The nationwide June 14 No Kings Day protests, with more than 5 million participants in 2,100 locations, was the largest demonstration of opposition yet to the twice impeached president’s authoritarian agenda since he returned to the White House in January. But the growing anti-Trump protest movement on its own cannot stop the president’s and Republican Party’s unpopular militarized mass deportations, reckless imposition of tariffs and the slashing of the nation’s social safety net programs to give massive tax cuts to the rich.
Many Americans who oppose Trump’s policies, including those who voted for him last November, have little confidence in the Democratic Party leadership’s ability to mount effective opposition to a president, who in recent multiple public opinion polls has hit a record low approval rating in his second term.
In a recent commentary, Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org, asserts that “the Democratic party will need a very different orientation to regain support from the millions of working-class voters whose non-voting or defection to Trump last fall put him back in the White House.” Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Solomon, who while encouraged by the momentum and activism of millions of Trump opponents, maintains that the Democrats must end their addiction to corporate campaign funding and adopt a bold, progressive economic policy agenda in order to have any chance to defeat the Trump-GOP authoritarian power grab.
NORMAN SOLOMON: We really need to see No Kings Day as a start, as simply a springboard to what needs to happen, which is intensive grassroots organizing. Virtually every neighborhood should be a place where people are canvassed, where there are events, where there is an upsurge of activism and activity and organizing both electorally and outside the electoral system to build the kind of opposition to this truly fascistic regime called the Trump administration — what’s really imperative. Some people listening may feel understandably: “Well, I’m listening to a discussion about how the Democratic party should step up and so forth.”
But really, shouldn’t we all just be talking about how bad Trump is? Well, Trump is atrocious. He’s the worst president in any of our lifetimes, the most dangerous president in any of our lifetimes. But the fact is that No Kings Day was organized without the Democratic party. If we’d left it to the leading Democrats in the House and the Senate and the Democratic National Committee, nothing like that would’ve happened this year at all.
Nothing close to it. So that’s a tip-off that we can’t depend on any Democratic party institution to do what needs to be done. We’ve got to do that ourselves. And the contradiction, the simultaneous truth is that when the election rolls around next year, the midterms, the only electoral instrument to take the House away from these dangerous people like Mike Johnson, who are running the House of Representatives, the only electoral vehicle to gin up, to gun, up to ride, to defeat the Republicans next year in the congressional elections will be the Democratic party.
So we’re in a position of needing to challenge the party to expose its often craven complicity in some cases with the Trump agenda serving Wall Street in a way that doesn’t help mobilize voters for the Democrats, that’s all true. We have to challenge that. We need to acknowledge it. At the same time, we’re going to need the Democratic party candidates to defeat Republicans in 2026.
SCOTT HARRIS: Norman, what are the key ingredients in your view to make the Democratic party more responsive to voters? To respond to the crises, the economic crises that many families across the country are experiencing and have been experiencing for many, many years under Republican and Democratic presidents. There is a sea change that you say is essential. What are the issues that need to be articulated by Democratic candidates and the party itself to make people excited about policies that could improve their lives and make ends meet? I mean, people can’t pay for healthcare. There’s trouble paying for college. There’s so many areas of life in America where people are falling behind the experience of their own parents.
NORMAN SOLOMON: For the first time in memory, the working class vote went more to Republicans last fall and that tells us that, as Bernie Sanders said, “It shouldn’t surprise us when the working class abandons the Democratic party after the Democratic party abandoned the working class.” So the only way to defeat the phony faux pseudo populism of the Republican party is not with the neoliberal models of watered down liberal formulas and corporate power with a few populist bits of rhetoric. That’s not going to do it. It hasn’t worked. What will do it potentially is to have genuine, progressive populism that doesn’t kick down, that doesn’t blame immigrants. It kicks up at the people who are exploiting the workers and who are making gazillions of dollars of excess profits while people, as you know, are struggling to pay their rent and send their kids to college and all the rest of it with the healthcare system here just in such a disastrous shape for so many people.
So I think part of the necessity is for us to organize, push and demand that the Democratic party have a truly progressive populist agenda. That means that we need absolutely drastically progressive taxation. We need to tax the wealthy in corporations at a very high rate, cut the military budget substantially. I don’t call it a defense budget, very little has to do with genuine defense, and we need to have a real regulatory structure to break up these huge corporations, to have a genuine antitrust department in the Justice Department, to have a real Justice Department that fights for people instead of corporations.
This kind of progressive populism is a real possibility if we can organize effectively and demand it effectively of the Democratic party. That’s the programmatic part. Procedurally, we need to stop being so respectful of Democrats in Congress. There is a tendency when progressives see someone who has a D after their name in the House or the Senate, and they do some things we like, then we defer to them. We are almost obsequious sometimes. We thank them excessively when they’re doing some terrible things, when they don’t really fight the Trump agenda, where they support wars, where they vote for these huge military budgets. So it’s about a progressive populist program and it’s about activism from the grassroots because that’s how social change happens.
For more information, visit Roots Action at rootsaction.org and Norman Solomon’s website at normansolomon.com.
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