8,000 Stand at No Kings In Deep Red East TN

I went to two No Kings events in East TN yesterday.

Yesterday, I went to two No Kings rally in deep red East Tennessee. One in Knoxville the other an hour away in the rural town of Loudon. The Knoxville event grew from 5,000 last time to an estimated 8,000 people yesterday. Hundreds turned out in Loudon, a tiny little burg in the foothills of the Appalachians that you’ve never heard about.

That might not sound like much if you live in New York or D.C., but in East Tennessee, that’s a roar.

I went live on TikTok and interviewed dozens of people. Democrats, independents, even a couple of “anti-King” Republicans. Three sentiments came through loud and clear. Trump and this administration are overstepping their authority. People’s lives aren’t any better as a result. And most tragically, that there’s a leadership vacuum. The folks I spoke with don’t see anyone coordinating this energy, no one offering a vision that matches the scale of what they’re hungry for.

Yesterday, millions marched across the country say no to Trump but they didn’t have a vision to say yes to. They had nothing positive to demand.

The energy is real, it’s massive, and right now it’s going absolutely nowhere.

The Energy Exists. It’s Being Wasted.

When I talked to people in Loudon and Knoxville, I heard worries about grandkids who will never be able to own a home. People worried about healthcare bankruptcy. They weren’t shouting about left or right. They were talking about the daily math of survival.

And when I asked who they thought could lead them, I heard a jumble of names. Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, James Talarico, AOC, Bernie Sanders. Often from the same people. Any of these, please. There was just this sense of hoping that someone, anyone, could step up.

And that’s the problem. We haven’t done the work to differentiate the establishment Democrats, the Gavin Newsoms and Pete Buttigiegs who still believe in the institutions that have stopped believing in us, from a radically different vision. Something more akin to AOC and Bernie Sanders, but really more akin to FDR. A vision that says the system itself is the problem, not just who’s managing it.

That energy, all that rage and hope I saw in those crowds, it’s looking for somewhere to go. And the people offering to lead it are telling them the destination is back to normal. Back to the system that was already broken before Trump ever announced. Meanwhile millions of people are standing in the street saying they want something fundamentally different.

We Tried Heroes. It Doesn’t Work.

We’ve seen this before. Obama was supposed to be the one. Hope and change. And what did we get? Wall Street bailouts while families lost their homes. A healthcare plan written by the insurance industry. Not because Obama was weak, but because one person cannot transform a system designed to absorb resistance.

Trump promised to drain the swamp and his voters believed him because they felt the same betrayal. He just redirected the flow. Different billionaires, same extraction, same system.

This is what happens when we wait for a savior. The energy gets channeled into a personality, the system absorbs it, and nothing fundamental changes.

So when people ask me which Democratic candidate I’m excited about for 2028, I tell them that’s the wrong question. Waiting for the next presidential cycle is how we waste this moment. By 2028 this energy will have dissipated or been redirected into another dead end candidate.

The question is can the emerging progressive leaders unify now, take over the Democratic Party as a vehicle, and offer a vision that explicitly rejects the status quo.

The Damage Makes Transformation Inevitable

And here’s the thing that makes this moment different. This administration has taken a chainsaw to our institutions. They’ve gutted the federal workforce. They’ve installed loyalists and cronies into nearly every position of power they can reach. They’ve further corrupted a Supreme Court that didn’t need much of a push to become a rubber stamp.

To even get back to normal would be a Herculean task. You’d have to rebuild broken institutions, remove loyalists hell-bent on making sure government can’t function, and try to restore faith in institutions that were already damaged. That’s years of exhausting work.

So with that level of effort sitting in front of us, it would be insane to use it to rebuild something that already proved it doesn’t work. Why would you spend a decade reconstructing a system that got us here in the first place?

We should take this moment, this crisis, and turn it into something beautiful. That’s what we’ve done before. The Great Depression gave us the New Deal. World War II gave us an economic transformation. The Civil War gave us a chance at reconstruction, even if we botched it. We’ve taken moments of devastation and turned them into opportunities for real progress.

That opportunity is sitting here right now, waiting to be harnessed. The institutions are already broken. The work of rebuilding is unavoidable. The only question is whether we rebuild the same failed system or build something that actually works.

The Leaders Exist. They’re Just Not Working Together.

Here’s what I know from being in AOC’s first primary campaign, from helping cofound Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. You don’t have to take over the entire party to scare the shit out of them. But scaring them isn’t enough anymore. We need to take the party from those that corrupted it.

And the candidates to do it already exist. Saikat Chakrabarti in SF. Zohran Mamdani in NYC. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. AOC in the Bronx. Bernie in Vermont. Graham Platner in Maine. James Talarico in Texas. Angela Gonzales-Torres in LA. Justin Pearson in Memphis. Donavan McKinney in Detroit. Kat Abughazaleh in Chicago.

There are others. The ones who get it. The ones who understand that the system is working exactly as designed and that design needs to be demolished.

I know what you’re thinking. Anytime we talk about standing up to right-wing movements and countering with something bold and different, you hear the same things. The right has Fox News. The right is cohesive in their messaging. The right has decades of institutional formation. The right has churches. The right has this, the right has that. It’s always about what they’ve got that we don’t.

But here’s what we have. We have popular ideas. We have a history, a party capable of transforming this country and giving us some of the most amazing things we’ve got as a nation. We have a group of rock stars all across this nation running on big, bold ideas. You’re right, we don’t have a lot of the same assets. But we have different assets and we’re just not using them well.

What all these candidates have in common is they’re fighting their local battles. What they’re not doing is coordinating. Not enough. They’re not running as a unified movement. They’re not standing shoulder to shoulder with a shared vision and shared infrastructure. They’re fighting the same war on different battlefields and that’s why we keep losing.

