The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

Trudy fled her home in Africa in fear for her life. Her “crime” was supporting a candidate for president who was running against the incumbent leader. As her friends and family were being kidnapped, tortured and killed, Trudy decided to save herself and her 1 year old daughter. Seven years ago, she left her country. She arrived in the U.S., applied for and was granted political asylum, and is now a permanent resident in Vermont. Citing concerns about the safety of her relatives, Trudy asked to be identified by her first name.

One of President Donald Trump’s first acts was to shut down asylum and refugee admissions, accusing migrants of staging an “invasion.” The American Civil Liberties Union has since filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of violating legal obligations to offer refuge to those fleeing persecution.

“Those changes were introduced for the purpose of chilling the system, of scaring everyone into hiding, into retreat, into inaction, into panic, into self-deportation or self-harm,” said Jill Martin Diaz, an immigration attorney who is executive director of Vermont Asylum Assistance Project (VAAP), a legal services and advocacy organization. “Even though a lot of these executive actions will not survive scrutiny in court, just having passed them and created fear in our communities is already having a really chilling effect.”

Martin Diaz explained that there have recently been a number of arrests in Vermont by agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Agents have reportedly been showing up at supermarkets, gas stations and Western Union offices where migrant workers are known to frequent. VAAP has a form on its website to report ICE activity.

Vermont is home to several thousand asylum seekers, according to Martin Diaz.

Trudy explained that had she been sent back to her country, she considered giving up her daughter for adoption and then returning to "face the consequences.”

“When I got asylum, I got my life back,” Trudy said. “You have no idea what it feels like to be in a state where you don't know. Because most people who leave their countries to come here don't leave because they want to. For example, for me, I had everything. I had a good job, I'd gone to school. I don't come from a very poor family. I came here because of security reasons for my child and for me.”

Once she received asylum, “a whole burden fell off of me. I started my recovering process.”

Trudy now works as a business office manager and her daughter is in third grade.

“We are moving forward. We are looking towards the future. We are hopeful. We are happy. We are fine. We are really fine.”

President Trump’s gusher of executive orders upending government and targeting vulnerable people is spreading fear and anxiety. In just the last week, Trump has issued orders that would ban gender-affirming health care, effectively close the US Agency for International Development and threaten to close the federal Department of Education, fire career federal prosecutors, freeze some $3 trillion in federal grants, end birthright citizenship, block people from seeking asylum, and construct additional detention centers in Guantanamo Bay for thousands of immigrants to be held.

A headline in today’s New York Times proclaims, “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab.”

Yale historian Timothy Snyder is more direct: “Of course it’s a coup,” he proclaimed in his Substack.

And this is just the third week of Trump’s presidency.

Resistance has been steadily building, especially on the legal front. More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed by Democratic attorneys general, including Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups. A number of the legal challenges have succeeded in stopping Trump’s more audacious moves. A federal judge blocked the attempt to end birthright citizenship, declaring that it was “blatantly unconstitutional.”

James Lyall is executive director of the ACLU of Vermont (full disclosure: I am a board member of the ACLU of Vermont). Nationally, the ACLU has already sued the Trump administration over fast track deportation and restrictions on trans youth health care, birthright citizenship and asylum.

Lyall acknowledged the fear that has gripped vulnerable communities including immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and that his office has seen a sharp uptick in calls. But he believes there is reason for hope.

“The fact that so many people want to help and are reaching out to figure out how to support their neighbors and their communities when they feel so threatened right now, that's incredibly powerful,” he said.

“As difficult as it is in moments of uncertainty and fear and even chaos, it's that determination of everyday community members to support one another and to find a way forward that's just really powerful. That is what solidarity looks like.”

“Trump can say whatever he wants. It doesn't necessarily make it so. It's really important to remember that we have strong protections on the books,” he said. He urges people to know their rights.

“For all the progress we've made in recent years in Vermont, legislators can and do more to shore up our state-level defenses,” he advised.

Lyall urged people “not let ourselves or others just be overwhelmed by the chaos. Because that's an intentional part of their strategy.”

“Those who would seek to divide us or sow fear — we know how to get through this, and it's together,” he said. “That is what Vermont — the state of freedom and unity — that's what we are designed for. I just have a lot of faith in the state and its people to come together to get through hard times, and this is certainly one of them.”

