"Trump plans to sabotage the midterms, so we're going to need a plan to stop him"

As soon as he took office again, Trump started signaling that he intends to interfere with the midterms. There are too many examples to cover everything, so here are some of the lowlights from just the last year:             

March 2025: An executive order trying to unilaterally overhaul election administration.

July 2025: Ordered Texas to gerrymander five new Republican House seats.

August 2025: An executive order to "get rid of" mail-in ballots ahead of the midterms.

January 2026: Told the House GOP "they should cancel the election.” He regretted not seizing the voting machines after 2020, and then later that month he sent goons to raid Fulton County's election hub.

February 2026: Said Republicans should "nationalize" elections. The next day Steve Bannon said, "You're damn right we're gonna have ICE surround the polls come November," and urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

March 2026: Issues an executive order to create state-by-state citizen lists and orders USPS to deliver mail ballots only to federally approved names. Installed election denier Dan Bishop to run DOJ's "election-integrity" efforts.

April 2026: Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for racial gerrymanders in former Confederate states. Trump team threatens to force blue states to redraw their own maps.

June 2026: Raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a voter-registration nonprofit.

Even as he meets resistance from the courts and some blue states, he's clearly not backing down. So what's our plan?

We need to get into election protection formation -- let’s talk about how. For the last 75 weeks or so, Leah and I have hosted What's the Plan, our live Q&A with the Indivisible movement. It’s a unique space: thousands of people from across the country and the world, together every week, working through the strategy and tactics of organizing against fascism. When we’re at our best, we’re cutting through the noise, demystifying some process or institution, and focusing on what we all can actually do.

If Indivisibles are going to plan together for how we organize in defense of the midterms, the place to have that conversation is What’s the Plan. We don’t want to shortchange the big topic, so this week we’re trying something a bit different. This Thursday at 3pm ET, we'll be joined by Corey Dukes from Protect Democracy, an ally in this fight.

We're asking you to do a few minutes of pre-reading so the discussion is as fruitful as possible.

We're inviting you to submit a question ahead of time here. I’ll go through all these Wednesday night to help us steer the conversation before turning it over to live Q&A.

If we pull this off, you'll come away with a better understanding of how this sabotage threat actually works, and the steps you and your local group can take to blunt it. 

As a movement, we have to learn, grow, and act together, so I hope you can join us Thursday (or catch the podcast Friday!). But whatever your schedule, there are plenty of ways this week to organize your community in defense of democracy -- read on!

In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

 

Shut down Trump’s corrupt slush fund

 

Trump’s second term has been marked by levels of corruption unprecedented in US history. But the regime’s creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund for the president to dole out to insurrectionists and other political allies is perhaps the most corrupt, lawless act of all. 

In the United States, Congress has the power of the purse. Only they have the constitutional authority to apportion funds. If a president can raid the treasury through sham lawsuits and dole out our taxpayer dollars as they choose, that’s an end-run around our constitutional order that makes the executive not a coequal branch of government, but an autocratic one.

Congress cannot accept this usurpation of its power and subversion of our constitutional order. There are already several pieces of legislation in Congress that could block this money and create guardrails around federal settlement funds. 

Every Member of Congress, regardless of party, should be opposed to this egregious overreach, and the good news is, members of both parties are. But we need to demand they go beyond concerned statements and actually act.  The slush fund not only threatens to reward people who attempted to overturn a free and fair election, it incentivizes Trump’s rabid supporters to try to help him do so again. 

And there’s no reason to expect this to be a one-time gambit. If Congress doesn’t act, Trump could sue his own administration again for some other imagined slight, order his underlings to settle, and draw new funds for whatever program or patronage system he wants to implement. 

But while the slush fund is unimaginably dangerous, it’s equally unpopular.  Polling shows that even a majority of Republican voters oppose it. The fund is so unpopular that it spurred a backlash on Capitol Hill and caused the GOP’s reconciliation bill to stall in the Senate last week. Vulnerable Republicans in Congress know that Trump’s corruption will be a liability in the midterms -- we need to keep up the pressure and make them act, if not for loyalty to their oaths of office, then in a desperate bid for political survival. 

Congress will be back in session on Monday. Let’s make sure when they return, their inboxes are flooded with demands to shut down Trump’s corrupt slush fund.

