After the biggest day of protest of the second Trump presidency, when millions of people rallied in more than 1,300 cities and towns across the country, Ezra Levin addressed thousands of faithful progressive activists.
For the previous few months, as Trump reclaimed the White House and Democrats struggled to oppose him, the drumbeat of opposition had steadily grown. Protest was back in the air. Democrats were finding their way. And it was because of activists like them, Levin told the crew gathered on a weekly organizing call for Indivisible, the progressive movement that started during Trump’s first term.
The day of the Hands Off protests, 5 April, was an “inflection point” in the movement against Trump, the Indivisible co-founder and co-executive director said.
The pressure had mounted. Trump’s approval rating had tanked. Elon Musk, a frequent villain in protests and pushback, was in retreat, returning to his car company after its stock fell following sustained demonstrations and boycotts. A growing number of universities, law firms and private organizations had started pushing back on Trump’s agenda of retribution.
“Who are they going to be when democracy reasserts itself? They now have to think about that. All of these institutions, all of these leaders, are sticking their finger into the wind, and they’re trying to see which way the wind is blowing. And on Saturday, we changed the weather. That’s what we did together,” he said.
Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization with a national office and thousands of offshoots in cities and towns around the country, grew out of a Google Doc created by Levin and his wife, Leah Greenberg, when Trump won in 2016. At the time, the document suggested progressives use the Tea Party tactic of constituents pressuring their members of Congress to derail Trump’s agenda.
Now, more than eight years later, the organization has matured and formed a critical flank of the opposition, using its millions of members across the country to quickly spin up town halls, rallies, educational events and protests. Since Trump won in November, progressive activists have launched or restarted more than 1,200 chapters, reigniting a level of activity the organization hasn’t seen since the early days of Trump’s first term.
“If your theory of winning against the authoritarians is mass peaceful protest, what’s the first word? Mass. It’s got to be big,” Greenberg said during a recent Indivisible call. “It’s got to be overwhelming. And you don’t just snap your fingers and get there. You build. You build over time.”
The tactics meet new obstacles
Trump’s first term began with the massive Women’s March protest. His second term started with a question mark for the resistance: how would the adrift Democrats oppose a man they revile who shocked them by winning the popular vote? And how could the opposition be effective without elected power?
Those questions cleaved the party. Some suggested sitting back while the Republicans fought within their own ranks and Trump took it too far, like Democratic strategist James Carville, who wrote in the New York Times that Democrats should simply “roll over and play dead” for now.
Indivisible capitalized on the leadership vacuum. When Democrats were voting for Trump nominees or priorities, it was time to call or show up at their offices. When Democratic leaders showed some spine by holding protests or breaking filibuster records, they deserved praise.
This time, the organization had models for success – it helped block the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017, one of the first big wins for the left in the first Trump administration, by pressuring moderate Republicans at town halls to keep it.
David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University who studies political advocacy and strategy, said Indivisible created a “vessel for localized outrage”.
Trump was not an anomaly, the organization acknowledges, but an increasingly authoritarian threat, and his rise transformed the Republican party into a group of loyalists. It also acknowledged that “a lot of people are burned out on the idea of protesting and marching” after the first Trump term and the racial uprisings in 2020.
“Too often in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests instead of using them as part of a strategy. Let’s be clear: protest is a strategic tool to achieve your goal. It is not a form of self-expression or therapy,” the 2024 guide says.
They also had to reckon with Democrats’ serious losses in 2024. Some in Democratic circles were quick to blame groups like Indivisible for pushing Democrats too hard on issues like trans rights and the war in Gaza. This sense of indignation from the establishment toward the grassroots created a chasm in the party.
Indivisible members first started whipping up Democrats in February to form the party into a more uniform anti-Trump bloc, though that wasn’t taken kindly by some. Some Democratic lawmakers told Axios that they were upset at Indivisible and other groups, who should be calling Republicans instead.