Numerous refugees living in Vermont have lost support for food, rent and other basic needs after a funding freeze imposed by the Trump administration. Refugee assistance organizations lost access to federal funds on Monday, only to have a judge block the order on Tuesday, and have the government rescind the order on Wednesday. The situation has caused confusion and panic among newly arrived refugees, who are legal immigrants who often arrive here with nothing.

The federal refugee program assists people who have escaped war, natural disaster or persecution. Refugees typically receive reception and placement (R&P) funds in their first 90 days in the country. Newly arrived families in Vermont receive $1,650 in R&P funds that enables them to pay for initial housing, medicine, clothing and other basic needs. 

Last week, the Trump administration halted refugee admissions, stopped R&P payments, and suspended nearly all foreign aid.

The president of Oxfam America denounced the halt in foreign aid as “a cruel decision that has life or death consequences for millions of people around the world."

On Wednesday afternoon, facing furious backlash, the Trump administration rescinded its order that froze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans. But this did not restore the reception and placement funding, leaving 59 recently arrived families with few resources on which to survive. And as of Wednesday afternoon, some Vermont refugee groups were still unable to access federal funds to support their general operations.

On Tuesday afternoon, we spoke about what is happening to refugees in Vermont with Molly Gray, the executive of the Vermont Afghan Alliance, Yassin Hashimi, a program manager at the organization, and Sonali Samarasinghe, Field Office Director for the Vermont office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).

“What we've seen over the last week is a systematic abandonment of Afghan allies and refugees more generally,” said Gray. More than 600 people from Afghanistan, many of whom helped the U.S. in its diplomatic and military missions, have settled in Vermont following the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in 2021.

Samarasinghe said, “It is undeniable that our capacity is being diminished but we are fighting back to continue to support these efforts, to support our clients at least, and we are confident that with the support of Vermonters on the ground here, and we are beyond grateful for their generosity of spirit each and every day, we can meet these challenges.".

Yassin Hashimi was working on a project for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul before fleeing Afghanistan and coming to the U.S. in 2023. His parents have received approval to come to the U.S. but are stuck in Pakistan due to the Trump administration’s freeze on refugee programs. Hashimi has already rented an apartment around Burlington in anticipation of their arrival, but does not know when or if they will arrive. 

“Sometimes we have to be ready for the worst situation,” he reflected.

But he added, “We should not give up and we should keep fighting for the things which is right.”

Donald Trump launched his second term as president this week by enacting executive orders authorizing mass deportations, curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, withdrawing from climate accords and pardoning his supporters who assaulted Capitol police officers. Flanked by an assortment of the richest men on Earth, Trump's inauguration vividly symbolized the dawn of a new age of oligarchs.

This has many people — including the nearly two-thirds of Vermonters who voted against Trump — in despair.

Bill McKibben has long found hope and opportunity in the face of daunting challenges. As one of America’s leading climate activists, McKibben freely admits that he has lost more fights than he has won, as evidenced by the inexorably rising global temperatures and the proliferation of climate-fueled disasters, most recently in Los Angeles, where wildfires have burned over 40,000 acres and destroyed over 15,000 structures .

But McKibben keeps writing, organizing, and launching movements. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org that helped to stop major oil pipelines. And he launched a fossil fuel divestment movement that has resulted in more than 1,500 institutions with $40 trillion in assets committing to divesting from fossil fuels.

Four years ago, McKibben launched Third Act, a political movement of people over 60 to use their “unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.” The organization is now 100,000 volunteers strong.

“It feels to me as if a kind of arc of American history that began with the election of FDR has come to an end,” said McKibben. “The idea that America was a group project that we were working on together trying to make things better, always imperfectly, often dangerously for other parts of the world, but nonetheless a consistent effort to build a country that that worked, that feels like it's over and we're now in some new era where we do not understand what the goals are, what the rules are, what the ideas are, what the etiquette is. I mean, watching Elon Musk throw up a Nazi salute was a pretty breathtaking moment.”