Email your Members of Congress

If you’ve already emailed your Members of Congress, you can drive the message home by calling as well. Click here to call your representative's office and then contact your senators here.

In solidarity,
Indivisible Team

P.S. -- Today, a federal judge temporarily halted payouts while legal challenges against the fund move through the courts. This is good news, but we still need Congress to act, and we need every Member of Congress on the record supporting or opposing the Trump regime’s corruption.

Email your Members of Congress and tell them to block Trump’s corrupt slush fund for insurrectionists.

 

Fight back against ICE detention camps

Indivisibles,

Tomorrow, [Saturday, April 25], Indivisibles across the country are joining our partners at Detention Watch Network to demand an end to ICE detention warehouses. We’re showing up for peaceful protests, rallies, and vigils outside detention facilities, on street corners, and in front of city halls and courthouses in hundreds of communities.

For months, the Trump regime has been quietly expanding their detention capacity by converting warehouses into detention camps. This is a key part of their plan to deport more than one million people every year. In the process, immigrants will be separated from their families and lawyers, kept in horrific, inhumane conditions, and face increased likelihood of abuse and death.

The detention camps are moral abominations -- but they’re not inevitable. Local organizers have already prevented thirteen of these warehouses from being converted into detention camps and with your help we can prevent even more. 

We all have a role to play in the fight to end the warehousing of human beings and the criminalization of immigration. You can get started by joining the Communities Not Cages National Day of Action.

There are hundreds of events tomorrow, and no matter where you live, there’s an action you can take to fight back against ICE detention camps: 

1️⃣ Join a Communities Not Cages event near you. Stand in solidarity with immigrant communities, connect with local groups and activists leading this fight, and call on your local officials to use every tool to oppose the camps. 

2️⃣ Demand action from Congress. Email your Members of Congress and tell them to publicly oppose any new warehouses or detention centers and block any federal funding that would be used to build, renovate, or operate these facilities.

3️⃣ Check out our resource page for more ways to get involved. From Know Your Rights guides and recorded trainings to toolkits and an ICE warehouse tracker created by our partners, this page has everything you need to join the fight against Trump’s ICE detention camps. 

We hope you’ll join us tomorrow and stand in solidarity with immigrant communities across the country, and after the national day of action we’ll be in touch with more ways to continue organizing against the regime’s detention camps.

In solidarity,
Indivisible Team

A core principle behind all Indivisible events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. No weapons are permitted under any circumstances.

 

In Solidarity

 

