These progressives fighting for our democracy know what has always been true: The people have the power.
Illustration by Brian Stauffer.
Ayear that began with the second inauguration of Donald Trump was always going to be suspect. But 2025 became overwhelming. The president’s cruelty and lawlessness, along with his aggressive determination to deconstruct both government and civil society, shocked Americans, whom polls now suggest are deeply dissatisfied with his reckless tenure. This year’s Nation Honor Roll recognizes activists and artists, pastors, and political leaders who have spoken truth to Trump’s destructive power and forged a resistance that is evident in mass demonstrations and election results—and in an emerging hope, as Patti Smith once counseled, “That the people have the power / To redeem the work of fools.” John Nichols
PROPHETIC VOICEMariann Budde
After a reinauguration day that saw him fêted by billionaires and right-wing ideologues who hailed the supposed triumph of his MAGA vision, Trump imagined that he would be celebrated once more at the traditional interfaith prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral. But he got something else altogether when the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the longtime Episcopal bishop of Washington, delivered a homily in which she informed the new president that “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now.” Describing groups that Trump had already smeared with hateful rhetoric and now was threatening from the Oval Office, Bishop Budde explained that transgender children “fear for their lives” and pleaded for immigrants who faced the threat of deportation. “I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.” Trump experienced the homily as a rare rebuke and dismissed Budde as a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.” He complained that “She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way.” In fact, Budde embraced the prophetic tradition of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and other faith leaders who have spoken truth to presidential power. “I am not,” said Budde, “going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.”
US HOUSE MEMBERDelia Ramirez
“We are under attack by our own federal government,” declared Delia Ramirez, a Democratic US Representative from Illinois, as President Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” brought a violent and lawless federal immigration crackdown to Chicago. Ramirez was not the only official who spoke up; Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also called out the vile behavior of ICE and Border Patrol agents in the blue city—one of many targeted by Trump and his minions—with Johnson decrying ICE as Trump’s “private, militarized occupying force” and calling for a general strike. But Ramirez, the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, brought a dynamic combination of experience and passion to the fight.
“They want to normalize violence. They want to normalize cruelty. They want us to be OK with what they’re doing so that you won’t question what they do next,” she told 250,000 No Kings demonstrators on October 18. “But let me be very clear to Donald Trump and all those criminals: You will not break the city of Chicago. Ever!”
What has stood out about the response from Ramirez—a bold advocate for defending the social-safety net, empowering workers and unions, taxing the rich, and cutting the Pentagon budget—has been her determination to bring the fight for her constituents to Washington. She used her position on the House Committee on Homeland Security to demand investigations into the administration’s “violent, middle of the night operations that traumatize entire communities and put innocent men, women and children, including U.S. citizens, at risk.” Then, in October, when more than a dozen House members joined Ramirez in Chicago to conduct on-the-ground oversight of the Department of Homeland Security’s lawless actions in Chicago, she detailed how “our residents have been surveilled, they’ve been threatened, they’ve been tear-gassed, they’ve been hit with pepper balls, they’ve been shot, they’ve been subjected to warrantless arrests and precision immobilization-technique maneuvers, and kidnapped and disappeared,” and declared, “We will hold them accountable.”uth to presidential power. “I am not,” said Budde, “going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.”
