: Thank you so much, Jon. Happy to talk to you.
JW: Of course the immediate crisis of the last two weeks has been about Trump sending the National Guard to LA, and then the Marines, despite the opposition of the mayor and the Governor and the chief of police, ostensibly to help ICE round up and then deport undocumented people at workplaces. They’ve targeted garment workers sewing downtown; day laborers outside Home Depots in Paramount, people washing cars in Culver City, picking strawberries in Oxnard, people with kids in school and sometimes their own parents at home. Trump said he was going to deport millions of people – and now he’s trying. We need to start with your perspective on all this.
AP: Well, where to begin? I think the fact that ICE is going in with masks and military gear and disrupting workplaces across all of these essential sectors in such violent, terrifying ways should be alarming to every American. And I think what you’re seeing in Los Angeles with the protests is neighbors, coworkers, family members coming together to say ‘this is not okay,’ and wanting to stand with their neighbors and coworkers to protect each other, which is what people in LA and all across this country have been doing. LA has just been through a devastating traumatic fire, and what kept that city resilient and functioning was neighbors coming together to support each other. And that is what is happening right now in the streets of Los Angeles. And it is horrifying that this administration is using the force of the military against our own people in this country.
One thing to say is I’m so grateful for the peaceful protesters who are standing up on the right side of history for their neighbors and their coworkers. And I just want to recognize David Huerta, president of the SEIU local in Los Angeles, who has spent his life negotiating for better pay, better working conditions on the part of low wage workers across Los Angeles, and he has won. And that is what labor leaders do – stand up for the rights and the human dignity of workers. And for that, he was violently arrested, detained, and is now facing federal charges — for protecting the human rights of workers and exercising his First Amendment rights. I mean, this should have every American quite alarmed. And I believe that there’s no sector of our economy or our society who will not be harmed by these attacks on people, on workers, on families. I think it’s time for us to come together.
JW: I want to emphasize here that the ICE raids are not popular. Not many people support the idea of deporting working people with families on the grounds that they came here without documentation years ago, or decades ago. The latest poll from The Washington Post found 37% approve of Trump’s immigration policies. The overall approval ratings for Trump in the recent AP poll: 39% approve; 60% disapprove. So we are the majority on this.
AP: We absolutely are. And just as somebody who has spent my life advocating on behalf of caregivers, immigrants are a third of the care workforce in our country, the backbone of our ability to care for our loved ones, our children, our disabled loved ones, our older loved ones. They rely on immigrant care every day. And I think most Americans realize that we are connected, we are interdependent. And what these raids are showing is that we are actually in the same communities, the same workplaces, and I think we all knew that inherently. And these approval ratings–the more people realize what’s actually happening, the truth of what is happening to our workplaces and our communities–we will see those approval ratings continue to decline and we will see more people come together to show up to protect their neighbors and coworkers.
JW: Now, at the beginning of these raids, a lot of us argued this is a transparent effort to distract attention from Trump’s real work, which is passing this tax cut for the rich and cutting everything for everybody else. Seems to be a little more serious than that after the first two weeks, but we don’t want to lose track of what is going on in Washington. The budget bill passed by the House Republicans, by the narrowest possible margin, is stuck in the Senate Committee right now. Trump’s budget is also not popular. Among Independents, the voting group, 52% disapprove, 18% approve of Trump’s budget. And the heart of this bill, the biggest cuts, are the cuts to Medicaid. The bill’s sponsors insist it does not cut Medicaid.
AP: Oh, well, that is just not true. If you look at the bill text, it proposes cuts to Medicaid over 700 billion. Cuts to Medicaid. And for those who may not know what Medicaid is, and it is fair that you wouldn’t, because it often has a different name in every state. In Wisconsin it’s called Badger Care. In Connecticut it’s called Husky Care. But it’s all supported through the same federal Medicaid funding stream. and that is what this bill proposes to cut. And that funding stream covers healthcare for almost 80 million Americans.
And it also is the only way that millions of Americans have access to long-term care, care for older adults and people with disabilities, especially in the home. There’s a lot of us who assume that Medicare covers long-term care, and it doesn’t. So if you can’t afford to pay a hundred thousand dollars per year for a room in a nursing home for your aging parent or your spouse who’s chronically ill, your only option is oftentimes to completely impoverish yourself so you can be eligible for Medicaid, that will help you pay for the essential lifeline of care that you need. And that is what is at stake.
A lot of people don’t realize that 70% of the home care workforce is funded through Medicaid funds, which means, and this data point just came out this week, that over 2.6 million jobs are at risk if these cuts go through. And those are jobs that deliver care, essential supports to ensure dignity and quality of life for the people we love who raised us, who cared for us. This is cruelty and lives are on the line – jobs, lives care.
This is a matter of life and death for every single community in this country, especially rural and small-town communities that were nursing homes and communities, for example, are almost entirely dependent on Medicaid funds to keep their doors open. Now, these are also some of the communities who either didn’t vote in the last election or voted for this administration and this majority in Congress. And I think that this is an opportunity to really engage everyone in what is at stake in our choices to vote or to not vote.