Why the Party Must Be Captured

We need a weapon and we don’t have time to forge a new one. I get it, the current Democratic Party isn’t going to cut it. Hell, I wrote about the idea of taking over the Libertarian Party as a political vehicle. We simply don’t have time.

The Democratic Party has ballot access in all 50 states. It has name recognition with millions of voters who will never vote third party. It has small dollar donor networks, infrastructure, institutional legitimacy. Building all that from scratch takes decades. We don’t have decades. The oligarchy is consolidating power right now while we’re arguing about whether to work within the system or outside it.

The answer is take the system and turn it into something else. The party is a vehicle. We take it back to it’s roots pointing it towards transformation. Not reform. Not better management. Transformation.

This means primarying incumbent Democrats who still believe in the system. This means building power in state parties. This means candidates running as a slate, supporting each other, pooling resources, coordinating strategy. Bernie should be standing shoulder to shoulder at these fight oligarchy tours with dozens of candidates, many of them running in primaries against the very Democratic leadership that’s failed us. That’s what this movement can look like. Bringing people together is hard. Egos, personalities, and campaign resource scarcity stand in the way. It’s both frighting and it’s kinda unnatural for politicians to come together during a campaign but that happening, however unlikely, is our best hope.

What They Must Stand For

The vision that unifies can’t be better neoliberalism or compassionate capitalism or let’s regulate the systems that are actively extracting wealth from working people. It has to be an explicit rejection.

Privatization failed.

Pumping trillions into this healthcare system isn’t working and pumping in more won’t help.

We handed housing to developers and got an affordability crisis. We handed healthcare to insurers and got bankruptcy. We handed infrastructure to contractors and watched it crumble. We handed space exploration to Musk and Bezos and lost ownership of our own discoveries. Every time we’ve been told the public sector can’t build, what we’ve really lost is accountability. When you privatize, the money goes dark. The books close. The public loses its sightline into its own future.

The people in Loudon, TN weren’t protesting for better subsidies to private equity. They know in their bones the system has stopped delivering. So the message can’t be we’ll manage this better. It has to be we’re taking back public ownership of our collective future. We’re building again. Housing, healthcare, infrastructure, education. We’re doing it ourselves, through our government, and the books will be open.

That’s the line in the sand. That’s what separates management from transformation.

The Missing Element Has Always Been Unity

I’m nobody. I get it. I’m just a guy with a Substack. But I’ve been in the trenches. I’ve seen wins turn into failures. And the missing element in every battle I’ve been in was unity. Unity at the top, unity in the middle, unity at the bottom.

We fantasize about general strikes and mass movements but we can’t even get our leaders to coordinate with each other.

If candidates have time to call donors and ask for money, they have time to call other candidates and get on the same page. If organizations like Justice Democrats, Working Families Party, Way to Win, Leaders We Deserve are all fighting the same fight, why aren’t they pooling resources and running joint campaigns?

The answer is turf or ego or different theories of change. But they have to be put aside. Last time we were fighting fascism we brought women and people of color into the workforce not because sexism and racism had been defeated but because the moment called for unity. This moment does as well. Alone, none of these organizations, none of these candidates, can move fast enough to stop the authoritarian train barreling down on us.

We’ve got to find ways to come together. And if our leaders can’t do it, if they can’t lead by example and show us how to unify, then I don’t see how we’re going to do it with our neighbors.

What Needs to Happen Now

If you’re a candidate reading this, reach out to other candidates. Not just for endorsements. For coordination. For a shared platform. For running as a movement. You’re fighting the same fight. Please for the love of god, link up.

If you’re a campaign manager or staffer, get the conversations started. Your candidate has time to call donors, they have time to call other campaigns. Make it happen.

If you work at one of these organizations, understand that alone you cannot win fast enough. Coordinate with other organizations. Pool resources. Stop competing for the same donors and start building an actual coalition.

If you’re just a person who showed up to a rally, get this message out. Share it. Demand that the leaders you’re supporting start working together. Push them. Because they’re not going to do it on their own unless we make them.

The energy exists. Hundreds of millions of us are ready. The candidates exist. The organizations exist. The only thing missing is unity of purpose and coordination of action.

This Has to Happen in 2025 and 2026

Not 2028. Not when the perfect presidential candidate emerges. Now.

The midterms are the target. Take seats, take power, primary incumbents who still believe in a system that’s already dead. Build the movement that can actually challenge oligarchy instead of managing its worst excesses. When a story runs that New York City Council member Chi Ossé is considering a primary challenge against Hakeem Jeffries the movement and the candidates leading it should draft him.

If we and our leaders cannot reform and rebuild the Democratic Party we cannot reform and rebuild our system. One is easier and less well defended than the other. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s necessary.

If you are in politics in any way and your plan is based in 2028 you need a new plan.

By 2028 the presidential cycle will suck all the oxygen out of the room. The energy I saw in Loudon and Knoxville will either be channeled into transformation or it’ll dissipate into another round of disappointment.

This is the window.

No Kings. No Saviors. Unity.

The people I talked to at those rallies weren’t looking for a king. They were looking for co-conspirators. For leadership that’s accountable, coordinated, and committed to building something new.

They were looking for someone to say out loud what they already know. The system is broken by design. Privatization, deindustrialization, and globalization have failed. We’re taking back ownership of our nation’s assets and it’s future.

But it only works if the leaders unify. If the candidates coordinate. If the organizations stop fighting over crumbs and start building a machine capable of taking power.

We’ve spent too long worshiping the symbols of a country that no longer works. It’s time to become a country that builds again. Together.

No kings. No saviors. Just us, working together.

Corbin Trent