Power Isn't Given. It's Taken.

Defeating MAGA requires transforming the Democratic Party first. That means confronting its leadership, not playing nice.

By Corbin Trent — Born in East Tennessee to a family of union workers, civil rights fighters, and draft dodgers. I’ve been flush, I’ve been broke. I’ve run a food truck, flipped houses, and helped launch Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats, and AOC’s campaign. I’ve seen both parties walk away from working people—and I’ve been fighting ever since to bring power back where it belongs. Now I’m using my voice and my story to call bullshit on the system—and help build something better.

David Hogg, the DNC, and the Illusion of Boldness

David Hogg is a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. He’s also running a PAC to primary sitting Democrats. That’s pissed off a lot of people—mostly party insiders, elected officials, and the usual curmudgeons who think being in the DNC means you owe blind loyalty to incumbents. But his choices are also frustrating folks who should be cheering him on. I’m one of them.

I co-founded Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. I was AOC’s strategist and comms director when she occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office with the Sunrise Movement. I believe in primary challenges. I know what they can do. But they must be bold. Strategic. Relentless. They have to mean something.

And Hogg’s efforts don’t feel like that. They feel like branding. His PAC, Leaders We Deserve, is only targeting “safe blue” Democrats—no leadership, no gatekeepers, no real confrontation. He’s even said he wants to make Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House.

In other words, he wants to change the party without challenging the people running it. Maybe he’s afraid that taking on leadership means risking defeat. And sure, that risk is real. But if you’re not willing to fight, you’ve already lost.

If the Democratic Party is failing to meet the moment—and it is—then its leadership is responsible. Jeffries, like Pelosi before him, represents everything broken about today’s Democratic Party: careerist, lawyerly, performative, elite, and aimless. He offers no vision beyond “not Trump.” No mission. No urgency. Just better manners while the country burns.

And it’s not just Jeffries. Look at the rest of party leadership: Clark, Aguilar, Lieu, Neguse, Schumer, Durbin, Klobuchar, Warner, Warren, Baldwin. The only near exception is Patty Murray, who taught parenting classes before getting into politics in the ’80s. The rest are lawyers. Almost all went to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia. They’ve been in government forever. They recycle the same tired answers to crises they’ve never had to live through.

They know how to draft bills but not how to build power. And it shows.

In the 118th Congress, 94% of House members have a college degree. Two-thirds have graduate degrees. Half the Senate are lawyers. In contrast, just 38% of Americans have a bachelors. Only 0.4% are lawyers. Yet, Congress is full of them. And that matters.

They’ve transformed government into a place only they understand—a maze of legalese and procedures. Bills are thousands of pages long. Ideas that could be explained in plain English drown in “notwithstanding the foregoing” and “subsection (b)(3)(ii).” The system isn’t complicated by accident. It was built by people trained to operate in courtrooms and bureaucracies—not to build bridges, fix schools, or keep the lights on.

It’s the same thing that happened in factories when the MBAs and consultants pushed out the people who knew how the machines ran. They buried common sense under spreadsheets and jargon. The result? Dysfunction. Waste. Stagnation. That’s Congress now.

But it wasn’t always this way. In the 1940s, Congress looked more like the country. In 1945, just 56% of House members and 75% of Senators had college degrees. There were more veterans. More union members. More people who’d worked in the trades, served their communities, or had a job before politics. Today, working-class people make up over half the country, but only a sliver of Congress.

If Congress had zero women or zero Black members, we'd call it a crisis of representation. But when it's missing half the workforce—the folks without degrees, without connections, without safety nets—we act like that's just how government works. Like struggle doesn't qualify you to lead.

Look, you can't expect working-class and middle-class policies from a Congress that's never lived those lives. It's not that lawyers and Ivy Leaguers are evil. They just haven't made decisions with $14 in the bank. Haven't skipped medicine to make rent. Haven't prayed their kid doesn't get sick before payday.

When we elect people who've been insulated from everyday American struggle, we get laws built for their reality—not ours. The complexity isn't a bug. It's a feature. You can’t expect representation for working people if there are no working people in the room.

When we launched Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, we didn’t just endorse candidates—we went out and recruited them. But not from the usual places. We weren’t looking for people who wanted to be in politics. In fact, we saw that as a red flag.

We believed the best leaders were too busy holding their communities together to be chasing political careers. They were running small businesses, working jobs, raising families, showing up at union meetings, church potlucks, and town halls. They had roots. They had responsibilities. And they had to be drafted—because they weren’t doing it for ambition. They were doing it because something was broken, and they were willing to make the sacrifice to fix it.

That was the bet: that we could find those people, convince them it was worth it, and back them with a team, a mission, and a map. That’s what separates a movement from a brand. A brand follows candidates. A movement recruits them—and gives them something to belong to.

But we didn’t finish the job. We brought in great candidates, but we failed to bind them together. We didn’t build the deep infrastructure, shared commitments, or living mission they needed to weather the storm of Washington. Our platform leaned heavily on the 2016 Bernie campaign, but it wasn’t forged into something durable and unified. So, they went in alone. There was no real Squad. Some got isolated. Some got co-opted. Some just got tired. That’s on us.

Other orgs hit the same wall. Indivisible turned resistance energy into local chapters but struggled to scale a national strategy. Run for Something got young people on the ballot, but never connected them to a bigger mission. Leaders We Deserve is following the same path. It sounds bold. But without a plan, without confrontation, without a mission—it risks becoming just another brand.

Meanwhile, MAGA has a mission. A vile one—but a mission nonetheless. Build the wall. Ban Muslims. Kill the administrative state. Privatize everything. It’s crystal clear. Specific. Simple enough to organize around. That’s how they took over the courts. The bureaucracy. The conversation. That’s how they are rewriting the rules.

We don’t need to mimic them. But we need something just as legible. Just as transformational and bold. Just as audacious. That’s what Mission for America is.

It’s not a slogan. It’s a step-by-step plan to rebuild America’s economy, restore public power, and take back the future. Public housing. Public transit. Public healthcare that competes directly with private insurance. National industrial policy. A clean energy buildout. Government that doesn’t just regulate markets—but enters them, competes, and delivers.

It’s also a recruitment tool. For engineers. For builders. For caregivers. For the people who keep things running, not just the ones who write memos about it. We don’t need more lawyers of color or LGBTQ+ Ivy Leaguers. We need more people who’ve budgeted for groceries, fought with insurance companies, and waited on hold with the VA. Representation isn’t just about identity, it’s about lived experience and whether you’ve ever had to fix your own car.

That’s why Saikat Chakrabarti is running against Nancy Pelosi. Not as a stunt. Not to make a statement. To win. To put a real alternative on the ballot. To show that change doesn’t wait for permission. That we don’t have to whisper about leadership failure. We can say it. Run on it. And build something better.

His campaign is a Bat Signal—to anyone ready to challenge the status quo, organize with purpose, and fight for something bigger than a brand. He’s not waiting. He’s moving. That’s what leadership looks like.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not enough to win elections. We have to win power and use it. That takes more than candidates. It takes coalitions. Commitments. A living mission people can join, contribute to, and carry.

You can’t fix Congress without talking about who’s missing. You can’t represent the people if you’re terrified of confronting power. You can’t change a party by trying not to offend it.

If David Hogg wants help build a better party, he’s got a choice to make.

You can’t lead without a fight. And can’t win without picking the right ones.