McKibben said that currently immigration is one of his biggest concerns. “The thing that we should be saddest and scared about is what immigrants to this country must be feeling right now. The amount of fear there must be in people's homes every night when they go to bed, just that quanta of apprehension and fright, must be off the charts,” he said. “I don't know quite how we're going to be able to come to the defense of people, but I hope that we can figure out some ways to do it in the longer term.”

McKibben added that his other big concern is “the single deepest problem facing the planet, and that's its rapidly escalating temperature.”

Trump declared in his inaugural speech that he was declaring an “energy emergency.” 

“Of course, that's absurd,” said McKibben. “We have no shortage of energy. We're producing more oil and gas than we've ever produced before. The real problem, the real urgency, is that the people who control that oil and gas are worried that we might use less of it someday.”

“We're in an emergency," he continued, "but it's not the one that he's describing. The emergency that we're in, obviously, is the one that drove temperatures higher in 2024 than they've ever been before, and the one that set our second largest city on fire.”

McKibben said that Trump and his oil industry backers hope “that they can get another 10 or 20 years out of their business model even at the cost of breaking the planet, because that's clearly going to be the cost.”

McKibben noted that the fossil fuel industry is losing a race against the burgeoning renewable energy sector, in which China I leading the way with cheap solar panels and electric vehicles. “Every day on this Earth people are putting up solar panels equivalent to a nuclear power plant. ... We've roughly doubled the pace at which we're putting renewables up, and we need to roughly triple it in order to get back on a kind of Paris (climate accord) pathway. But it's a remarkable, remarkable change.”

McKibben observed that even in a hostile political environment “we also need to just celebrate where we are, the fact that we do live at a moment when we could make this decisive turn towards the sun and towards the wind, where we could reconnect with the natural world as the source of our power.”

McKibben is the author of some 20 books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He writes regularly for the New Yorker at his Substack, The Crucial Years. His latest book is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.” McKibben is the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College.

“I don't think that we're actually going to be able in the short term to defy Trump's energy regime. I don't think we can prevent them from doing lots of drilling. I think the place where his ideas are weak and vulnerable is precisely in the fact that now we know how to make the same product — energy — just cleaner and cheaper and more beautifully. And if we can hammer on that, then maybe we'll get somewhere despite it all.”

The 2024 election was a political tsunami that washed across the country and Vermont. The Green Mountain State led the national anti-incumbent wave: More Democrats lost seats in Vermont than in any other state, with more than two dozen Democratic state lawmakers losing their re-election bids. Though Democrats still retain the majority in the State House, the election erased the Democratic supermajorities enjoyed in both chambers of the Vermont legislature.

In addition, Republican John Rodgers won Vermont’s Lt. Governor race, defeating incumbent Progressive/Democrat David Zuckerman. It is the first time an incumbent lieutenant governor in Vermont has been defeated in over two centuries.

The 2024 election has reshaped statewide politics. Republicans now control the top two elected offices in Vermont and Democrats no longer have the ability to override vetoes by Republican Gov. Phil Scott.

Confrontation and stalemate that has often characterized the politics around tax reform, housing, and energy must now yield to compromise.

“One of the things that struck me was that (Gov.) Phil Scott has had pretty much a singular message since he got in, and I do believe that Vermonters have a certain amount of trust in him on the issue of property taxes and the related issue of education finance. And what we had never seen from the governor were detailed proposals on his part,” Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth told the Vermont Conversation. 

So Baruth made an offer: he would give the governor the first week of the legislative session to present his ideas to the Senate.

“To his great credit, he has taken us up on that,” said Baruth, noting that this is a departure from the governor’s past practice of “letting us go through an exercise of four or five months work and then vetoing it and demanding that we revise it on the fly at the end.”

“My hope is that we'll take the governor's plan, which is detailed, complex (and) has multiple moving parts, and we will marry it with our own ideas, and we'll reach compromise with not just the governor, but with all three major parties.”

Is Baruth willing to do things that would have made him uncomfortable five or 10 years ago?

“Yes, absolutely,” he replied. He cited as an example his changing approach to education funding. Part of the problem is that “Montpelier has no authority over (school) districts so they make their own budgets. They spend as much as they want, as long as their voters will approve them. They are sovereign in a certain sense. If they don't want to close a building with 22 kids in it, they can have a principal and a superintendent there. But we've reached a point where that doesn't work anymore. The system won't bear that, so we have to have some levers in Montpelier to control spending.”

