Impeachment From the Bottom Up
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When I opened up the show's voicemail box this week, the main thing I learned is that you all are energized. Hi, Mary. My name is Teresa White, and I'm calling from Vermont. I attended the hands-off protest in Denver. I'd asked you to call in and tell me if you'd been part of the protests that took place this weekend. I participated in two rallies this weekend, and we had several thousand people in downtown Boise.

I wanted to know how all of it made you feel. We are generally a red state, a red county. There was a much bigger turnout than we had anticipated. It was very freeing. It gave us a lot of hope. There were about 3,100 people in front of our little city hall in Lakewood on Saturday for Hanza. The energy was freaking amazing.

I wanted to know who you'd met. I took the light rail in from the suburb outside the city and light rail trains were so packed. And there was a man from a rural part of the state who said he'd never been to a protest and never been on the light rail. But he saw the coverage of the protest on the news that morning and drove an hour and a half and took his first trip on the light rail and his first trip to a protest to come be a part of it because he said it was too important to miss.

But listening to all your messages, the hardest question to answer was what everyone was out there for. Because each of you had your own asks about funding cuts, about doge, about tariffs.

I think like the big problem that the resistance or the opposition right now to Trump's agenda is having is like it is very unclear what people are ultimately trying to fight for. I called up Gabe Garbowit to talk about this challenge.

He's a former Senate staffer. He's been thinking about this messaging issue a lot, about what protesters are going to demand. Is it to just slow down the madness so that it is more manageable, all the chaos that's happening? Or is it like ultimately the goal is to make sure that

Trump is so unpopular, he will be removed from office. And I think if it's that second thing, I think that has not really been clearly stated yet. You're trying to fix that. Yes. Yes. That is exactly what I'm trying to do. Gabe has a familiar solution here. Something that's been tried before. Twice, actually. I saw this comment on Blue Sky that right now Donald Trump is speedrunning all the grievances that are ticked off in the Declaration of Independence. Yeah.

Like you could say he's imposing taxes on people without their consent. You could say he's trying to cut off trade with the rest of the world, depriving a whole bunch of people of due process. And it does raise this question, like, if only we had a remedy for that. Yes, and we do. It's yeah, it's in the Constitution. It's impeachment and then removal from office if he's convicted in the Senate.

Today on the show, can Gabe activate enough people that when it comes to impeachment, third time's the charm? I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next? Stick around. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, hoping it all works out?

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Investing is risky. Robinhood Financial LLC member SIPC is a registered broker-dealer. Trading during extended hours involves additional risks. Other fees may apply. So a little bit about Gabe before we begin. He got his official start in politics by working as a field organizer for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

After that, he landed a job as a digital communications guy for Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota.

But the moment he became politically activated, he traces that back to a formative experience at his small liberal arts college in St. Paul. My first real experience getting involved in politics was a referendum campaign on my school's campus. It was over a contract that one of the organizations at our school had where they got a special funding deal for

I just couldn't believe that this was part of our tuition. It was a part of our student activity fees, the $6 charge that was going to this organization. It was the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group at the time. It sounds so vanilla. It sounds so benign.

They were supposed to be like student advocates. So it was supposed to be, hey, our money is going into this. And the reason why we're doing it is that way you have a voice in politics for our school. But we literally had no way of knowing what they were spending the money on. And they refused to disclose the finances for it. Like what was ultimately the thing that set me off and like, okay, I'm going to do a campaign over this is...

They were required to do a town hall where they were supposed to explain their activities to the student body. And they just skipped it. They just decided not to even do a town hall. So you organized a vote no campaign on campus so students could somehow eject this nonprofit from your business, stop charging you this $6 fee?

What they were required to do is every three years, they were supposed to have a referendum. And they could set the ballot language for themselves, and they could set the date of the referendum. And they had won those referendums very easily every single time since the 1970s when the contract was first created with the campus. We just kind of decided, well, let's see if we can do something different this time. It was kind of one of those things where I thought, okay,

something maybe can be done about this. And who's talking about this? Not that many people are talking about it. If I brought this argument and I thought more people heard it, I actually thought that, yeah, they would be convinced by it because I was convinced by it. After you graduated, you ended up working for Tina Smith in D.C. I imagine you don't do that without being a little bit idealistic.

What did you expect when you got to the Senate as a staffer and what did you find? Part of the reason why I ended up working there, which was in 2018, is when I started. I was just so shocked by everything that was happening with Trump. And I think from the get-go, I was a little disappointed that I didn't feel that a lot of the staffers in Congress, the senior staffers in Congress, I should say, were

were super committed to working towards the right thing. I think they had been, for whatever reason, they'd just been in the system for a very long time and had gotten very numb to all the consequences of the things that happened out of Washington. Give me a concrete example of something you saw where you're like, hold it, this is an easy thing to do. Why aren't we doing it? I remember this very distinctly during the Biden administration. There was some deal on the debt ceiling. And rather than work out

some deal that would have funded more government programs. Everybody just kind of wanted to go home for, they were like, it's going to take too long to work out all these details. And so they came to a deal that was more favorable towards the Republicans and just decided to go home for the week. And there was a lot of that sort of thing. There was a lot of prioritizing overall comfort, I think,

in the political sphere over actually doing something that could have really benefited a lot of people. You were working in D.C. during Trump's first administration, so you actually got a pretty close-up view of his impeachments. What did that experience teach you?

