Wide-Ranging Discussion Covered Future of Progressivism, Harm of Musk-Trump Agenda, and How Democrats Should Fight Back

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CAMBRIDGE – This week at the King Open School in Cambridge, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07) joined Joshua Miller of the Boston Globe for a live, fireside chat about the news of the day, the Trump administration’s latest actions, and the future of progressivism in the United States. In the wide-ranging discussion titled “What do we do now? A conversation with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley,” Rep. Pressley discussed her personal journey in politics, the harm of the Musk-Trump agenda, and how Democrats can and must fight back.

The full conversation can be watched here and highlights are available below (edited lightly for clarity).

On Rep. Pressley’s parents and upbringing:

REP. PRESSLEY: I grew up raised in a single parented household with the righteous role-modeling of a mother who was a proud Democrat, a super voter. Just to give you a little insight into my upbringing, my mother never read me stories about anyone coming to save me. She read me the speeches of Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm. So, I get it honest. And she, you know, taught me early on that to be Black is something beautiful and to be proud of, but that I was being born into a struggle, and she had an expectation that I would do my part in that struggle, in the work of liberation for Black and all marginalized people.

So two other quick things I would say that really informed the work that I do from my origin story.  I grew up on public transportation. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about transit justice. It truly is at the intersection of everything. My father is a brilliant man who battled substance use disorder and a heroin addiction and cycled in and out of the criminal legal system, and it was incredibly destabilizing, and there was great shame and stigma that I carried about that not understanding at the time that it was a disease. But my father, while incarcerated, attained two advanced degrees, came out, attained his PhD, and went on to become a college professor, a dean of a college, and a published author. And so, by my father’s example, that is why I’m so passionate about family reunification and those bonds and re-entry programs and Second Chance Pell Grants – recognizing that there are so many brilliant people whose gifts are dying on the vine that are unjustly incarcerated because my father should have been met with culturally competent on-demand care, not incarceration.

And now as for my mother, in addition to the ways in which she poured into me – reading the speeches of Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm, being a tenants rights organizer through the Urban League of Chicago – I also had an incredible education with a front row seat into the indignities and injustices that my mother experienced as a Black woman and because I’m an only child, and it was really just sort of me and my mom versus the world. You know, it takes a lot of children to grow up and become an adult to see the humanity in their parent. I was there for my mother’s heart breaks. I was there for her hardship. I was a latch key kid home alone as young as five years old, and she would say, “You cannot tell anyone you were here alone, because they will take you away from me.” But she couldn’t afford childcare, right? I was also there when my mother was battling uterine fibroids, and the healthcare system would delegitimize her pain. She was forced into a radical hysterectomy when she did not need it, and I also remember the day she collapsed on the street because she returned to work too early and had not fully recovered.

And so, I saw the ways in which a broken government and broken systems and policy violence were showing up in my mother’s life every day. And so as far as my education, your parents are your first teacher. So, both through the consciousness of my parents and through the landscape that they navigated, I received an incredible education.

On Rep. Pressley’s journey in politics:

REP. PRESSLEY: I came here in 1992 to attend Boston University, so school is what brought me here. I like to say Chicago is the city that raised me, and Boston is the city that changed me. You know, it was in Boston that I sort of better crystallized my purpose, the contribution I wanted to make in the world.

And I was very active on campus, Student Government President, President of my College. I was charged with organizing a Martin Luther King Day celebration at Boston University. It was called a day on, not off, because it always bothered me that people treated it as an extended weekend, and because I had seen how many people worked for so long to make that a holiday.

So I said, I’m going to invite Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II and Congressman Barney Frank to this event. And I said, I believe in the – I’m an Aquarius, so I’m really into manifestation. And I said, I am going to get an internship with one of them. So, they both came into the room, and I’m just going to tell the truth, because I’ve said it to his face: Barney Frank scared the shit out of me. He was a complete curmudgeon. And I just was like, he’s brilliant. I love everything he’s doing on banking. That’s a no go. Okay. And so, you know, Congressman Joseph P Kennedy II greeted me with a “Hiya, pal!” and I said, this is the way I’m going. And my mother, who was very politically astute, had taught me all the work that Congressman Kennedy was doing on redlining. And so I approached him, and I said, I’d like to intern in your office. I secured this internship in his Roxbury satellite office. I showed up with a briefcase from Goodwill that was permanently locked. I never figured out that – I never figured out that combination. But I thought it was important to look the part. Ladies, do y’all remember a store called Hit or Miss? Okay, so I went to Hit or Miss, got my first little work situation, walked in with that permanently locked attaché case, landed that internship, and that internship changed the trajectory of my life.