“It’s been a constant theme of us saying: ‘Please call the Republicans,’” the representative Don Beyer said in February. In some places, local Indivisible groups are still turning up to pressure Democratic lawmakers, including the representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
Building a movement again required first aligning Democrats with a basic truth, at least in Indivisible’s eyes: the country is in a constitutional crisis that needs the opposition party to use every tool to block the Trump agenda.
One of the first big tests came when Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer helped pave the way for a Republican bill to keep the government open. Indivisible chapters across the country resoundingly called for him to be replaced as leader.
During weekly organizing calls since November led by Levin and Greenberg attended by thousands, questions hit on common themes: whether Trump would crack down on protests (he already has, but don’t give him more power by staying home), how to protest against the courts (many judges are lifetime appointments, so they’re not necessarily swayed by protests), impeachment (not a practical move right now) and the benefit of a proactive policy agenda right now (now is the time for defense, offense comes later).
Levin and Greenberg often allude to the experts who study authoritarians. Timothy Snyder, a professor and author of On Tyranny, is frequently cited, as are historian Heather Cox Richardson and Erica Chenoweth, who studies mass movements.
“These are the experts in how authoritarianism takes over. And what they tell us is, do not wait for somebody else to come and save you. If you wait for that, it will be too late,” Levin said. “When institutions fall, it is up to people to organize. That’s the tool we’ve got.”
The married couple who grew a movement
Co-directors Levin and Greenberg work from their Washington home, where they are also raising two young children, so their days include a constant stream of messages about work and household tasks.
In weekly calls with thousands of people across the group’s nationwide chapters, they sit shoulder to shoulder in front of the camera, a guitar beside them on the wall.
Both attended Carleton College in Minnesota, a private liberal arts school, but didn’t meet until they were working in Washington, in the early Obama years.
Greenberg is from Maryland, where politics is in the water, she told a group of new Indivisible chapter leaders on a recent call. She started organizing before she knew the word for it, running anti-sweatshop campaigns in middle school. Much of her professional work was in anti-human trafficking policy and advocacy. She also worked as a staffer and then on the campaign for the former representative Tom Perriello.
Levin was born and raised in rural Texas, where he described his family as low-income. He told the new leaders that he, like many people, was radicalized by the country’s healthcare system. He worked on anti-poverty policy and served as staff for the Texas representative Lloyd Doggett.
When Trump won in 2016, they, along with other former congressional staffers, wrote a guide that detailed how progressives could fight back using the Tea Party model (minus the racism and on very different policy lines) to get members of Congress to listen. Written in about two weeks, the guide flew around political and activist circles, crashing the Google doc with its virality.
They thought the most likely outcome of publishing the guide was losing their jobs; they didn’t intend to start an organization, much less one that’s grown this much. A footnote in the guide says: “PS: we’re doing this in our free time without coordination or support from our employers. We’re not starting an organization and we’re not selling anything.”
People started forming local groups, gathering in living rooms and basements and calling themselves Indivisible, before a national organization officially existed. In early January 2017, Levin and Greenberg wrote an op-ed in the New York Times and Levin went on Rachel Maddow’s show to talk about it. At that time, whenever a new Indivisible group would join, he would get an email. While he did the show, his pocket in his pocket was buzzing nonstop. “I could literally feel it growing in real time,” he said.
Levin is bombastic, prone to a full-throated characterization of what they’re up against. Trump and his allies are “malicious muppets”. When a Democratic elected official who voted against progressive principles comes up, he doesn’t hesitate to launch into a critique. Greenberg is more wonkish, laying out the steps it takes to achieve a broad opposition movement and peel off independents or moderate Republicans and responding to questions about immigration and deportation policies.
“We successfully get to the right combination of risk and caution between the two of us,” Greenberg said. “It’s been eight years. When we first started, we had to learn each other’s work personalities.”
They now also have to protect themselves and their family from the ire of the right, who have accused Levin and Greenberg of orchestrating criminal activity, paying protesters and astroturfing Trump opposition, in posts often laced with antisemitism.
Levin and Greenberg didn’t want to comment to the Guardian about safety threats, but told an organizing call that they expected this kind of response when they wrote the 2024 version of the Indivisible guide. “We knew what we were getting into. We knew this was an authoritarian regime,” Levin said. The fact the right is fighting them shows Indivisible is effective and that the right is scared of these widespread protests, he said.