Since we sent the below email yesterday, federal agents have killed another person in Minneapolis. The video of them tackling 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti to the ground before opening fire is absolutely horrific. Everything about ICE and Border Patrol’s brutal invasion of our communities is horrific.  It is increasingly clear that stripping the Department of Homeland Security down to the studs -- ICE, Border Patrol, all of it -- is the minimum we must do when we regain power. But we can’t afford to wait that long to rein in these agencies. Senators have a choice next week to vote for a DHS funding bill that gives ICE and Border Patrol more money to brutalize our neighbors or to say ENOUGH. We must demand our senators -- especially our Democratic senators -- refuse to give ICE and Border Patrol one more penny of taxpayer money or vote for any funding bill that doesn’t get these thugs the &$*# out of our cities.  Since senate offices are closed today, we’re asking you to email your senators and demand they use their vote this week to rein in ICE and CBP death squads. Then make a call. If your senators’ voicemails are full, call back on Monday. We can’t go on like this. It’s time for our leaders to step up and protect their constituents. And if they won’t, we’re going to elect new leaders.  In mourning and solidarity,  Indivisible Team ---- ORIGINAL MESSAGE ---- ICE is terrorizing our communities, violating our constitutional rights, and killing innocent people -- and the House just voted to give them more money. Yesterday, the House passed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for ICE. That increase comes with no meaningful restrictions or accountability measures to rein in ICE and Border Patrol. We’re demanding Congress use the appropriations process to end ICE and Border Patrol’s lawlessness. This bill doesn’t just fall short -- it increases the funding for their brutality. But this fight isn’t over.  The Senate will vote on the DHS appropriations bill next week -- and it cannot pass without Democratic votes. If you’re ready to take action, call your senators and demand they vote no on increased funding for ICE and Border Patrol. Call Your Senators >>   Everything wrong with the DHS funding bill ❌ The bill increases funding for ICE. If this bill passes, ICE will receive $400 million more for detention and $370 million more for its enforcement budget compared to last year. That’s on top of the $170 billion allocated by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill for his mass deportation machine. ICE is using taxpayer dollars to kill people, invade homes without warrants, and threaten peaceful protestors. The last thing we should be doing is giving them more money to enable their cruelty.  ❌ The reforms included in the bill are completely inadequate. The bill allocates funding for body cameras, officer training, and the DHS Inspector General’s Office, but these measures fall far short of what we need to actually protect our communities. We’ve already seen what ICE thugs are willing to do on camera -- one filmed the killing of Renee Good on his own cellphone. And there’s no reason to think that giving the Trump regime more money to investigate itself will stop the violence unfolding in our streets.  ❌ Actual restrictions on ICE were left out. Congress can end Border Patrol deployments to our cities; restrict ICE and Border Patrol’s dragnet operations, racial profiling, and mass surveillance; and prevent these agencies from stealing funds from other programs to run their mass deportation machine. All of these provisions would have real impact on the ground, but none of them were included in this bill.  There’s still time to act The DHS funding bill will move to the Senate where we expect a vote next week. Reminder: the bill needs 60 votes to pass, which means Democrats have real leverage here. But they won’t use it unless we force them to.  Atrociously, 7 House Democrats already voted yes on this bill (list here), and Chuck Schumer is not publicly whipping Senate Democrats to unify in opposition. With a vote on this bill coming next week, we need to act fast and be loud:  1️⃣ Call your senators today and demand they vote no on the DHS funding bill. After you call, share our script with your family and friends and encourage them to call too.  2️⃣ Email your senators in opposition to more ICE funding. Calls are more effective than emails, but if you are unable to call or want to call and email, we make it easy to reach your senators instantly.  In solidarity, Indivisible Team

Kick ICE Out of Our Communities

Ezra Levin is the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a grassroots organization made up of thousands of group leaders and more than a million members taking regular, iterative, and increasingly complex actions to resist the GOPs agenda, elect local champions, and fight for progressive policies.

The following transcript has been edited for formatting.

Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I’m delighted to have back our dear friend, Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, who was getting outraged with me even before we got started. Welcome, Ezra, great to see you.

Ezra Levin
Happy New Year, Jen, I always love getting angry with you.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. We have had a cold-blooded murder in Minnesota. We’ve had the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Homeland Security not only lie to our faces, but defame a mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered for doing nothing but trying to remove her vehicle as directed by the ICE agents. What is the reaction in the community? What do you think can be done about this, and what do you think the appropriate response is?
Ezra Levin
Look, the reaction has been horror, and the reaction has been outrage, and I think that’s the appropriate reaction. We’ve been talking with Indivisible groups on the ground, since this occurred, and… look, they’re devastated. Their community is being terrorized by a secret police force led by a would-be fascist ruler, and that’s not editorializing, that’s just what’s happening on the ground, and now a woman with a young child is dead, and the regime is actively shielding the perpetrator from any kind of accountability. It’s horrifying.

The only piece of good news in response that I can say is that while this regime is trying to make everybody feel scared and alone, that’s not what we’re seeing in Minnesota, and that’s not what we’re seeing around the country. We just held this launch call last night. It was Indivisible hosting, but it’s not just Indivisible as us and 50501, and ACLU and, Move On, a lot of organizations and a lot of folks on the ground, coming together to talk about what do we actually do in response. Because what we hear from the Republicans right now, they said it explicitly, one member of Congress said, stop protesting, stop getting out there. No, we’re not going to do that. We are not going to do that!

When a regime like this comes for us. attacks our communities, murders Americans, and asks us to not protest. You know what we do? We protest, because it is our job, as Americans, to express our outrage peacefully, but powerfully in this moment. And not just to be on the right side of history, not just to remember Renee Goode, but it’s our job to express outrage because it is our elected official’s job to act. And they are only going to act if they see that we are outraged and demanding action. I’ve seen a lot of elected officials out there expressing the right emotions, which I appreciate. What we want to get them to do is beyond emotion. We want to get them to act.