First off, on the first trial, we were told and the senators were told, and that was how they acted, is like, do not show that you believe that he is guilty. What? That was the messaging down from on high. That would be like the opposite message if you were a prosecutor. Like prosecutors are supposed to make their case. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Very true. But the idea was the Democrats wanted to be seen as like neutral arbiters and

And like that they were carefully weighing the evidence, even though they very, you know, almost everybody had made up their mind before any of the opening arguments be in. You talked about how that kind of bled into how the trial was conducted, how it was kind of boring for even for you, someone who is interested in the proceedings. Yeah.

It was extremely boring. I was so excited to go watch it. And I did. I watched some of it from the galleries. So that's like kind of the seating up on high. I remember walking in there and sitting down and I was just like, oh, they had actually worked out a deal about how the cameras where they could be pointed. So it wouldn't show just how bored the senators were.

But yeah, when I went in there, there was Senator Knapping. I believe it was Richard Burr. And there was Tom Cotton was spinning a fidget spinner. You're not giving me a lot of faith that impeachment is an answer to much of anything right now. Well, the reason for all this is because the trial was actually boring. It was just like a lot of like really boring exhibits of evidence and just done in a very strange way.

Everybody was sort of like a little confused because it's not really like a court case because there's not really it's all politics. So like all the rules are out the window. There's not even like a known evidence standard. Right. Like it's not like you're supposed to convict him if he's guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It was a fairly boring thing. And after about an hour of watching it, I was like, OK, all right. Well, I saw it and that's kind of it.

Things were speedier the second time around after January 6th, right? Some of it was shortened because the senators didn't want to prolong it. They wanted to get on with getting Joe Biden's nominees in place. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of the reasons. There's a very famous story about how Chris Coons was not interested in

allowing more witnesses at the trial because he said he, like a bunch of senators, wanted to go home for Valentine's Day. Senator Chris Coons, close ally of Joe Biden, senator from Delaware. That's correct. Did you feel like the Democrats had learned from the first impeachment the second time around?

A little bit. I think like what really changed, not necessarily from the top of the chain, but there was a little more push, like this was a really bad thing that happened and we really should try to make an argument about it. And there's a reason why it went from...

I believe like 48 votes were for conviction the first time around. The second time around, it was 57. One thing that probably would have increased the likelihood that he actually would have been convicted at the trial is if the Senate chose not to adjourn for two weeks immediately after January 6th by unanimous consent. There was a big pause, and that pause is really what killed a lot of the momentum going into that second impeachment trial. After the break...

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So let's talk about your effort now. What are you calling this push to file articles of impeachment against Trump? I think of it as just like a citizen's impeachment. Al Green, who is someone who's actually he's interested in filing impeachment articles in the next 30 days.

He said this is going to be something that has to come from the grassroots up. It's not going to come from the top down. Operation Anti-King was the idea that why don't we just start asking these offices what their position is on impeachment.

It was a plan that I wrote up and we actually just executed on, I guess, is the way to describe it this week. So explain how this is supposed to work, because my understanding is you actually have drafted an article of impeachment and it could be real legislation. Right.

And then as part of your effort, you're recruiting people who live in every district of the country to reach out to their elected congresspeople regularly. So tell me how all of this fits together.

My idea was, let's just see if we can recruit people from every single congressional district in the United States to send an email to their member of Congress asking what their position is on impeachment. You have two questions, right? Do you support impeaching Donald Trump? And will you make that support clear with a public statement? That's right. How did people respond when you reached out to, you know, citizens all over the place and were like, hey, will you do this? Like, were you able to get every district in the country?

I was not able to get every district in the country in one week. There were people from every single state

emailed their member of Congress. And I believe it was over 300 congressional districts that ended up doing it. That's pretty good, given that, what, there's 400-odd congresspeople? How many are there now? 435. So you recruited all these people. They emailed folks. What did they hear back? Did they hear anything back? Maxine Waters' office got back saying that they did support impeaching the president. Hank Johnson's office got back saying the same thing.

Sam Liccardo, who's a freshman member, their office also got back telling us that, yeah, they supported impeaching the president. Part of the strategy was that afterwards you wanted folks to write to their local papers and either cheer on representatives who'd said, yes, I want to impeach Donald Trump or complain about representatives who didn't. Why was that important?

That's the part that hasn't happened yet. I did just send out the guide yesterday for everybody to start doing it.

I mean, ultimately, big picture, right? Like all these members of Congress, they want to know like what their constituents are thinking about things. And they have like various signals that they use to determine that. A huge one is what is written in the local press about them. It happens literally all the time that like members sign on to bills because there was something in a letter to the editor about it or some local piece about it in their paper about some legislation connecting it to that.