Democratic House Speaker Jill Krowinski added, “Everything's on the table. We can't come into this with topics that we can't touch or that are off the table … It's gotta be bold, and we have to be open minded about it.”

When it comes to education funding, Krowinski said that she has “been talking with members about showing up wearing our statewide hats, because it's going to have to be a statewide solution, and there's going to be a need for some pretty big compromise here to make a difference.”

“Why I'm optimistic is because everyone is talking about this, everybody is agreeing that we have to tackle it this session and that is the most critical thing we can do right now to support our communities and our families who are struggling,” she added

Regarding the housing crisis, which has left some Vermonters sleeping in tents in frigid winter conditions, Baruth said that Vermont has spent $1.5 billion on housing in the last five years that was enabled by Covid relief money. “That has never been done in Vermont history.”

“There is a small explosion of housing going on,” said Baruth. “It's not going to get us to the ultimate place, but we're about a third of the way there with this last huge infusion of money, and that's no small thing.”

Krowinski said that the House “will be looking at how we can modernize our general assistance program and supporting more shelter capacity. What can we do to ensure that we have the beds that we need for folks that are unhoused? It's been an expensive program and we haven't been seeing the outcomes that we thought we might see and we were hoping for.”

“We're going to have a tough budget year,” she predicted.

Krowinski acknowledged that many Vermonters are on edge about changes and threats being made by President-elect Donald Trump targeting immigrants, abortion rights, and his political opponents.

“My message to Vermonters right now is that we have your back and we will do anything we can within our power if we see threats to Vermonters,” she said.

“We're in this together, and we have a lot of things that we can do to help protect us if those threats come through,” she said.

“So hang in there. We'll get through this.”

Myra Flynn performs on many stages, shape shifting between music and journalism. She is an accomplished songwriter andsinger, performing soul, jazz and indie pop with five albums to her credit. She is also a journalist with a unique voice in Vermont’s media landscape. She is executive producer and host of Homegoings, a program on Vermont Public that launched in 2021 and brands itself as a “righteous space for art and race.” She has also worked as a features reporter at the Burlington Free Press.

Flynn, 40, grew up in Brookfield, Vermont, the daughter of an Irish father and an African American mother. She signed her first songwriting deal at age 16, attended Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and now divides her time between California, where she lives with her husband and 5 year old daughter Avalon, and Vermont, where she works for Vermont Public and does most of her musical performances. I caught her in one of her concerts this summer at a farm in Montgomery, Vermont. Her soulful blues singing is interspersed with a breezy repartee about life, politics, motherhood and relationships.

In her journalism, Flynn fearlessly delves into sensitive topics. She explained about her work in Homegoings, “I wanted to find a way to talk about race that was going to speak in a language that everyone understood and wasn't going to make anyone feel shame or fear around talking about it, that they could boldly participate in the conversation.” 

Then she had an epiphany. “That universal language is art. That's how we talk about race. It always has been art that's bridged this gap.”

Last year Flynn did a four-part series on Homegoings on “stereo anti-types,” her term for “the dangerous stereotypes that apply to Black men.” This includes the myth of the scary Black man, the stupid Black man, and the deadbeat dad.

“Black men ..are categorically more harmed in America...by these myths that become real life,” she explained.

Many of Flynn’s stories have an autobiographical component, such a s a show that she hosted about surviving the music industry as a woman of color, a program about preserving one’s culture in a predominantly white state, and another about the “biracial conundrum.”

That conundrum is “just having to choose between the Black or the white race, because it's two of the most opposing races in the world inside of your body. And so you are literally holding history in your blood and in your bones.”

Flynn reflected that in this time of deep polarization, she is “looking forward to whatever personal revolutions for artists come out of this,” such as happened in the 1960s and 70s. “I just want to hear people keep talking about our lives in real time and documenting our history as artists with a sense of responsibility.”

She said that “as a journalist it is my job to be of service to all people who have a story … especially to folks who have less of a voice in all of it. So in some ways, I'm really inspired to get to do the work that I do, and to get to be the person who either has the mic or is passing the mic for really important voices to be heard.”