“They think we’re the leaders of this. Look, we could be gone tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. There are thousands and thousands of people across the country who are leading this movement. They are up against much more than just little old me and Leah,” Levin said.
But on the weekly calls, which are public, Levin also often jokes that he looks forward to seeing clips of him and Greenberg circulating in rightwing media.
“Shoutout to the special people on the call who are Maga infiltrators,” he said on a call on 27 March. “Look, I know a lot of Trump supporters were looking for a lower price of eggs and bread, and they got this fascist nut in the White House. You’re probably looking for ways to organize, too. Welcome.”
The local chapters
Indivisible has nearly 2,000 active groups registered across the country. In the past six months, the number of new or reinstated chapters has kept growing considerably: 101 in January, 319 in February, 395 in March, down a bit to 261 in April.
“This is by far the biggest surge in new Indivisible groups forming since that initial wave in 2017 when the movement began,” Levin said.
In November, after Trump’s win, about 135,000 people joined a call hosted by a coalition of progressive groups, which Greenberg helped lead. After Indivisible released its revamped guide, 31,000 people joined a zoom to discuss it. In the months since then, Levin and Greenberg have drawn about 7,000 people weekly to their organizing calls.
The structure of local groups feeding into a national movement is common among social movements, including the movements for civil rights and migrant farmworkers, said Hahrie Han, a political science professor who studies organizing and collective action at Johns Hopkins University.
“The key is to develop national purpose, but local action,” Han said. “You need all the ships sailing in the same direction, obviously, otherwise it doesn’t add up to anything bigger. But you need people to feel like they’re independently strategizing and developing their own locus of control over the work that they do.”
Cyndi Greening, a Wisconsin retiree who fought for women’s rights and abortion access during her career and intended to spend her retirement gardening and flinting, spent the first couple months after Trump’s second victory in despair. But she started joining the weekly calls and learning what she could do with her chapter. Her first group meeting for Chippewa Valley Indivisible had 28 people; she now has more than 900 members.
Many local Indivisible leaders, including Greening, have been called “fake protesters” or “paid actors” by the right. They’ve also been falsely accused of approving violence to achieve their goals.
Levin described nonviolence as critical to the movement, saying: “There’s nothing that the administration would like to see more than some sort of violence in the streets that they can then use as an excuse to crack down on normal, everyday Americans organizing and protesting. So we embrace nonviolence as a hard-headed strategic matter.”
Lots of Indivisible chapters are run by older white women, partly because they were the people who hadn’t already been organizing before Trump’s first term, Greenberg said, which often raises questions. “We think older women organizing is amazing, because they’re bringing their skills, they’re bringing their resources, they’re bringing their experiences from their previous lives,” she said.
Mary Jane Meadows runs one of the longest-running Indivisible chapters, started after Trump’s 2016 win. The group, based in north-east Mississippi, provided a life raft in a deep-red part of the country, where people were initially scared to talk about their distaste for the president. She was not previously politically active.
The chapter was initially mostly white women, but the group has worked to diversify by reaching out to other organizations and holding events together, building trust along the way.
“We began on this journey never knowing where it would take us,” Meadows said. “And we found community and we found purpose and a voice. And now, our machine is ready to go into battle.”
Each week on the Indivisible calls, someone will ask what comes next. How can they get more people involved? When can they start round-the-clock sit-ins and general strikes and mass boycotts?
“Those require enormous amounts of planning, preparation, building of muscles, building of potential,” Greenberg told a recent group. “We should just be real about the fact that those are not things that people are capable of doing right now.”
Some also ask whether progressives should be crafting a policy agenda for when Democrats have more political power. Thinking about a policy platform can happen alongside pushing back on Trump, but it can’t be the sole focus.
For now, Levin and Greenberg say, the goal is to build a broad-based coalition that aligns behind a simple message of no to Trump. That group will not agree on everything – and that’s OK for now.
You have to make it to the next round of free and fair elections first, Levin said.
