The Scene
The Democratic Party’s reckoning over age and “gerontocracy” appears to be on hold: The key figures in the anti-Trump resistance, right now, were born in the 1940s.
Texas Rep. Al Green, a 10-term progressive from Houston who’s never sought a leadership role in the party, won an instant online following for protesting the president’s joint address to Congress. In five “Fight Oligarchy” rallies in Republican-held House seats, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders built the biggest crowds for any non-Donald Trump politician since the 2024 election, delivering hour-long speeches against the GOP’s tax and spending plans.
None of this was endorsed by national Democrats. The Sanders tour is run through his political PAC, and ten of Green’s Democratic colleagues joined Republicans to censure him last week. But both Green, 77, and Sanders, 83, have tapped into frustration at the fizzling political efforts to slow Trump down — a few defeats in court, no obstacles to his agenda in the GOP-led Congress.
“Not am I not going there to run my own campaign, I’m not going there to support any candidates,” Sanders told Semafor shortly before the tour began. “I am going there to try to educate the people in those communities about what Trump’s agenda is about. People can tell their Republican members of Congress, who won by relatively small margins, not to vote for legislation to give tax breaks to billionaires in order to cut Medicaid, cut veterans programs, cut education, and cut environmental programs. That is the message of this trip.”
Green’s protest was focused on Medicaid, too. Waving the walking cane he’s used since a surgery three years ago, Green shouted that Trump had “no mandate to cut” the 60-year old health care program for the poor; the GOP’s budget resolution assumed $880 billion in Medicaid savings, with no details.
“We have to meet incivility with incivility,” Green explained on Friday, in an interview with The Breakfast Club. (The black and gold cane, he told Semafor, was a gift from a friend, and “has no weapon in it.”)
No Democrats stood with Green, who had made national news before for introducing Trump impeachment resolutions that went nowhere. Ken Klippenstein, an investigative reporter who’s been closely and critically covering the Democrats’ age issues in his Substack, mocked Green for “waving [his] walking cane around” during last month’s Democratic rally against DOGE’s federal workforce layoffs. Last week, he cited Green as an exception to wimpy Democrats who didn’t want to “challenge the symbolism and sanctity of the formal occasion” in the House.
“I think it says less about Green than people’s desperation for someone, anyone, in the party to respond assertively,” Klippenstein said. “Green has been doing this for months, and people didn’t care. What changed is that the rest of the party is in opossum mode, so what he’s doing suddenly contrasts.”
The View From Democrats
The second Trump resistance has proven more challenging for Democrats than the first, when most of their voters supported their ad hoc fightback. Polling has found widespread dissatisfaction with their leaders, and confusion about what they’re doing to stop Trump.
“People are pissed off, and they want to see fighters,” said David Hogg, the 24-year-old gun safety activist who was elected as a DNC vice chair last month. With “Bernie and Al Green, we’re seeing people stand up, and we need a hell of a lot more of it.”
Sanders, who campaigned for the Biden and Harris tickets in 2024, frustrated Democrats after their defeat by saying that the party had “abandoned working-class people.” At his anti-oligarchy tour stops, some of his messaging has overlapped with that of party leadership, denouncing the Trump Cabinet and GOP for voting to extend tax cuts while cutting social services.
Some of his messaging was more critical of the party. “We are not a democracy when billionaires like Musk, in both political parties, can buy elections,” Sanders said in Kenosha, Wisconsin. That evoked the 2022 and 2024 primaries, when super PACs helped beat or unseat progressive House candidates — but Sanders spoke in a state where the Democratic Party has courted wealthy donors like George Soros and Reid Hoffman to overcome pro-Republican campaign spending by Musk.
Still, the speech was a balm for voters who’d wondered where the Democrats had gone.
“You need to drag this out and make it as difficult as possible for Republicans,” said Randy Bryce, a 2018 congressional candidate in southeast Wisconsin who introduced Sanders at his Friday rally in Kenosha. “People need to know that somebody’s standing up for them to fight. Some people there were hopeless and needed a reason to get cheered up. Some of them were pissed off, and they had a reason to be. We need more Democrats doing this, everywhere.”