DEMOCRATIC SENATORChris Van Hollen
When the senior Democratic senator from Maryland directed a mid-September “J’Accuse!” at top New York Democrats—including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer—for failing to embrace the mayoral candidacy of Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani as the “kind of spineless politics [that] people are sick of,” some observers were surprised that a Capitol Hill veteran would be so blunt in decrying his own party’s listlessness. But they obviously hadn’t been paying attention in recent years. Chris Van Hollen has rebuked both President Trump and former president Joe Biden for failing to break decisively with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Gaza; traveled to El Salvador to meet with deported migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia in an open challenge to the Trump administration’s lawless strategy of expelling immigrants without due process; joined colleagues in condemning “President Trump’s un-American, unconstitutional transgender military service ban for being a blatant violation of our brave servicemembers’ civil rights and weakening our national security”; and worked with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on legislation to tax the rich. In November, after Schumer botched the government-shutdown fight, Democratic Senate candidates called for new leadership in the chamber, and liberal groups dispatched a memo that pointed to the Marylander as a potential replacement for the minority leader, arguing that Van Hollen “represents the rare figure who combines experience, credibility, and a forward-leaning vision.” Van Hollen’s strength is his recognition that, as he put it, “This job is not worth it if you constantly have to be putting your finger to the wind.” At a time when Americans are desperate for principled leadership, that’s a mantra every Democrat should consider.
ATTORNEY GENERALLetitia James
New York State’s indefatigable attorney general has, since Trump returned to office, led almost two dozen Democratic attorneys general in fighting Trump 2.0’s lawless actions with dozens of lawsuits. This is an extension of the many years Letitia James has spent demanding accountability from the 45th and now 47th president. Vowing to get vengeance, Trump installed a woefully inexperienced US attorney, Lindsey Halligan, to indict James for mortgage fraud. James fought back against this vindictive prosecution, and in late November a federal judge dismissed the charges on the grounds that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful.
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Through it all, New York’s AG has kept fighting for the people of the state and the country. A few days before the administration threatened to withdraw food-stamp benefits from almost 42 million Americans, James and her fellow AGs sued to stop it. A federal judge in Massachusetts sided with them, ruling that the government is “statutorily mandated to use the previously appropriated SNAP contingency reserve when necessary.”
At the same time, James and the able lawyers in her state office took on landlords in a rural New York county for discriminating against low-income tenants; won an order protecting teaching about gender identity and trans issues in schools; blocked a cutoff of funding to school-based mental-health services; and set up an election-protection hotline in advance of New York’s November election. Remarkably, she did all that in a single month: October. And she’s continued to defend abortion providers and transgender people in the face of the right’s deliberate attacks. No one can argue that James has taken her focus off of New York and national issues while she fights the man-baby who wants to be a tyrant-king. In fact, she’s working harder than ever. Joan Walsh
NEW POLITICSZohran Mamdani’s Campaign
It’s been said that Zohran Mamdani is a once-in-a-generation candidate, and there is no question that the 34-year-old democratic socialist’s successful mayoral campaign electrified the politics not just of New York City but the entire nation. But Mamdani is the first to say that as a little-known, Uganda-born, Muslim state legislator, he could not have broken through without the remarkable team that came together to help elect him. At a time when everyone recognized the need to stop listening to traditional consultants and pollsters, Mamdani’s campaign was guided by idealistic young activists: primary campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church (now his mayoral chief of staff), creative director Andrew Epstein, media strategist Morris Katz, and field director Tascha Van Auken, to name but a few. With support from the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, and key unions, Mamdani built a campaign that outworked and outsmarted the political establishment and inspired candidates nationwide. If you’re looking for the future of American politics, start here. Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols
ACTIVIST GROUPFree DC