The acclaimed author Julia Alvarez is the longtime writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her novels include, “How The García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies.” She's also a prize-winning poet, children's author and essayist.

Alvarez’s most recent novel, “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” was published in 2024 and will be published in paperback in April 2025.

Alvarez’s family was forced to flee from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. when her father was implicated in a plot to overthrow the dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Alvarez graduated from Middlebury College in 1971 and earned her Masters in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She returned to Middlebury College in 1988 as a full-time faculty member.

Alvarez is a founder of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Alvarez’s work has earned her numerous awards, including a National Medal of the Arts that she received from President Obama in 2014.

I spoke with Alvarez on New Year's Eve 2014. I asked her to share her New Years Resolution.

“Something that I'm really asking myself at this stage of my life with the time left me, with whatever skills I've cultivated over a lifetime of serving an apprenticeship, how do I want to use that skill? How do I want to marshal those resources so that I feel like I'm helping the next generation that is coming after me? … What are the stories we need to be hearing to come together as a human family?" she replied.

"It's those kinds of questions I'm at least asking myself and committed to in the new year and the years to come to try to understand and to work with.”

This Vermont Conversation was originally published on Nov. 23, 2022.

Santa Claus is coming to town. But the person shimmying down the chimney may not be the rotund, bearded white man who has long played the role of St. Nick.

“Santa Camp” is a new documentary from HBO Max about an effort to diversify who represents Santa Claus. The story begins at the annual summer camp of the New England Santa Society, which represents more than 100 Christmas performers. The Santas realized that they need to look more like some of the communities that they serve. So they welcomed three new Santas: Chris Kennedy, a Black Santa from Arkansas; Levi Truex, aka Trans Santa, from Chicago; and “Santa Fin” Ciappara, a Santa with spina bifida who communicates via an iPad, joined by his mother Suki Ciappara, both from Barre.

Santa Fin always dreamed of being Santa in a parade. The movie captures the day in December 2021 when his dream came true and he sat in a sled pulled by elves in the River of Light parade in Waterbury. 

“Believe in your dreams and don't give up,” he said. "Be kind to people who are different."

For some, diversity is a threat. Kennedy set up an illuminated, inflatable Black Santa Claus display in his yard. Soon after, he received a racist letter. That motivated him to become Black Santa. 

“You're not going to steal my joy,” he told The Vermont Conversation. 

"I'm appealing to families who want diversity and want to see themselves represented or their adoptive kids want to see themselves represented. That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for the naysayers,” Kennedy said said.

The documentary showed the “Proud Boys” protesting Trans Santa Levi Truex outside the Chicago church where he was greeting children last year. Truex talked about violence directed against LGBTQ+ people, which continues to rise. The FBI reported that 2023 was the second year in a row that more than 1 in 5 of all hate crimes were motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ bias.

“We've always experienced hate. It's what makes us resilient. It's what makes us get louder and push harder,” he said. “The more that we feel the pressure from the hate, the more we're just going to be even more visible and more open. It's just what needs to happen.”

Truex believes that Trans Santa makes a difference, especially for the LGBTQ+ children who visit him. 

“I don't have an agenda to make your kids trans or whatever. My agenda is purely to spread joy and just be a good person, to be a good human. And to treat people with respect and dignity and just spread the love of Christmas,” he said.

For Noah Dines, life has been an uphill climb. And that is his dream come true.

Dines, a 30 year-old Stowe local, is in the process of setting a new world record for human powered vertical feet skied in one year. The previous record had been 2.5 million feet set in 2016 by Aaron Rice, another Stowe skier. Dines broke Rice’s record in September, then surpassed his original goal of skiing 3 million feet in October, broke 1 million meters — or 3.3 million feet — in early December, and will wrap up the year having skied 3.5 million feet.

Uphill skiing is known as skinning, so named for the strips of material that attach to the bottom of skis that enable skiers to glide uphill without slipping backwards. They used to be made from seal skins, hence the name skinning. Skinning up ski area trails has become a popular form of exercise in recent years, and backcountry skiers also use skins to travel where there are no lifts.

