Rebuilding Trust Takes Honesty, Courage, and Risk

What to keep in mind at No Kings tomorrow.

Tomorrow, millions of us will take to the streets. We’re saying no to authoritarianism, no to fascism, no to a police state.

But one of the greatest challenges in stopping this disaster? The elite—business and political—still don’t understand why Trump and MAGA are attractive to so many Americans.

Just look at this from The Bulwark, a “serious” outlet. They interview Graham Platner, one of the candidates primarying establishment Democrats on a bold economic platform. And here’s what the editor says about him:

“Objectively speaking, his analytical frame is wrong. The country is not in ‘worse straits’ than it has ever been… when it comes to economics, we are nowhere near the worse straits we’ve ever been in.”

You see the problem? Platner says people are struggling economically. The “serious” editor says he’s objectively wrong. Points to the data. Tells us we don’t understand how good we’ve got it.

This is the 80/20 problem. Twenty percent of America lives fairly normal lives. They make decent to obscene money. The top 10% account for 50% of all consumer spending. The other 80%? We worry. We struggle to pay bills. We’re worse off than our parents. Our kids will do worse than us. We die from lack of insurance. We put groceries on credit cards. We’re in dire straits.

The “serious” people reject this reality. Their bad math and condescension are making it impossible to pull back from this slide into dictatorship. Our neighbors are desperate and being radicalized, while the elite try to convince them things are fine. They are treating the symptom, not the disease.

For decades, Americans have been searching for change. We went to Reagan. Newt Gingrich. Got inspired by Howard Dean, Obama, Bernie, Trump. Gave Ross Perot 19% because he promised to shake things up.

This isn’t random. This pattern started when offshoring and privatization took hold in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Free markets, globalization, deindustrialization, extraction. We were told it would make us prosperous. It did—but only 20% of us got the goods. The rest got the shaft.

For forty years, we haven’t been able to build a coalition willing to admit this experiment failed. So every few years, people look for someone who promises to blow it all up. Every time, the system absorbs the challenge, waters it down, or waits it out.

Nothing changes. The extraction continues. The struggle gets worse.

Change on the scale we need happens in one of two ways: through an authoritarian dictator, or with massive, democratic supermajorities.

The New Deal: Democrats controlled over 70% of the House and Senate. They created Social Security, the TVA, rural electrification, the WPA and CCC—putting millions to work building infrastructure. All despite fierce opposition from business interests.

The Great Society: Democrats controlled roughly 67% of both chambers. Medicare and Medicaid. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. Federal funding for education massively expanded.

Real majorities. Supermajorities. That’s how you get transformation.

Those supermajorities built the foundation of American prosperity for two generations. The period from 1945 to 1975 was the greatest expansion of shared prosperity in American history. Workers’ wages rose with productivity. Home ownership soared. College was affordable.

That didn’t happen because of bipartisan compromise. It happened because one side had overwhelming power and used it decisively.

Right now, faith in normal democratic means is collapsing. That vacuum is pulling us down a dark, authoritarian path. The only democratic answer is to build that overwhelming power again.The crises we face require transformation on systemic scale.

Americans spend more than their entire income on housing, healthcare, education, transportation, childcare, and food. Congressional approval is at 16%. 83% think the system needs complete overhaul or major changes.

Does that sound like people hungry for moderation? We want bold, decisive action we can believe in.

This requires three things:

Recognizing the Crisis. The economic struggle, the social decline, the loss of our capacity to build—this isn’t a normal fluctuation. This threatens the foundation of American prosperity and democracy itself.

Building Political Power. Supermajorities at the federal level and in state legislatures. Without overwhelming democratic power, you can’t impeach corrupt justices, break up monopolies, or restructure the economy. The only other form of government strong enough for change at this scale is dictatorship. And that’s not the future we’re building.

Having the Courage to Use Power. When you have 70% of Congress, you don’t negotiate with the 30%. You pass what needs to pass.

