Greg Casar won reelection to the Austin City Council the same year that Donald Trump won his first term in office. The son of Mexican immigrants, Casar made clear he had no plans to entertain the whims of an incoming president who had made vitriol against his community a centerpoint of his political persona.
“Lots of people, including Donald Trump, are calling for healing and unity today, ” Casar, then 27, wrote the day after the 2016 election. “I won’t call for healing. I’m calling for resistance.”
Resistance has continued to define the career of the local organizer-turned-progressive politician who earlier this month was elected to replace Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) as leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Casar has long opposed Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s inhumane crusade against undocumented immigration. He backed policy reforms protecting immigrants in Austin from increased targeting by law enforcement, granting them legal counsel, and was arrested for protesting S.B. 4 — a law that would allow Texas police to arrest undocumented migrants. Casar won a House seat in Washington, D.C., in 2022, in a landslide victory after running a deeply progressive campaign — especially by Texas’ standards — highlighting criminal justice reform, workers rights, and his support for Medicare for All. He won his district again with 63 percent of the vote this November.
Casar, now 35, has now been tapped to lead the House Progressive Caucus at a crucial juncture, as Democrats wrestle with how to respond to Trump winning a second term in office. Casar recently spoke to Rolling Stone about his belief in a way forward. As the incoming Trump administration plans sweeping, draconian transformations of the nation, Casar holds that it is Democrats’ responsibility not only to obstruct the worst of the MAGA agenda but to take on a serious reimagining of the party — one that recenters the needs of working-class Americans and shucks off corporate interests. Casar believes progressives can “supercharge” this push within the party, and tell the real story of what is responsible for what ails America, rather letting Trump and his cronies control the narrative and scapegoat immigrants and other marginalized groups.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
There’s been a lot of talk about what went wrong for Democrats this year, and where the party should be going. There’s also a lot of anxiety that this defeat will be taken as a sign that the party needs to pivot rightward, and align themselves more with the Republican approach to immigration, the economy, and social issues. What do you think the party should be focusing on right now?
I’ll caveat this with two important points. One is that Republicans have a huge responsibility for what happened in the election in that they lied at every opportunity they could. They had an enormous propaganda machine, and they did everything they could in Congress to make things not work so that they could then complain about things not working. I expect they’re going to continue to do exactly that, and we can’t change that behavior in the short term. So the question is: What do Democrats do if that’s what Republicans are going to continue to do?
The second caveat is that it’s clear Democrats have started losing many of the working-class voters who are really the base of the party, and we’ve been losing those voters across race, across ideology. You have more and more disaffected voters choosing to not participate at all, and even some who voted for Joe Biden or Barack Obama who chose to vote for Donald Trump. If you want to win, you just can’t have that happen.
I think it’s a moment of soul searching in Washington for Democrats. There are some of us that are really trying to figure out what we should have done differently. And having just been elected chair of the Progressive Caucus, you might expect me to say that we should have just been more progressive. I’m actually here to argue that the party doesn’t need to necessarily run further left or further to the right. We just need to run directly at the issues of working-class people and be authentic leaders for that.
I think that going and trying to pretend to be Republican-light, or to just discriminate a little bit less than Republicans, or to just be the party that isn’t Trump clearly hasn’t worked. It isn’t right for us to allow discrimination against people, but I don’t think that it works politically either. I think what works is if we tell a clear and authentic story to the American people about why they feel screwed over, and that’s something the Democratic Party hasn’t been able to do. We shouldn’t throw trans people under the bus or throw immigrants under the bus. Instead, we should point out that it wasn’t a trans person that denied your health insurance claim; it was a gigantic corporation that went unregulated by the Republicans. It’s not an undocumented immigrant raising your rent; it’s a Wall Street hedge fund that’s doing it, and Trump is appointing those guys to his Cabinet. I think the Progressive Caucus is ready to tell that kind of story, and supercharge that kind of message inside the Democratic Party.
Progressives in Congress are often maligned for making the public argument that Democrats needed to refocus on popular economic issues. How are you looking to strengthen the caucus’ position in this term, especially coming in as the minority party?
We’ve heard moderate pundits say Democrats should have focused more on housing and child care, for example. Well, that’s great, I’m happy to welcome them into the tent, because it was the Progressive Caucus that pushed for legislation to bring down housing costs, and that pushed for legislation to keep child care costs at 7 percent of a person’s income. It was the more corporate part of the Democratic Party — crystallized by Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin — that actually blocked the legislation to reduce housing costs and reduce child care costs.
I think people can see that the Progressive Caucus has had the ideas on how to address people’s economic strain and that those ideas are widely popular. They’re popular among Republican voters and independent voters. So we have to lean in on those issues. In his first few months in office, Trump has promised to extend and expand his billionaire tax cuts, and I think the Progressive Caucus has a huge opportunity and responsibility to supercharge opposition to those billionaire tax breaks. We have to work to make sure every single Democrat on the Hill votes against it, and that way we can start showing people who changed their votes from Biden to Trump that Trump says one thing, but he does the opposite.
What do you see as a successful outcome for the Progressive Caucus — and even the Democratic Party as a whole — this congressional cycle, given that Republicans will be in control of the government?
We can take a look at Trump’s last term. Early on, Trump and MAGA Republicans tried to get rid of the congressional ethics office, and progressives mobilized people across the country and Republicans dropped [the effort]. Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take health care away from millions of people, and Democrats and progressive activists were able to inform so much of the country about it that Republicans worried whether they were more committed to taking away people’s health care or keeping their seats. And so a few Republicans — John McCain, most famously — either out of conviction or out of political calculation, voted with the Democrats, and that’s why we still have the Affordable Care Act today.