Now, I should say, at that time, internships were unpaid, and most interns were the kids of donors. And so I’m so grateful that we have, now, through a lot of organizing, changed that to open it up so there’s no gate keeping, and all of our interns are paid a living wage.

So I was a student at Boston University, started as an intern for Congressman Kennedy. Ultimately, I was hired, and I became a constituent services Social Security liaison, advocating for our most vulnerable, our seniors, our veterans. Then I went on to work for United States Senator John Kerry for 11 years, and then served on the Boston City Council for eight years.

I’m not new to this, I’m true to this – and I’ve been doing this work of electoral politics and movement building, the work of freedom that my mother demanded of me for a very long time. So thank you to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for changing my life. It is also here where I found the love of my life, who is from Cambridge. So thank you Cambridge for the gift of my fine ass husband. But it was, it was here that I found the love of my life, put down roots, grew a family as well. 

On the Republican government budget bill:

JOSHUA: I want to talk about Democrats who seem very split, speaking of fight like hell, who seem very split between the House and the Senate these days, between the vanguard and the old guard. Why is there this split, and which of these two constituencies do you think will win out? And the context for this is the Senate passed the government funding bill that every single Democratic Representative, but one, voted against in the House. And the Senate, Chuck Schumer – I’ll let you describe what happened and how you see it. 

REP. PRESSLEY: Does anyone know what the word trifling means? It was trifling, it was outrageous, it was a betrayal. And this goes right back to the point I was making earlier, that when Democrats have the power, no matter how limiting your tools are in this moment, you have to leverage and exhaust every single one of them – because the American people are exhausted, and we need to be exhaustive.

The reason why there isn’t a narrative that the Democrats are out there fighting like hell is exactly because of reasons like that. Chuck Schumer stood with me and others in front of the Department of Treasury for, for an agitation, a mobilization effort, and linked arms with us and said, “We will win.” Not like that, Chuck – no, we won’t. No, we won’t.

So again, the other thing is that [Republicans] presented a false narrative that there were two options: this Republican manufactured shutdown, because that’s exactly what it was – they’re the reason we were on the brink of a shutdown which no one wanted – or this dangerous spending bill that is going to be a tsunami of hurt that everyone is going to feel. And that’s inaccurate. That was a false choice, because the Democrats had a 30-day stopgap spending bill that was on the table that we were ready to vote for.

JOSHUA: So you think Democrats had leverage that they did not use?

REP. PRESSLEY: Absolutely, and I don’t know how you win any fight when you started out by ceding ground. But I want you to know this is what I mean, because I hold myself accountable. When this vote was going down, or, you know, hours before it, and I was on the phone myself and my colleagues, we were calling Democratic senators and saying, “Hold the line.” I went on television and appealed to them as well. And I said, if you don’t want to listen to me, listen to your constituents. Listen to the appeals and cries of your constituents.

Y’all, the Massachusetts 7th Congressional District is an incredible district and one of the most unequal in the country. I have 220,000 Medicaid recipients in my district. 30% of the people the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are Medicaid recipients. So this is a denial of health care. People will get sicker, and people will die. I’m not being hyperbolic. Those are the facts. So you’re supposed to do everything.

The problem is that there was a false narrative that was presented that the choice was between this Republican rip off to cause harm to the people this country, to pat the pockets of billionaires, or this Republican manufactured shutdown. And that’s not true. So again, I’m very unhappy and very worried about the fallout of this.

Now you asked about the generational divide and that kind of thing. So two things. Again, I worked for Senator John Kerry 11 years. John Kerry was best friends with John McCain. This is not your grandma’s Republican Party, and I think that there are some Democrats that are still stuck in an old frame of bipartisanship being the goal. And I’m not a dolt, I understand the legislative process and why we need some of them again, appealing to people of conscience. I will sit at the table and work with anyone who is serious about progress and about the safety, the preservation and the health of our shared constituents, but so far, they have proven that they are unserious.

Bipartisanship is not the goal. The goal is justice. The goal is impact. And there are some people, again in their punditry and analysis of the election outcome, who have said the country sent a message that they want to see bipartisanship. Well, again, I reject that, but let’s say that were true, that was a partisan bad faith spending bill the Democrats had no input on that, and that’s exactly why it should have been stopped and rejected while we continued the work of negotiating for a bipartisan compromise.

So I want to say that there’s some Democrats that are stuck in an old frame. And then secondly, I ran for Congress because – and was elected under Trump’s first occupancy – and I ran because I felt the time demanded activist leadership, that it was not going to be enough to just vote the right way, that we were going to have to agitate, we were going to have to organize, we were going to have to resist, and that’s the moment we find ourselves in now.