It’s hard to think of an advocacy group with a more timely name than Free DC, as citizens of our nation’s capital continue to fight their occupation by ICE and associated federal and military forces. The organization was founded in 2023, as part of the backlash against Mayor Muriel Bowser’s veto of City Council–approved criminal-justice reforms that sought to reduce maximum sentences. The whole dismal episode culminated with President Joe Biden caving before a new GOP majority in the House as it demagogued the reforms as criminal-coddling threats to public safety. In reality, the crime fight highlighted the unjust federal strong-arming of local governance in DC, going back to the disenfranchisement of the city’s African American population during Reconstruction. The launch of Free DC revived the long-standing crusade to wrest full independence (and statehood) from the district’s overseers in Congress, who still have the power to quash policy initiatives while threatening the district with extortionate budget cuts. That shakedown dynamic allowed Congress to effectively steal $1 billion from DC’s budget during last spring’s vote on the Trump administration’s comprehensive tax-and-spending bill. With the multifront authoritarian MAGA putsch facing minimal resistance at the federal level, Free DC’s grassroots campaign to reclaim self-rule in our nation’s occupied and budget-captive capital represents a key path forward in the crusade to make democracy matter again. Chris Lehmann
GLOBAL ACTIVISTDavid Adler
A political economist who has served on the foreign-policy advisory team of Bernie Sanders and as director of policy for Yanis Varoufakis and the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25), David Adler is now the co–general coordinator of Progressive International, which “seeks to unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces around the world.” That, by any measure, is full-time work. Yet in September, Adler jumped aboard the lead vessel in the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of civilian vessels that sailed to Gaza as “the largest convoy in history to traverse the Mediterranean Sea with a mission to establish a humanitarian corridor to reach the starving people of Palestine.” The flotilla’s participants—doctors and aid workers, parliamentarians and journalists, lawyers and grassroots activists from around the world—traveled with the “shared conviction that something must be done to halt the destruction of Gaza—and that if governments refuse to do it, then ordinary people will.” In a letter published by The Nation as the flotilla approached Gaza on the eve of Yom Kippur, Adler wrote, “I joined this flotilla just like any other delegate—to defend humanity, before it is too late. But on Yom Kippur, I am reminded that I am also here because my Jewish heritage demands it…. If Israeli forces intercept us on Yom Kippur, then let them see what true atonement looks like. Not fasting in comfort while starving their neighbors. Not praying in safety while dropping bombs over their heads. Atonement means action.” The flotilla was intercepted, and Adler reported being abused by Israelis and taunted by American diplomats. He counseled that his mistreatment “pales in comparison to the treatment that Palestinians endure every single day,” yet he argued that it illustrated “how rogue the state of Israel has become in its utter disregard for basic international humanitarian law.”
KNOW-YOUR-RIGHTS CAMPAIGNWin Without War’s “Not What You Signed Up For” Project
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
With the Trump administration putting military personnel at legal, moral, and physical risk through reckless and unnecessary domestic deployments, Win Without War’s “Not What You Signed Up For” project has launched a campaign to reach out to National Guard members who have been deployed to DC, Chicago, Memphis, and other cities.
After the Trump administration deployed the Tennessee National Guard to Memphis in violation of state law and against the wishes of local officials, Win Without War posted a billboard advertising NotWhatYouSignedUpFor.org, awebsite connecting members of the military with information about their rights while in uniform, including how to respond to unlawful orders. (The billboard is visible on Memphis’s historic Beale Street, where National Guard troops have recently patrolled.)
The “Not What You Signed Up For” project highlights the work of principled organizations that are experienced in counseling service members, including About Face, the GI Rights Hotline, and the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. They want troops to know that someone has their back—because the Trump administration doesn’t. Katrina vanden Heuvel
ONLINE ACTIVISMTrack AIPAC / AIPAC Tracker
When Israel’s assault on Gaza turned into what Casey Kennedy described as “a live-streamed genocide,” the anti-corruption campaigner started asking why so few people were “connecting these dots of why are our officials OK with being complicit in this? Why are we sending American tax dollars to be used for war crimes? Why are we sending American-made weapons to murder women and children and innocent civilians?” Kennedy and Cory Archibald, a veteran leader of the group Brand New Congress who’s campaigned for candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush, set out to “pull back the curtain” on the role played by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in influencing US policy. Their vehicle is the website Track AIPAC and the related X account AIPAC Tracker, which reveals the money that Democratic and Republican candidates have taken from the billionaire-funded organization that backs Netanyahu’s policies. Launched in April 2024, AIPAC Tracker now has almost 400,000 followers. Breaking Points host Krystal Ball credits it with playing a major role in making AIPAC “a lightning rod in American politics” and convincing even centrist Democrats to reject donations associated with the organization, while “more and more candidates,” Archibald notes, “are running on an anti-AIPAC platform.”