The idea is, well, why don't these people who wrote in and asked what these people think, if they responded to it, great. If they haven't responded or given no comment, why don't the citizens that wrote in, why don't they just talk to their local paper and have a bulletin out saying, hey, I did this and this person didn't respond and I would like them to respond? Is it worth talking about?

what your article of impeachment is all about. It's about tyranny, right? And it's really clear. It talks about all the ways that Donald Trump is operating, not in the traditional role that I think a lot of Americans expect a president to operate in. He's acting with a lot more authority, much more authority, by your understanding, than the Constitution grants him.

It's a bigger charge, I think, even than either previous article of impeachment that was filed against him. Yes. And I should say, I did not write this article. I tried to write an article, but I was not a legislative staffer myself. I reached out to someone who's a

constitutional law scholar and also does a lot of like election law work and helped write the Electoral Count Act, which passed through Congress, Andy Craig. And I asked him, I'm like, hey, are you thinking at all about like impeachment articles? And a few days later, he showed me, I think it was actually seven articles that he had drafted. But the one that really stood out to me

Was this tyranny thing because of what you just said? I felt it really got like a lot closer to who this person is and why their behavior is so existentially horrifying for the future of our republic. Do you feel like the people who you've recruited to call their representatives are

Do you feel like they're fired up? Like, what are they telling you about? Because it seems like such a small thing you're asking them to do, right? You're sending an email. You ask them to do it all at the same time. I'm not sure how that affects everything, but it's interesting. Then write a letter to the editor. It's like small steps. But what are they telling you about doing this work?

One thing we on the forum on the sign up, I was curious myself. So I asked, why did you sign up for this? And we got like a very wide range of responses. Like some people were like, yeah, I like the idea of like doing a small action that I feel can concretely help in some way.

I think one of the reasons why it resonated with a lot of people was because I directly explained why I thought it might work. I had people who were telling me they were a federal worker that was fired and they are just so horrified by

There was a lot of people telling me about how they care deeply about their children and their grandchildren's future. And they felt this was the first thing that they saw that they felt like directly connected to the feelings that they had been experiencing about what had been coming out of the federal government. Yeah, there were a few of them that I really was very moved by. If all of your volunteers called their representatives back next week, emailed them,

Do you think they'd find change? Do you think there would be one more representative, two more, who could get behind the impeachment idea? I do, actually. There are...

Absolutely more people who would actually be willing to vote for an impeachment article in the Congress than the people who have replied back. And I can have a pretty good sense of this because when Al Green brought impeachment articles in 2018, they were over racist comments that Trump had made in Charlottesville and Puerto Rico. There were 58 votes in the Congress willing to do that.

And while those comments that Trump made were very terrible, probably is not like the big thing that will get him removed. And something like an article about tyranny, I'm not like wedded to that has to be the article that they use by any stretch of the imagination. But yeah, something like that, that I think is a little more like getting to the real depths and heart of like who he is.

And all the other bad things he's done flow from that. I'm incredibly sure that there will be more support out there. I got to ask, if you got your wish, if there were impeachment articles filed tomorrow, if an impeachment actually happened, you'd still have J.D. Vance in charge. You'd still have all these people in the cabinet there. I'm kind of fascinated by this part because this is actually the most common thing

objection I get is that J.D. Vance would be worse than Trump. I do not think that he is worse than Donald Trump. I just can't. I don't understand how people like, especially after watching Trump getting forcibly wheeled out of the White House because he was convicted by the Senate. It is like impossible for me to imagine that somehow J.D. Vance comes in as like, oh, well, now let's double down even harder on all of this. That doesn't quite track to me. But the other thing I would say about it is like,

In South Korea, they impeached their president. And then the second in line, there was also a lot of problems with them. And they just got rid of the second in line, too. You're dreaming big. I mean, yeah. But if we're already getting to this point, right? Like...

I know that like people, a lot of people I don't think can quite see in their heads, like the mechanism that it can get to the point where Trump is getting removed from office. But yeah, if he's getting removed from office, there's a lot of possibilities that open up. Anyone ever called you quixotic? I definitely like I have an ability, I think, to like imagine things that are like big things changing. Right.

I'm not telling you I am guaranteeing that we are going to get to removing Trump from office. There is an excellent chance that he just cements his control over everything. Maybe he does get that third term that he keeps talking about so much. And yeah, we're just under this for the rest of my lifetime. I often can think of different possibilities than I think a lot of other people can think

And I am like, okay with like saying that aloud. And I also think like in general, these things don't happen just magically. They happen because people call and demand for something and they push for something. And that plays a role, right? Like we're not just all passive observers in our political future. Gabe, I'm really grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah. Yeah. My pleasure.

Gabe Garbowit is a political organizer and former Senate staffer. And that's our show. What Next is produced by Paige Osborne, Alana Schwartz, Rob Gunther, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Ethan Oberman. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations here at Slate. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky if you'd like. I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.

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