How Democrats can fight the Musk-Trump agenda:

JOSHUA: Just in the last few days, the administration seemingly defied a direct federal court order. President Trump called for the judge’s impeachment. He said he no longer considers some pardons issued by Joe Biden to be valid. Definitely pressure testing the system in a big way. And I’m wondering because your constituent asks – what can you substantively do as a Member of Congress in the minority party in a not seeming to be so co-equal branch of government. In the face of all of it, what can you do? And what are you doing?

REP. PRESSLEY: Fight like hell.

You know, I keep returning to the words of Cecile Richards – daughter of you know, the great Ann Richards, Governor of Texas – leader of Planned Parenthood. I co-chair the House’s Reproductive Freedom Caucus. And when she was in the throes of her cancer fight, she was still out there organizing and fighting, and people said, “What are you doing here?” And she said, “There will come a time where the question will be asked, ‘What did you do when everything was at stake for the country?'” And she said, “the only acceptable answer will be everything that I could.”

And so I keep returning to that, because the strategy of this hostile White House administration in the midst of an active hostile government takeover is to overwhelm. It is to shock and awe. It is to get you to believe that these proposals, most of which are lawless, are inevitable, and in that overwhelm, that you will concede and that you will be resigned to a mindset of indifference and of inaction. That is the strategy. When we say that their strategy is to flood the zone, that is why these executive orders are coming out fast and furious. They mean to overwhelm us. They mean to suppress any organizing. They mean to suppress any outcry or resistance, which is why Donald Trump has now instructed them to not even do town halls.

So as part of our strategy, what’s happening now? Democrats are doing town halls in Republican districts to say that I will come here and be accountable to you, be accessible to you.

But the Republicans, it bothers me, because people keep asking me, do you see any opportunities for bipartisanship? Are we in the same reality? Where is there a party for bipartisanship? They are operating, Republicans in the House as cowards, complicit cowards, in wholesale harm to our shared constituents. They are operating as a cult. So no, I don’t see any opportunities. Because people that define government efficiency by making people hungrier, poor and sicker are not my kind of people.

So the Democrats, our defensive strategy is litigation, and we are winning a number of court cases. The second is legislation. So you take, for example, Elon Musk, unelected billionaire, his little grubby hands all over our data. We introduce the Taxpayer Data Protection Act. We just need three Republicans, and we can move legislation. Their majority in the House is just [three] Republicans, so we’re just appealing to them as people of conscience, do the right thing by the people who elected you and not operate with this fealty and loyalty to Donald Trump and cowering under his politics of retribution.

So our strategy is litigation, which again, we’re winning a number of the cases. Our defensive strategy – legislation and agitation and organizing. And as a member of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, I’ve been conducting real time oversight by showing up and resisting and agitating in the face of these dangerous and draconian proposals from dismantling our federal agencies to the unjust massive firing of our dedicated federal workers.

Why Democrats lost the 2024 election:

JOSHUA: You’ve been a Member of Congress now for six years, and this is not your first time as a progressive Democratic Representative during a Trump administration. But a lot more of the country voted for him this time around, and even in your district, one of the very most progressive, he did better last year than in 2020. Why do you think Donald Trump picked up more votes here and across the country in just about every group with voters knowing who he is?

REP. PRESSLEY: The reason why this isn’t an easy question is because we don’t all agree about why we lost. So what I see happening in real time. And I worry about is that Democrats will reflexively say: you know what, we need to moderate our aspirations. They’ll buy into this shallow punditry that we lost on social issues. I reject that categorically.

I believe we lost because it was more important to a lot of people to preserve white supremacy. And they were very skilled at advancing othering and a scarcity mindset. And so people knew that harm would come if they believed even a third of what was laid out in Project 2025, which was not a blueprint. It is a playbook which we see playing out in real time, but they just thought that they would be exempt from the harm.

And then I imagine there are people who believed what he told them, that he was going to lower the cost of prescription drugs and groceries and housing. So for people who did vote for Trump, I know no one gave him a mandate to operate with what I would consider the godlessness, the lawlessness and the callousness that he is in this moment. No one gave him that mandate.

And then I’m going to say another reason why I believe he won and we lost, Democrats, and we need to remedy this quickly. In my opinion, [Democrats] are afraid of power, and when you operate with scared power, it’s like having no power at all. We have had the House, we have had the Senate, we have had the White House, and we reserve the filibuster. We did not restore voting rights. We did not pass George Floyd Justice in Policing, and so many of the things that I could name. Donald Trump, even if he is just about moving fast and breaking things – he is transparent about the fact that he wants the power, he wants to amass the power, he wants to wield the power, he wants to manipulate, abuse, and exploit the power, but he wants the power – and in order for us to effectively rebuild this party and this coalition of voters, we have to also offer an affirmative – so that, I have to say, come back home and let’s, let’s rebuild this party. Because we need to get the gavel. We need to be back in power. Because when we have the power, we are going to do what, right?