The way you get elected officials to do their job is by doing your job, and as an American resident of any community in this country, your job over the next 48 hours is to show up, and the good news is since we launched the ICE Out for Good weekend of action yesterday night, there are hundreds of vigils and protests and events scheduled for this weekend, and more every single hour being registered. People are coming out in force. I think this could be an inflection point against ICE.

Jen Rubin
And where do people go if they want to find one near themselves?

Ezra Levin
You can find it at Indivisible.org, just click the link and get there, or to your favorite partner, whether that’s Move On or 5051 or others. Look, I love Indivisible, I’m biased towards Indivisible, I just want you out there. I want you organized in whichever community you’re organizing with, and if you go to that map, and you say, there’s not one in my neighborhood, what a bummer, put it on the map, get your friends together and say, no, we’re going to stand up against ICE in our community. We’re going to join together and tell this fascist force that we’re not going to just lay down or constitutional rights, we’re standing up for them. Protest is not the only thing we can do. Showing up is not going to magically fix everything, but again, if we, as Americans, don’t do our job to protect our rights, to stand up against this force that is terrorizing us. It’s over. That’s the tool we have at our disposal. And if we do that, the politicians will follow. They won’t lead on their own, but they will follow us.

Jen Rubin
And I want to be clear, it’s not only to put pressure on the bad guys, on the administration, on ICE, it is to put pressure on Democrats federally, in Congress. And in Minnesota, at the state and local level, that this must be investigated. This is not going to be pushed under the rug. The state has its own capacity. The sheriff has her own capacity. This does not get shoved under the rug because Donald Trump doesn’t want us to know the truth. And I think people should be clear about this, that the state can do something, the sheriff can do something, they can investigate in parallel to the feds.

Ezra Levin
You are a thousand percent right, Jen. One of the most frustrating things over the last year is hearing from some Democratic elected officials, and this is the local, state, and federal level, what do you want me to do? We’re in the minority; we have no power! ...Do not accept that. Do not accept that. I’m under no illusion that protest is suddenly going to lead Donald Trump or any one of his Republican goons to listen to their better angels if they even have them. That’s not going to happen. The elected officials that could listen to you are the Democrats who do indeed have power, and I’ll give you a specific example, Jen. The funding for ICE runs out at the end of this month!

Democrats are going to be asked to vote to give ICE more money in weeks. And so, a question is: Are Democrats in the Senate and the House going to vote for Trump’s warmongering? Are they going to vote to give more money to a secret police force? Or are they going to use the leverage they have? And I’ll tell you what they’ll say. Some of them, not all of them. You got great ones. Maxwell Frost, and AOC, and Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie, and Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy. There are fighters out there that are on the right side of this, but some of them will say, well, if we try to fight back. The Republicans in the Senate, they’re just going to eliminate the filibuster; they’re just going to steamroll us, they’re just going to pull other shenanigans, so we shouldn’t fight on this. I’m sorry. Make them do it. Make that happen.

Use the leverage that you’ve got... make a big political deal about it and stomp them in the midterms, because you know who doesn’t like ICE terrorizing their community? Democrats don’t like it, Independents don’t like it, and normal, everyday Republicans don’t like it. This should be a massive political issue for Trump if he refuses to scale back, but the way you make it a political issue is force them to defend it if they don’t backtrack.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and the biggest example of this just happened in the House. Remember we were told. We shouldn’t have a shutdown, we shouldn’t make this an issue, we’re in the minority, they have all the votes. Well, thank goodness for Hakeem Jeffries and the House members who stuck it out, made it the top issue and drove Trump’s numbers into the ground, kept it in the public eye, even after those senators caved, and lo and behold, 17 Republicans crossed the aisle yesterday to vote for this. What more proof do we need that this works? You force them to do things they don’t want. That’s what politics is about. What was your reaction yesterday when you saw 17 of these cowards who, a few months ago, were unwilling to extend the ACA, suddenly crawling after the Democrats in order to save their skins? Were you relieved? Were you disgusted? This is how we have to make it so, because this is what it takes to get these people to move.