SUNDAY-MORNING RADIOKeep Hope Alive
The Rev. Jesse Jackson has been ailing in recent years, yet his Rainbow Coalition vision echoes across the land each Sunday morning in the form of a two-hour radio show organized each week by Jackson in consultation with his daughter, Santita, a veteran broadcaster. Aired from Los Angeles to Washington, Phoenix to Chicago, St. Louis to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the program features members of Congress, state legislators, authors, academics, and activists. While there’s a sharp focus on domestic debates, the show’s great strength may well be its internationalism, as it maintains Jackson’s emphasis on diplomacy and peacemaking, with regular segments on the Middle East (featuring guests such as longtime Rainbow aide and activist Jim Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute) and Latin America. And, over many years, this is where listeners have heard thoughtful assessments of the outcry against Trump’s continued threats toward Venezuela.
PATRIOTBruce Springsteen
The rocker whose name is synonymous with the phrase “Born in the USA” toured Europe just months after Trump and his wrecking crew retook the White House. It could have been a respite from the chaos at home. Instead, Springsteen chose to speak to the world about the “tyranny” that gripped the nation that his songs have chronicled for more than five decades.
“In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death,” Springsteen told the crowd in Manchester, England. “And in my country, they are taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers, they are rolling back historic civil-rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society. They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.”
Springsteen was attacked on Fox News and by an angry Trump, who dismissed him as a “dried out prune of a rocker” who “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back in the Country.” Springsteen, who recognizes that dissent is a true expression of patriotism, was not intimidated. Believing in the power of music, the heir to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger told the world—and Americans who were desperate for a resistance message—that “the mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll, in dangerous times. In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”
POLITICAL HISTORYJuanita Tolliver’s A More Perfect Party
Shirley Chisholm’s influence on American politics keeps growing. In April, the voters of Oakland elected as their mayor former US representative Barbara Lee, who began her political journey as a Democratic delegate backing Chisholm’s groundbreaking 1972 presidential bid. Lee always recalls Chisholm’s immense contribution as the Black woman who broke down the barriers of American politics to advocate for economic, social, and racial justice—and peace. But Tolliver, an MSNBC political analyst and a contributor to TheGrio, recognized that more Americans need to know about Chisholm’s presidential bid. Tolliver tells that story in A More Perfect Party: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carroll Reshaped Politics, which focuses on a remarkable Beverly Hills party in 1972 at which Carroll, then at the peak of her acting career, hosted Chisholm, Lee, Huey Newton, Berry Gordy, Flip Wilson, David Frost, Goldie Hawn, and dozens of other artists and activists. A brilliant examination of a time when politics and art combined to imagine a more perfect union, this is a book of engaging and necessary political history.
DOCUMENTARYSteal This Story, Please!
Did you know that the intrepid independent journalist Amy Goodman dotes on her dog, Zazu, who is named for the historic youth movement in France during the German occupation? Or that Goodman’s grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi who taught her to “accept all questioning”? Or that she once asked former president George H.W. Bush, to his face, if he was a war criminal? It’s all in Steal This Story, Please!—an intimate, instructive, and often surprising documentary about Goodman and the power of independent media. Directors Tia Lesson and Carl Deal go behind the scenes at Democracy Now!, the independent news outlet Goodman cofounded. The program now airs on more than 1,500 public broadcasting stations worldwide, providing frontline reports on the most consequential stories of our time, from the global climate catastrophe to the war in Gaza. The documentary’s great power comes through its deployment of archival footage—from a young Goodman’s reporting on a 1991 massacre in East Timor to the days after 9/11 when she and her crew remained in Democracy Now!’s Chinatown office so they could give a full report from Ground Zero.