Dines began his uphill skiing quest on New Years Day 2024 just after midnight. He turned on his headlamp, snapped on his lightweight alpine touring skis and quietly skied off into the night up the trails of Stowe Mountain Resort. He has spent this year chasing snow around the world, from Vermont, to Oregon, Colorado, Europe and Chile. He has skied all but about 30 days this year. A typical day has him skiing uphill about 10,000 feet. At Stowe, that means he skis at least five round trip laps per day, often more. He will finish his quest at the end of this month and will be joined in his last days by his father, who has never skied uphill before.

I met up with Noah Dines on December 17 at the base lodge at Spruce Peak at SMR. It was raining, but Dines was still skiing.

“If you bail when it rains all the time, then you're not getting everything you could,” he said.

Dines explained that his record quest has required “a lot of saying no” to everything from friends’ weddings to having a beer, from which he has abstained. “Your response to anything has to do with, how will this affect my big year?” he said.

Conceding that "the money has definitely been hard," Dines has supported himself during his year of chasing snow through sponsorships from Fischer Skis, Maloja clothing and Plink electrolyte drinks. He also raised $10,000 through a GoFundMe and has drawn down his savings.

What has a year of living strenuously meant? 

"Friendships. I've met so many incredible people. It's meant learning how to persevere and work harder than I've ever worked before. It's meant seeing beautiful sunsets in Chile. It's meant cold mornings and crisp Alpine air. In Europe, it's meant croissants on the side of a mountain. It's meant more time with friends in Stowe."

By pursuing a dream, Dines hopes that he can be a model for others. “I have a passion and I pursued it and I've pushed myself as hard as I can, and you can too,” he said. “It doesn't have to be with sports or take a year, but there's no reason that you can't set goals and meet them, that you can't push yourself just because you didn't grow up doing it.”

What will the million meter man do to start 2025?

“Well first and foremost, I'll take a little nap, at least for an afternoon.”

Ben Jealous has a long and deeply personal perspective on the fight for social and environmental justice.

Jealous was elected president and CEO of the NAACP in 2008 at the age of 35, making him the youngest person to lead America’s oldest civil rights organization. Since 2022, he has been the executive director of the Sierra Club, the first person of color to lead one of the country’s oldest and largest environmental organizations.

In exploring his own history, Jealous learned that he is a descendent of Robert E. Lee and a former slave. He told this personal story in a memoir published last year, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing.”

Jealous has been working on the front lines of American politics. He was a surrogate for Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, and in 2018 ran unsuccessfully to be governor of Maryland.

After election day this year, Jealous wrote a letter to his children, nieces and nephews. He reassured them, “All of you descend from families that have been here since the very beginning of our nation and have survived and ultimately triumphed over tougher times.”

Jealous told The Vermont Conversation that he hoped to give his young family members “a little bit of the wisdom I got from my grandparents. Which is, whatever we're dealing with, it's been worse in this country and we still triumph over it. And I also wanted them to understand that our obligation was to fight.”

Jealous was in Vermont this weekend where he spoke at an event sponsored by the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club.

Jealous blames Kamala Harris’s loss on her failure to champion people’s everyday economic concerns that Bernie Sanders had centered in his presidential campaigns. “What was clear back in 2016 is that Bernie's focus on the betrayal that was NAFTA, on the need for a better health care system, and on the need, most importantly, to really center kitchen table issues that vex all families across this country was something that was having a transformative and realigning impact on the electorate.”

“Corporate Democrats are afraid of that,” Jealous continued. "They are really dominated by a set of consultants who are as addicted to power as they are to corporate cash and they really make it hard for mainstream Democrats to deviate from that.”

Jealous said that under Trump, progressives need to work with people with whom they disagree and who make them uncomfortable. He cited his work with conservative senators to advance environmental issues.

“Hope is a discipline,” said Jealous. “My grandmother, who was the granddaughter of three enslaved people and a white man in Virginia, she would always say pessimists are right more often. But optimists win more often.”

Jealous said that his grandmother “saw life like a boxing match. Any battle usually has like 12 rounds. And if you got in every round expecting to get beat up and knocked down, you probably quit by the fourth.”

“But if you got in every round thinking that this might be the round you don't get knocked down, that you're focused on the victory, and by the time you get to the 12th you realize all you got to do is be the last one standing, at the end of that round, you've won everything.”