Ezra Levin
I think it’s about all of the above, Jen, honestly. This was the entire theory of the shutdown fight. We knew that Republicans did not want to face their constituents for catastrophic increases in healthcare costs. We knew that many frontline Republicans themselves in the House wanted to extend the ACA tax credits. We knew that the public wanted Congress to do that, which is why we knew this was strong firm ground to fight on, and that’s why the Senate Democrats were winning the fight right up until Chuck Schumer and the rest of them decided to throw in the towel. So, I think what is frustrating is I don’t want to be right. I want to win. And so, it is cold comfort to me to be validated by the events that come after the Senate Democrats surrender. I want ACA tax credits extended. I want ICE rolled back. I don’t want to just be proven to have had the right strategic argument.

It is deeply frustrating to me when what everybody on the streets on No Kings 2 was saying "fight back, hold your ground," when those millions of people are proven right, but you’ve got a handful of Democratic senators who are just cowards, who are feckless leaders, who are unwilling to rise to the moment. And what this leads me to is, I’m sorry, Jen, we’ve been trying to convince these people for over a year, with three of the five largest protests in American history, that the people demand action, demand leadership, and Day after day, week after week, month after month now, they refuse to embrace anything other than status quo politics. 

It leads me back to the primaries. I’m sorry. The time for trying to convince these feckless leaders to actually stand at the moment is over. The time to replace them is here, and I’ll give you an example. We’ve got the first of the Senate caucuses, the competitive Senate caucuses or primaries, happy in mere weeks. It’s in Minnesota, of all places. You’ve got Angie Craig, who wants to be the next Democratic senator for Minnesota. You know what Angie Craig did last year? She voted for Lakin Riley to empower ICE, the first bill that landed on Donald Trump’s desk to empower ICE. Angie Craig voted for it. You know what else she did last year? She was part of a crew of Democrats who voted for a resolution thanking ICE for their service to America. You know what she’s doing this year? She’s accepting money from Chuck Schumer in order to run for Democrat in the Senate. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. This is not the kind of leadership that we need in this moment, unless she has some kind of very visible, come-to-Jesus moment about the current state that we’re in that’s beyond just empty promises to fight back, we need different leaders. We need different leaders, and the time to demand them is in the primaries, and that’s coming up all over the country.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and I want to reiterate what you have said a million times, which is fight like hell in the primaries, and then whoever the Democrat is, of course, get behind them in November. Let me go to, perhaps the next battle that is coming up, or it’s not even the next battle, it’s the continuation of this battle. The Senate now is going to vote, most likely next week on the ACA, or some variation of it. What is possible, and what do you want folks to do in order to force the Republicans and the Democrats in the Senate to follow what the House did?

Ezra Levin
Look, I think that the Democrats should be fighting for this because it is wildly popular and good for the country. That’s it, is good politics? And it is good for people. What is the three-dimensional or seven-dimensional chess thinking that would lead them to not do it? Unfortunately, I’ll get pretty cynical with you, Jen. It’s clear to me, some Democrats would prefer this to be a campaign issue in the midterms than to actually solve the problem and do some good. That is the reality of it. I think that’s inexcusable. They would say, well, this is smart politics. We hang the Republicans out to dry by blaming them for failing to do anything about healthcare prices. And I say, make it an issue right now. Fight right now. Because you are living on a different planet if you think that you can hold this and bottle it right up until the midterms.

You’ve got to fight the fight when the fight is available to you, and it’s available to you now. And I think we should be pushing all of our Senate Democrats to fight that thing. I’m willing to back any. If Chuck Schumer announces tomorrow this is where he’s showing the line, I’m behind him. I’ve been plenty critical of him. I do not believe in just choosing the folks who we need to get out and never coming back to the table. If they announce a plan to actually unify this opposition party and fight meaningfully, I’m there with them, but I am done accepting excuses. If they refuse to fight, we should hold them accountable.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Now, we have seen, again, like, we need any more examples, that putting pressure, making Republicans do what they don’t want to do, is possible. We had by a 52 to 47 vote margin, something you never see, which is Republicans voting for a war powers resolution against a sitting Republican president. In this case, because he launched a unilateral, unconstitutional war for oil against Venezuela, and has announced potential other targets. So beyond this, we’re going to need resolutions, I suppose, for Denmark and every other country on the planet. But Republicans move because they saw the reaction, and because Democrats, like Representative Himes, like Representative Smith, have been pounding away at this issue, even before the double tap. boat strike. They have been pounding away. What do you think we now need to do as this potentially now moves to the House, perhaps it’ll take a discharge position, to get the same result in the House?