Building a country united behind this vision isn’t a pipe dream if we offer a mission people can actually believe in. A movement cannot be built on simply being against Trump. We must be for something. Trump has Project 2025. Where is ours?

It would be impossible if the movement is simply against Trump or even authoritarianism. We have to be for something. Trump has Project 2025. Where’s ours? Where’s the mission for rebuilding this country from the foundation up?

Government as builder. Public pharmaceutical plants producing insulin at cost. Public banks offering free checking and fair loans. NASA reclaiming the innovation that made SpaceX possible.

Public competition in broken markets. When private companies create artificial scarcity to extract wealth, launch public alternatives that force them to compete. Government-produced generic drugs. Public banking. Public housing.

This isn’t socialism but really I don’t give a shit if it is. It’s competition owned by the people, through government, serving the public interest.

Trump just took a 10% stake in Intel, grabbed 15% of Nvidia and AMD’s China sales, and got a golden share in U.S. Steel. He’s bulldozing free-market taboos to bend industries toward his own power.

The lesson isn’t to shrink from that. It’s to do it right. Wield public power to break private monopolies. Put corporations in their goddamn place. Make them operate at OUR pleasure, not the other way around.

We need to take on a corrupted system head on. Impeach justices who declared presidents above the law. Prosecute Congress members trading on inside information. End elite impunity. Investigate and prosecute every person in the Epstein network—scale consequences with power.

I’m excited to be on the streets with my neighbors tomorrow. But think about what competent opposition leadership would be doing right now.

They’d be joining us. Jeffries, Schumer, Pelosi—they’d make sure the biggest mobilization against Trump knew Democratic leadership was standing with us. They’d help articulate demands. They’d connect this energy to a strategy for winning.

Their absence is a failure to lead.

And here’s the hard truth: defeating Trump in 2028 won’t fix this. Winning the House in 2026 won’t fix this. Not with the current Democratic leadership.

We can’t expect them to take on a broken economic system, a corrupted Supreme Court, and Wall Street billionaires when they can’t even reform their own party.

They won’t. Because leaders who think the fight is just about saving the ACA and stopping Trump are wrong. They’re wrong for this moment. They’re wrong for America.

To build the supermajorities we need, we need a different party. To get that party, we need to beat the current iteration. And to do that, we need to support the people stepping up to challenge them.

That work is already happening. Graham Platner is running for Senate in Maine. Saikat Chakrabarti is primarying Nancy Pelosi—he turned out 800 people eight months before the primary. Kat Abughazaleh is taking on the establishment. Justin Pearson in Memphis. Abdul El-Sayed. Donavan McKinney challenging Shri Thanedar. Angela Gonzales-Torres taking on Jimmy Gomez.

These aren’t symbolic campaigns. They’re running on the kind of bold economic platform that can eclipse the culture wars. And they’re not running alone—they’re organizing as a unit, coordinating around a shared governing plan, which you can read here: “How to Beat MAGA in 2026, 2028 and Beyond”

But here’s what has to happen next: Progressive Democrats already in office need to support these challengers. We’re seeing sparks of it—Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib endorsed Donavan McKinney. But it’s not nearly enough. Bernie is getting there, but he still won’t endorse a challenger like Saikat against the old guard. AOC electrifies audiences but won’t back these campaigns. If they won’t put their full political capital behind a movement to take on the Democratic leaders who aren’t built for this fight, then they’re choosing the status quo.

We need them to lead or get out of the way.

The people marching Saturday need to become the people funding these campaigns on Monday. Find the primary challengers in your district. Make the establishment know their jobs aren’t safe. Demand that progressive leaders already in office support these challenges or explain why they’re protecting the people blocking change.

This isn’t about restoration. It’s about transformation. We’re not going back to 2015 or 1995. We’re demanding our nation be returned to the people. Our government returned to us, to serve us. Markets and corporations operating at our pleasure—not extracting our wealth while we struggle to survive.

That’s how you build supermajorities. One primary at a time.

The future won’t make itself. We will build it, or it won’t be built at all.