This is the dramatic story of a heroic journalist confronting and overtaking the forces that have sought to silence and even kill her. Also heroic are the featured members of her team, including the pathbreaking Juan Gonzalez, the charismatic Nermeen Shaikh, and the show’s correspondent and former Nation contributor Jeremy Scahill.
The documentary feels especially poignant and necessary in an era of increasingly profit-driven and consolidated corporate media, when press freedom is under authoritarian assault. Reflecting on media repression today in the closing scene of Steal This Story, Please!, Goodman refers to the White Rose, a group of German university students who fought Hitler’s regime by distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. One of the pamphlets declared, “We will not be silent.” Goodman concludes, “These words should be the Hippocratic oath of the media today.”
UNBOUGHT, UNBOSSED COMMENTARYJoy Reid
Among the most prominent of the many journalists who’ve been forced out of their positions since Donald Trump retook the White House is Joy Reid. While all of these capitulations by media companies were unsettling, the decision by MSNBC (rebranded recently as MS NOW) to give Reid and her team pink slips, purportedly as part of a network-wide shake-up, was broadly recognized as a rebuke of Reid for doing what she does best: telling the truth, focusing on the communities most harmed by autocrats and uplifting the progressive voices and lawmakers who are working to bring us closer to a truly pluralist society. Reid’s removal came at the same time that we were witnessing mass firings in multiple industries, with Black women taking the hardest hits. Earlier in 2025, MS NOW reported on the stark reality that 300,000 Black women had left the workforce in three months. Ironically, just three months later, CBS News and then NBC News announced the end of their racial-justice teams, as well as the dismantling of sections covering issues centered on LGBTQ people, Asian Americans, and Latino communities. Amid this turmoil, Reid is carrying on with her own Joy Reid Show on YouTube, as well as a Substack and a podcast. “I think in this moment, not being a part of corporate media is actually a gift,” she told The Guardian. “Because from now, on the outside looking in, I don’t know that I could live with the kind of restrictions that people in corporate media are facing. So I think—it was a blessing.”
Joy Reid is not going anywhere. In the face of attacks from the right and capitulations on the part of corporate behemoths, she has emerged as an unbought and unbossed truth-teller. Regina Mahone
BEARING WITNESSThe Hind Rajab Foundation
Named for a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces after she pleaded for emergency services to rescue her from a bullet-sprayed car in January 2024, the Hind Rajab Foundation pursueslitigation against those responsible for war crimes in Gaza. Israel and its armed forces have enjoyed international legal impunity for too long; that’s why this donation-based foundation is holding members of the Israel Defense Forces to account. Cofounded by Belgian Lebanese organizers and headquartered in Brussels, HRF would not be possible without the efforts of dozens of researchers and lawyers, some based in the United States. Through painstaking research and coordination, a network of volunteers builds cases against IDF soldiers who commit crimes that have no chance of being prosecuted in Israel.
When low-level members of the IDF, acting either on orders or on their own volition, kill civilians or commit other atrocities, they do so assuming they are all but guaranteed to evade justice. HRF’s goal is for these perpetrators to see justice not in international courts but in national ones. There’s a legal theory behind this strategy. The International Criminal Court, as a rule, intervenes only after measures in a local jurisdiction have been exhausted, and the ICC is hamstrung for a host of reasons. HRF brings ingenuity and a diligent work ethic to the project of encouraging countries to prosecute these criminals at the national level. The foundation has assembled an impressive team of researchers to track IDF activity on the ground, identifying where units are operating and which international laws they’ve violated. Soldiers often travel abroad after committing these crimes, and HRF is seeing to it that their breaches of the Geneva Convention are brought to the attention of their host countries. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! has compared the foundation’s work to that of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which famously hunted Nazi war criminals. No doubt, the foundation merits the plaudits, but it also needs monetary support, which can be provided at hindrajabfoundation.org/donate. Rose D’Amora