Ezra Levin
So, you named it, but I just want to underline, Jen, this is about Venezuela, but it’s about much more than Venezuela. Think about how Trump operates. He’s a bully, and he’s a bully who’s always testing the limits. He’s always trying to figure out, where am I going to get pushback? Oh, I didn’t get pushback there. Let’s double down. Let’s do more. So this is about Venezuela, it’s about Denmark and Greenland, it’s about Cuba, it’s about Mexico, it’s about all of the imperialism that this president would like to engage in, it’s about.

Do not push back now. He takes that as a sign, and I’ll tell you why we know that. There was very little pushback against him bombing and murdering Venezuelans in boats off the coast. The thing we heard was, this is a distraction, and people don’t care about that, and why do we need to focus on that? Let’s talk about healthcare prices, or let’s talk about inflation, that’s what people really care about. And look, I’m not saying that cost of living isn’t an important issue, but you’ve got to engage in the issue of the day, and you’ve got to push back when he is testing his limits. So, what I want to see is people in elected bodies fight. I want them to see this is, this is the fight. This is where they need to actually push back, and it’s not just good politics.

Look, I don’t think the Democrats who are refusing to push back are in favor of regime change in Venezuela. Most of them are not. I don’t think they would like to see a war with Denmark. I don’t think they want to see the destruction of NATO. I think they have a model in their head of politics that is just simply outdated. They think that this guy is dangerous, and the best way to confront him is to focus on what the polls say people care most about, which, if you look at it, it’s always going to be healthcare, it’s always going to be jobs, it’s always going to be the economy. So, whenever a different issue comes up, they view that as a problem to be ignored so they can focus on the real winning issue. And I’m here to say that’s old politics that doesn’t work anymore against this authoritarian. You engage him on the ground in front of us right now. You have to fight back here. I think I understand the well-meaning political analysis that leads them in a different direction, and I think it’s for a different era.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely. What we’ve seen is one victory leads to other victories. We won on the Epstein files. They’re screwing around with that, so we’re going to have to come back. We won on healthcare. We’re going to have to fight that same battle in the Senate. We won on the War Powers Act. It is not a coincidence that once you start wheedling away and peeling off Republicans on one issue, they come back on other issues. This is how you build momentum, folks. And so, it’s not a distraction, it’s a step, it’s an opportunity. Every one of these is an opportunity, not a distraction. And I think it’s critical for our folks to kind of see that in the big picture. Let me take a step back and look at the entire landscape. 

We have what we all feared was coming, and that is a domestic guard, a tyrannical bunch of street thugs who have been unleashed, who are killing Americans, American citizens. Frankly, it shouldn’t matter that it’s a white woman, it shouldn’t matter that it’s a citizen, everybody who’s harmed is a human being, but let’s just put it right there. I think it’s critical for folks, and maybe we can begin to do this on the events coming up, that everybody understand they’re coming for you. It doesn’t matter what color you are. It doesn’t matter whether you’re illegal, or you’re undocumented, or whether you’re a native-born or a naturalized citizen. They’re coming for you. So, I would hope, and I think we’re beginning to see this, that people say, oh, hell. I could be shot in my car. A relative could be shot in the car. Oh, this is about me. How do we get that message over, and is this an opportunity to just do that one basic thing?

Ezra Levin
Look, I do think it’s an opportunity. It’s a real tragic event, and I’ve been reading a lot about Renee Goode, and… Look, I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, Jen, and the picture that I think will haunt me for quite some time is the picture of the car with the airbag out and blood covering the airbag, and in the glove box, what do you see? You see stuffed animals. You see stuffed animals. This is a mom… This is a suburban mom in Minnesota who was doing nothing illegal at all and was driving through a neighborhood peacefully, trying to support her community that was being threatened by masked, armed vigilantes who were terrorizing that community. It’s really scary stuff; I’m not going to lie. It is scary stuff, and it’s right if you’re looking at this to think, oh my gosh, it’s dangerous out there, I’m just going to stay at home. I understand that impulse. 

