I’ve talked to Seattle Representative Pramila Jayapal many times in the last eight years, when times were good and bad. She first entered Congress in 2017, having run as a progressive who backed Senator Bernie Sanders but then campaigned enthusiastically for Hillary Clinton, expecting to be someone who pulled Clinton to the left. That was not to be.

Nevertheless, she’s been one of the most energetic advocates of resistance—and then, of productive progressive cooperation in times of Democratic leadership—in all of Congress. When she stepped down as Congressional Progressive Caucus chair in January, having led it for six years, I reached out for a retrospective. When we finally spoke on Tuesday, we did not have that luxury. We had just learned about Signalgate, the stunning Trump administration national security disaster, in which key national security information was shared by our country’s top leaders in a group chat that mistakenly included a reporter. “This has to be elevated as the complete incompetence and danger to our national security these people pose,” she told me. “I’m not sure we have any intelligence screens right now. Are we doing everything on Signal chats?” It seems like it, I answered.

And we were still processing Democratic Party dissent from Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s boneheaded support of the GOP’s so-called “continuing resolution” that led to a full-throated rebellion from even Democratic moderates. Read her thoughts on that below.

But Jayapal has been among the most active progressive Congress members out in the field this year, hosting town halls and channeling the growing anti-Trump movement. We discussed the opposition that she has witnessed and participated in, including the launch of a project she called “Resistance Lab,” as well as her thoughts about where Democratic leadership is failing and what must be done about it.

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April 2025 Issue

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh: There’s been a lot of media coverage, a lot of complaints, about “Where’s the resistance? Where’s the opposition?” I first talked to you in early 2017, when you just got to Congress, about the resistance you saw building. But there’s now good research showing there are more protests at this point in 2025 than there were in 2017. We all have memories of the Women’s March and how wonderful it was. But in fact, whether it’s Tesla takedowns or town halls, there’s a lot going on. Tell me about it from your perspective.

Pramila Jayapal: I think it was a little slower to start, and I think it is not as coordinated as in, one big march with a million people, half a million people like we did for family separations, right? But we have seen this increase in local protests, coordinated across multiple cities, the Tesla takedowns, the days of action, the showing up at town halls, the calls that are coming in. We’ve been doing the town halls in my district, of course, and they’ve been way oversubscribed. But on the campaign side, we launched something we called the Resistance Lab. 

JW: You did it in Seattle, right?

PJ: Yes, and it just pumped me up in a whole different way.

JW: How do you describe the “Resistance Lab”?

PJ: The idea is that we need to get people “strike ready.” If you’re in the labor movement, you’d say strike ready and street ready. And in order to do that, people need to understand: What are other models of countries where democracies have fallen? How do people deal with that? What are the best tools and tactics and frameworks to analyze it and to fight back? The level of risk that people are willing to take usually goes up with the severity of the situation. It’s also about educating people that democracies don’t just fall in one day but in a matter of months. We need to understand that institutions don’t save us, government doesn’t save us in these situations. It really has to be the people. And so how do you inspire people to think about what is the scale of resistance that needs to be there and what kinds of things are most effective? We’re doing another one on Zoom this Sunday [March 30 at 2 pm].

Erica Chenoweth from Harvard Kennedy School’s nonviolent action lab Zoomed in to do the training. So now we have high-quality video of them that we’re gonna be able to reuse. And I did a piece on tactics and tools and frameworks that I took from a number of my own experiences but also a number of other pieces of research. I have never seen people so engaged for the entire time. I’m packaging this training for my colleagues.

I want to do a deeper dive into nonviolent training, like you’re doing a nonviolent protest, but somebody perpetrates violence against you. Think Selma church basements and the kind of training that they did to prepare people [for nonviolent protests that were met with violence in the 1960s]. Because that moment is coming.

JW: There’s something that I wanted to talk to you about which is not old news now, because Chuck Schumer is still dealing with the whirlwind: his decision to support the so-called “continuing resolution,” which House Democrats almost unanimously opposed. Schumer said shutting down the government would only empower Donald Trump and copresident Elon Musk. Do you have any second thoughts about it?

PJ: I have zero second thoughts about it.

JW: His argument that a government shutdown would have let Trump and Musk lay off more people, slash more departments…

PJ: It was a hard choice, but there’s two things—there’s the global argument, and then there’s Schumer himself. On the global argument, well, you have to play it all the way through. If you think a shutdown is gonna be bad now, and you’re going to make all the arguments—for the Republicans!—about why Democrats can’t shut down the government, imagine what happens when they attach a national abortion ban to something like this, when they try to pass their four-and-a-half-trillion-dollar tax break for the wealthiest? This was not even a bill that they negotiated with us, at all. It was just a Republican funding bill. They kept calling it a CR. It’s not a CR. It changed the levels of funding and it instituted big cuts in funding. And so I think if you don’t play it through: Is it possible that Schumer’s scenario—that we would shut it down and it would be terrible and they would just use that to fire more people—was right? Absolutely they might. We can’t control what they do, but we can control that we have to stand up and fight back, and we cannot be seen as just rolling over. Because the minute we do it, they’re gonna do it to us again.