JW: You’ve talked about the 70 million people who did not vote in the 60% of Trump voters who are not MAGA. How do we reach them? You’ve had a lot of experience doing this over the last decade or so. What have you learned and what do we need to do right now?
AP: Caregiving is a universal issue in America. It is not partisan. It is an issue – every single one of us has someone in our lives who we care for or who’s cared for us, who we are worried about how they’re going to get the support for dignified quality of life that they deserve. And some communities are aging quickly, especially in rural America where there’s very little economic opportunity and working age adults have left those communities and there’s really just an older population there who needs care. Medicaid is really the lifeline to support these communities when it comes to care. And I’ve always said that this is not a partisan issue and that has been borne out in I’ve done this work over 30 years. I can go into any community in America and it is universal. There’s so many people who are caring for others who need support, and these programs are underfunded as it is.
Further cuts will be devastating. And so all we have to do is listen. All we have to do is talk to people. All we have to do is listen to what is required to care for the people we love from the perspective of the communities that we’re engaging. And we will see that there’s this universal need and that Medicaid is what we have right now, and we’ve got to protect it.
And so I think that this is an opportunity for organizing. It is a unifying issue. It is not partisan. You don’t have to be progressive. You don’t have to believe anything. You just have to be somebody who cares for other people and has loved ones who you are responsible for caring for. And this I believe is a great opportunity for organizing and for building the kind of movement, the majoritarian movement we need to see in this country to come together to strengthen our democracy for the long term.
JW: Let’s talk a little bit about the tactics here, especially the group that you lead: I call it ‘our CIA’: Care in Action. Care in Action has actually been working on this for a while now.
AP: Yes. Care In Action specifically tries to talk to infrequent voters of color, and we have a focus in the southeast because there’s very little people, organizers, who are knocking on doors and engaging voters there about their real life economic concerns and needs. And I will tell you, there is not a kitchen table in America where people are not talking about the high cost of care for their families. 60% of American workers earn less than $60,000 per year, and the average cost of childcare costs $11,000 a year per child. The average cost of a private room in a nursing home over a hundred thousand dollars per year. The numbers are not adding up for working class families. And when you talk to voters about these issues, they see that.
And what we’re offering at Care in Action and across the care ecosystem is essentially the opportunity to come together to vote for care, for a future where we are supported as caregivers, as parents, to take care of our loved ones while we work – policies like Paid Family and Medical Leave. We’re one of the only countries in the world that has no federal paid family medical leave program, which means that one in four moms has to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. That is what is happening in our country.
And so when we talk to people, when we show up in communities – and it’s neighbor to neighbor, we are not parachuting in from outside. It is caregivers and parents and care workers knocking on the doors of their neighbors and listening. And what we’re finding is that care resonates, care matters and care could be our future if we all seize this moment to have our voices heard.
JW: Just talking politics about this campaign, who is taking the lead here, and what is the timeframe for a campaign to stop the cuts?
AP: Well, there’s hundreds of organizations in motion working to protect Medicaid, and it’s everyone from veteran caregiver organizations to organizations like Little Lobbyists who represent parents of children with complex health issues, to disability rights advocates, to pediatricians; I mean, it’s really the most beautiful broad coalition that is in motion right now. And we are all working to try to stop these cuts in the Senate, which is where this bill is currently being debated. The leadership of the Senate would like to vote on this bill before July 4th, and then it will go back to try to reconcile the House and the Senate bills. So really right now is the time. It’s already passed through the House and we have time to stop it in the Senate.
And so make sure that you have your voices heard, that you register with your Senate delegation to tell them what is at stake for you and your communities, the hospitals, the community health centers, the nursing homes that are so essential in all of our communities. It really is about our future.
JW: In the couple minutes left here, could I just ask you to tell us a little bit about your own background, how you got into this work? Working with caregivers is an extremely challenging kind of organizing, probably the worst paid, the most isolated, the hardest to reach. What path took you to the National Domestic Workers Alliance?
AP: I’m the product of a village of caregivers, including my grandparents who helped to raise me. And I know that each and every caregiver, each and every adult who helped to raise me, poured into me and made me who I am, and we are all products of care. And to have an issue that is so universal, and so human, I think is incredibly powerful. It has the ability to unify us across geography, race, class, gender. It really is what makes us human, Caregivers, no matter what, despite being undervalued, despite the fact that the median income of a home care worker is $22,000 per year in the United States of America in 2025, these care workers show up every single day dedicated to the dignity and quality of life of the people we love. I find that to be so inspiring and so humanizing, and if we could become a country that values that work for what it is truly worth, that to me is the aspiration, that’s the North Star, and I think it’s possible.
JW: “The Medicaid cuts are a lifetime opportunity for us to reach the 70 million people who did not vote, and the 60% of Trump voters who are not MAGA. We’ve got to put everything we have into this campaign. Stop the cuts, join us in a coalition of dignity and belonging. We’ve got about six months to do it.” That’s what Ai-jen Poo says. She’s director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and President of Care in Action. I call it ‘our CIA.’ You can support Care in Action by going to their website, careinaction.us. That’s dot u.s. Ai-jen, thank you for all your work – and thanks for talking with us today.
AP: Thank you, Jon.
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