At the end of his speeches, Sanders revisited a theme from his two presidential campaigns — that “real change” seemed impossible to previous generations until they won it. That’s also been a theme of Green’s post-censure media tour, too, as the congressman has invoked the “good trouble” of Civil Rights activists as a model for what he did.
“You’ve survived Jim Crow, where decorum was seen as a way to dampen protest,” Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman told Green on Friday. “What message do you have for all of those who censured you and said you broke the decorum of the legislature?”
On The Breakfast Club, asked to name the party’s current leader or strongest voice, Green cited 86-year old California Rep. Maxine Waters. In Trump’s first term, Waters’ acid tongue earned her the sort of following among liberals that Green is building now.
“She’s an OG,” said co-host Charlamagne tha God. “But the Bible says: Old men for counsel, young men for war.” When he asked who the young stars of the party might be, citing fellow Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Green gently pushed back on behalf of Waters.
“Her mentality is not old,” said Green. “Maxine is younger than most 25-year-olds. Yes, she’s an OG. But thank God for an OG.”
The View From Republicans
Wisconsin Republicans, who are trying to drive up turnout ahead of the April 1 supreme court election, derided the Sanders visit as “socialist fear mongering.” House Republicans may take up a motion to remove Green from his committees. They see the protest last week as an embarrassment that will hurt Democrats, and have enjoyed how it muddled the party’s plan to respond to the Trump speech.
“Al Green’s unserious approach to public policy and government has been well known in Houston and Texas for years, but now it’s nationally known with his absurd performance theater at the Joint Address, said Texas GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak. “He’s been legislatively irrelevant his entire career.”
David’s view
For all their disagreements about strategy, Democrats are hanging together on one big theme: Trump is letting right-wing billionaires slash jobs and benefits. They’ve listened to activists who wanted them to elevate ordinary people hurt by the cuts, rallying with them at town halls and protests.
They just haven’t figured out how to sell this, and even anti-Trump media has had fun trashing their optics. (“Stop trying to make Chuck Schumer happen,” Jon Stewart sighed after one uninspiring anti-tariff press conference.) The Sanders rallies broke through because they got crowds in the thousands; Green’s protest broke through because the image of an elderly Black man pointing his cane at the president was indelible. His colleagues couldn’t convincingly explain why they upheld House decorum instead of joining him.
How exactly does a party in the wilderness score a win — something big enough to inspire the base — without winning? It typically involves making enough noise to make the president, and the media, angry. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz spent his first year in office failing to block Barack Obama’s nominees, then failing to kill the Affordable Care Act. But he tried, he got denounced by GOP leaders, and this made him a credible presidential candidate.
The modern Democratic Party doesn’t have the same mindset or incentives as the GOP base. But it has watched that base humiliate them. It’s also constantly looking back to history, and other resistances — to fascism, to Jim Crow, etc. — for inspiration. All of that is feeding into the current enthusiasm for the way Green and Sanders fight Trump.
Room for Disagreement
In the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, Lily Sanchez argues that the left should move on from Sanders and Democrats, focusing on “mutual aid organizations and independent political parties” to build power.
“What he’s doing is simply an exercise in helping the Democrats with their ‘messaging’ and branding,” she writes. “He’s identifying problems but not offering solutions beyond more of the same electoralism. Not once does he say to stop supporting Democrats who fail to fight back against oligarchy or to primary them with progressives!”
Notable
- In The New York Times, Annie Karni contrasts the official Democratic choice to respond to Trump — 48-year old Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin — with the grassroots excitement about Green. “The lasting image of Democratic pushback to Mr. Trump on Tuesday night may have come instead in the form of a liberal 77-year-old congressman waving his cane.”
- For The Associated Press, Steve Peoples reports from the Sanders anti-oligarchy trail, where he is “bucking the wishes of those who want Democrats to focus on the price of eggs or “roll over and play dead.”