Now, separately, I also believe that all the polling was trending in our favor. We would have been able to make them own the shutdown. And then the question is: What’s the way out? The way out is you get them back to the table to negotiate. Either it’s negotiating a 30-day actual continuing resolution or you negotiate the whole deal, which probably wouldn’t have happened without a 30-day extension.

This idea that they could just fire everyone [during a shutdown]—they’re doing that [already], right? So, the minute the first Social Security check is missed, people are gonna be pissed. The minute all these things that people don’t even know government does are not happening, people are gonna be really pissed. And it’s not just Democrats. We were winning [on the shutdown issue] with independents and even some Republicans. So I think the analysis was all wrong.

Which brings me to Chuck Schumer. I was reading an article about “patrimonialism” recently, and I don’t know that the word exactly defines what happened. But when you have somebody who doesn’t listen to a united Democratic caucus in the House—we are the people that have to run every two years, [so] we know what’s going on. And it wasn’t a progressive versus conservative Democrat thing. Everyone in the House except one person [Maine’s Jared Golden] voted against this thing because we knew it was bad, and we knew we had to fight back. So you don’t listen to House Democrats and you don’t listen to your own colleagues in the Senate, you don’t listen to the public. You don’t listen to the polling. This idea that “I know better” is terrible.

I think it’s a sign that he can’t meet the moment. And if he can’t meet the moment of the anger and the frustration and the fear that is out there, [and he can’t meet the moment] to showcase what we can do to fight back and build a unified resistance and provide leadership for that? I don’t think he should be there.

JW: At the same time that we are witnessing a failure of leadership, voters are also seeing devastating authoritarian actions. I was watching the news today and they keep playing, over and over, videos of the men who were taken to El Salvador, extraordinarily renditioned, being shaved, humiliated, shoved onto planes and into jail cells. I realized I had two reactions. One was human: This is wrong, this is horrible. It’s humiliating. But I also realized that on some level I was internalizing a kind of fear. Like, that’s how brutal this administration is. I thought about the famous Adam Serwer line about the last Trump administration: The cruelty is the point. But humiliation is now the point, and also intimidation. It’s a psychological reaction that maybe we’re not even conscious of.

PJ: That’s right. One of the witnesses from US AID [who testified during a hearing earlier in the day that Jayapal had attended] from the reproductive health arena described it as “psychological warfare.” She was talking about the firings and the complete shuttering of the agencies and Elon’s five questions. We had somebody saying people are now afraid because even the Zoom meetings that they’re participating in with the federal government, it now says, you are being recorded, and they’re using AI to transcribe everything that people say.

There are two tools of dictators and authoritarians that I think we’re seeing. One is you have to terrify people in order to shut them up. And that is happening right now. The second is you have to strip protections from one group of people so that you can show that if you’re willing to do it to these people, [you’re] gonna do it to anybody, right? If you can do it to legal permanent residents, it’s just showing that you can do it to US citizens too, right?

JW: You recently remarked, “We can’t win people over by calling them stupid,” or something to that effect. And I agree with you, but it’s so hard when you see the level of misinformation and all these stories about Trump voters who’ve been laid off telling reporters: “I didn’t think it was going to happen to me!” I don’t mock those people and I have empathy for those people, but it makes me wonder: What are the Democrats doing wrong that all the good things Joe Biden did for workers didn’t come through, even the investments in red states?

I think one of the last times we spoke was when [Senator Joe] Manchin torpedoed the care-economy aspects of Build Back Better. I spent a lot of time analyzing the disappointing women’s vote from November, and I had women say to me, we had a care economy with all the Covid-19 help, and then we yanked it out from under people. So should we blame Joe Manchin for Kamala Harris losing? What are we doing that all of this is not getting through?

PJ: I honestly think if we had passed Build Back Better with universal childcare and a huge housing investment, we would not have lost the election. And that was torpedoed by two Democratic senators.

This other piece that you pointed out is really important: So many people said, I’m worse off than I was before, right? What people forget is we did pass a lot of assistance, both in the last year of Trump and then in the first year of Biden, and then it ended. So actually, many people really were worse off! We kept insisting that we had done all these good things instead of talking to people. They were telling the truth when they said they were worse off.

There are 90 million people who are eligible to vote and don’t vote. Either because they don’t believe the Democratic Party will fight for them, they don’t identify with either party, or they feel like Democrats are always the ones who are defending the system instead of saying, no, it’s broken. If we’re not willing to call that out? We have to say, we have to actually redo this system, because it’s rigged.