What I would highly encourage folks to do in this moment is not be alone. to reach out to their community. The good news is, your community is organizing right now. These, Ice Out for Good events, we’ve got literally hundreds in the span of 12 hours are already registered. There are more every single hour coming on the map. Check it out. Reach out to your friends and family members. If there’s not one nearby, put it together. 

This is a time to be in community, because while they are trying to portray themselves. as regime, as all power, as inevitable, as unstoppable. Their power is fragile. Their power is fragile. They do not have all the cards. They are a small, extreme minority. There are far more of us. This is not ideological. This isn’t there are far more Democrats, this is far more people on the left. There are far more people who believe in the Constitution, and believe in our First Amendment rights, and believe that our community should not be terrorized by a secret police force, then there are fascists who believe otherwise. The only thing standing between us retaking power and making our community safe is the organizing that we got to do, and that comes down to you watching this. If you are watching this and you are not yet connected to your community, find your indivisible group, or your 50-51 group, or your local group of friends. There are going to be folks who feel the same way as you. Find them. Organize and push back, because that’s how we’re going to win.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely. I couldn’t say it any better than that, Ezra. It is refreshing to hear that, those of us who have been thinking along the same lines are not alone, that we’re not on Planet Z, that we’re right here, rooted in reality. So, thank you. We’re going to look forward; we’re going to be participating in those events, over the next day or so, and we cannot thank you enough for everything that Indivisible is doing. It is the heart and soul of democracy. This is what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, and you folks are making it so. So, thank you so much. Best of luck. Stay safe out there, and stay angry, folks. Anger is good, righteous anger is good. So, we’ll look forward to speaking with you soon. Thanks so much, Ezra.

Ezra Levin
Thank you, Jen.

The Contrarian

No Wars! No Kings! Congress Must Act!

 

The Trump regime's weekend attack on Venezuela, taking of President Maduro, and declaration that the US will "run" that country until some indeterminate date in the future was wildly irresponsible, wholly immoral, and can only lead to disaster, unless Congress acts.

No one voted for another war. No one voted for an authoritarian regime that puts service members and the American public at risk. No one voted for placing the oil wealth of a few oligarchs above international law, the Constitution, and common sense. No one voted for a king. 

As Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg said in a statement on Saturday: The power to declare war belongs to Congress and the American people. Trump has once again taken power that's not his. He is attempting to drag the country into war by decree, all while treating the presidency like a throne. Congress must act immediately to stop these illegal strikes and hold the Trump regime accountable. No Kings, No War.

The regime's been telegraphing the weekend's actions since Hegseth’s “Department of War” first launched strikes on boats in the Pacific and Caribbean last fall, then moved on to attacking and seizing Venezuelan oil tankers. The excuses have been paper thin and fluid, one day focused on a supposed "invasion" by Venezuelan gang members, the next on Fentanyl trafficking (despite expert opinion the Venezuela plays virtually no role in Fentanyl trafficking into the US), and over the weekend, concern for the Venezuelan economy. 

But Trump gave the game away by mentioning oil 25 times at Saturday's Mar-a-Lago press conference. This is about Venezuelan oil, billionaire corruption, and Trump's aspirations to be America's first dictator, even as he and the GOP ignore skyrocketing healthcare costs and unaffordable grocery bills here at home. We can't let him succeed. 

WHAT YOU CAN DO: We need to make it crystal clear to Congress: This lawless violence must stop.

First: Use our scripts and call tools to place a call to your Members of Congress. Trump must not be allowed to drag the country into yet more chaos. Saturday's military operation may be over, but Trump is talking about keeping US forces on the ground in Venezuela indefinitely, and explicitly threatening other countries in Latin America. Click here to call your senators, and click here to call your representative.

Next: Use our email tool to drive the point home. Click here to email your Members of Congress to demand an end to military action against Venezuela.

Then: Register for the Healthcare Not Warfare grassroots call we're hosting with MoveOn, the Working Families Party, Win Without War, and Public Citizen, this Wednesday, January 7, at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT. We'll be joined by Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Greg Casar and other leaders in the fight against fascism and want to be sure you're there with us. None of us is alone; the more we work together, the stronger we'll be. Trump wants to be a wartime king. We the people demand: No War, No Kings.

In solidarity,
Indivisible Team