I know Democrats have always had the better policies. We know that we have a messaging problem. The Republicans have played the long game of building a mass communications ecosystem that they have put money behind. They had a long game of not just the Supreme Court that they’ve enlisted as co-conspirators in their extremist march, but they also went after federal judgeships, district judgeships. And so to quote my brilliant Chief of Staff, Sarah Groh – Democrats don’t need any more policies. We need more strategy.

So yeah, I think we have to be unapologetic in the pursuit of power, and this is not the time to moderate our aspirations. This is not the time to play small. Democrats win when we deliver, when people feel the impact of our policies. Not because they read it in a press release, but because their life is improved by a permanent Child Tax Credit, by affordable and accessible child care, by access to fresh and healthy foods. Democrats win when you feel the impact of our policy.

So in my mind, we should go as far and as deep as the hurt. This is not the time to moderate.

And then finally, I’ll say, in this moment, as I try to distill a path forward, I find it helpful to look back and to look at movements and to look at earlier chapters in the Civil Rights Movement, which we are still very much in, to be clear. And what I have gleaned from studying those earlier chapters in the Civil Rights Movement is that every movement needs three things. You need imagination. So we’re doing radical work, but you have you need a radical dream. You need a North Star. Secondly, strategy. So you need imagination. You need strategy. And here’s the hard one, stamina. You need stamina. So those are just some of the things that I’ve been reflecting on.

How everyday people can stay engaged:

JOSHUA: We got 37 pages worth of constituent questions from your constituents. So I want to get to a few of them, and a big theme of them, of the hundreds of questions that came in was that people are scared and they’re angry and they’re looking to you, asking, what can they do to push back? What specifically can they do? People wrote in and said they used to feel like they could call their representative, they could call their senator, and it would make a difference. They don’t believe that anymore. What can they do to pushback? 

REP. PRESSLEY: Yeah, okay. First, I never want to dissuade you from calling, because even when you feel that it’s not impactful – it is. And I think you should call in two ways. First, if you reject something that we’re doing, make it known. But this is the part that doesn’t always happen. If you agree with something we’re doing, affirm that, because when you do that, it fortifies that member to continue taking those stances and doing those things. And other colleagues take note. Okay, so I want to encourage you to both express what you disagree with, but also affirm what you do agree with.

Then, educate yourself. There’s so much mis- and dis-information. Again, they’ve got an anti-freedom agenda. They want to control what you read, what media you access. They want to perpetuate lies and propaganda. So, educate yourself. That is huge, because the country is getting a civics lesson on steroids in real time. The fear that you talk about, the fear that I hear from constituents who are telling their child what to do if they come home and they’re not there whose house they should go to instead. Elders that are carrying all their medications around in case they are deported. People afraid to go to medical appointments, to work, their places of worship, children not going to school. The fear is palpable. It is real, and it is justifiable – and even when these lawless executive actions have been introduced and they’ve been beaten back, there’s still a chilling effect. So even if that executive action does not become law, people are moving as if it is. And that’s why educating yourself is so very important.

The third thing is, I keep returning to the pandemic and the things that we stood up in that moment, infrastructure, mutual aid, rapid response. These are the sorts of things that we need to stand up in this time. Get to know your neighbors. Dr. King posed that urgent question in one of his final writings – Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? Well, we’re in a moment of chaos, cruelty and callousness, and we have to choose community every single time to fortify ourselves, to strategize, to take care of one another, mutual aid. So those are some of the things I would offer sort of at a macro, but also at a micro. 

How we can remain hopeful:

JOSHUA: My final question for you tonight, Congresswoman, what gives you hope?

REP. PRESSLEY: Okay, what gives me hope? There’s an affirmation that one of my siblings in the movement gifted me during Trump’s first occupancy. And I say it every single day, and I want to give it to you because it is in this room, it is in this movement, that I find hope. We have to continue to choose community. It’s how we fortify one another. And as I said, we need to keep the imagination so it’s not just about radical work. It’s about radical dreaming, and it is about radical love, and we’re going to need community in this room and our neighbors more than ever before.

So the affirmation I want to leave with you is the following: “I choose the discipline of hope over the ease of cynicism. I choose the discipline of hope over the ease of cynicism. And I choose fortitude over fatalism.”

So I leave that with you, and I will just say – in the midst of this constitutional crisis, this civil rights crisis, where they’re coming to roll back gains and progress, and they’re coming for every single one of our rights – my appeal to you, I beg of you, is to not give them your joy too.

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