We have the ability, because Republicans have such a thin margin, to block some of Trump’s most extreme ideas. Now, some of Trump’s most extreme ideas may get passed through Republican votes, like the billionaire tax breaks he passed last time. But if Democrats mobilize not just elected officials, but mobilize the entire country against these sorts of terrible ideas, it can cost Republicans enormously in public sentiment. I think that if we do that right, we can take back the House, not just by small margins, but by big ones.
I would see that as a big win if we are able to show people in the country that the Democratic Party has been reformed to be the working people’s party again. Outgoing [Progressive Caucus] chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and I just a couple of days ago put out a set of criteria that we want for the next [Democratic National Committee] chair, and it included rejecting money from some of these big special interests that are jacking up the price of medicine and jacking up the price of food and housing. We need to start decoupling the Democratic Party from some of those big corporate special interests. If we do that well, we could see a big change in public sentiment in the first few months of next year, and hopefully we can block some of Trump’s crazy ideas.
As a member of the Austin City Council, you advocated for some really impactful legislation to help curb state level policies targeting undocumented immigrants. How would you like to see Democrats handle the incoming administration’s immigration crackdown? Especially given how the Harris campaign and some Democrats shifted right on the border.
Trump told a very clear story to people. Housing costs are up. Trump lied and said you can blame immigrants and the Democratic Party for it. He said food costs are up: Blame immigrants. He clearly identified a problem and then created a villain, even if it wasn’t true. Democrats need to be able to clearly say that we have solutions to people’s economic challenges and tell people who is actually screwing them over. We have to be willing to say that it’s Big Ag and their corporate abuses that are jacking up prices. If we aren’t willing to say that, then it creates an opening for opportunists and fraudsters like Trump to go blame somebody who’s not powerful, and that’s the oldest trick in the autocratic and fascist playbook. Democrats have to be willing to call out the real villain, which we rarely do as a national party.
In Texas, even those who are more conservative than I am on immigration believe that we should have a humane and orderly and legal immigration system they want. They want to see the system work. Democrats should lead with a vision for a working [immigration] system, because if all we end up doing is just complaining about the system and acting Republican-light, then the argument is just between the real Republican argument and the Diet Coke version of the Republican argument. And a lot of times people are just going to choose the real thing at that point.
We should be talking about legal migration and giving people the chance to actually apply and legally come here. Republicans say all the time: ‘Well, go get in line.’ Well, there really isn’t one, because the system is so broken, and I think that the American people are smart and will be willing to hear us out if we present a vision for a system that is legal and that works. We back ourselves into a corner if we just wind up being apologetic without having a real, positive vision for defending people under the Trump administration. I think that we need to be engaged in that every bit that we can, because Trump — especially with people like Tom Homan at the top — is going to be coming after lots of innocent people.
What do you think it’s going to take for a mainstream Democratic politician to be competitive in Texas at a state level?
We end up getting this huge surge of money in the last two months of a campaign, but that infusion of attention in dollars coming in at the last minute can only make a tiny difference. There needs to be attention on Texas year round, for the full cycle. … We have to inspire people that are disaffected by politics, and engage with them year round instead of just showing them a TV ad at the end of the election.
We’ve got to have candidates that are for working people and are willing to kick special interests in the shins — those corporate fossil fuel CEOs who are the people that left us with massive blackouts in winter while they raked in gajillions of dollars. We know it’s the big funders of Greg Abbott that are driving things like abortion bans. The abortion ban is horrible, and it’s costing women their lives in Texas, and it is paid for by these fanatics that just make gobs of money while treating their workers terribly. We’ve got to be willing to tell that story.
Speaking of corporate bigwigs who rake in a ton of money while abusing their workers. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been granted unprecedented influence as unelected civilians within this incoming administration through DOGE. Some members of the Progressive Caucus, including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have indicated a limited willingness to work with them on some issues. In your view, is this the correct approach to be taking with someone like Musk? Or is it detrimental to legitimize a project like DOGE through participation from the caucus?
I’m glad that Congressman Khanna is trying to pull Musk back from the dark side — somebody’s got to go do God’s work over there. But for me, I think that we should be calling out this billionaire fraudster for trying to take away your mom’s Social Security check and cut Medicare so that he can pay less in taxes when he’s already the richest dude ever on the face of the earth. … Most of us should be out there calling it for what it is.
I think that Musk is bound to fail while he tries to cosplay as co-president with Trump. They’re gonna get sick of each other. They’re incoherent, they’re incompetent. There’s this unfortunate idea among some that just because you are worth a gazillion dollars that you know something that everyday people don’t. I don’t have high hopes for Musk’s experiment here. I think he’s going to mostly have stupid or terrible or hurtful ideas. If he happens to have some decent ones mixed in there, of course we’ll be for anything that’s actually helpful to people. I just don’t have high hopes that he’s going to be for anything that’s any good.
I appreciate that Senator Sanders points out that there is misuse of dollars within the Pentagon that we should be spending on people. I’m afraid that Elon is going to find dollars within the Pentagon that he wants spent on himself.
You serve on the House Oversight Committee. Trump and his allies have both ignored subpoenas and attempted to use the subpoena power as a form of political retribution. What do Democrats need to be pushing for as the minority in order to ensure that this critical committee is able to actually execute its mandate?
This last Congress the Republicans thought they could use the oversight committee to impeach Joe Biden’s son in order to try to impeach Joe Biden. They thought they were going to be successful. Democrats were able to tie Republicans’ shoelaces together.
I think that will be our strategy here again, as Republicans try to turn their subpoena power into taking political retribution against people. I think that we can again expose that. In the vast majority of these cases, Republicans are just making stuff up and are attention hogs, and just want power for power’s sake. The good news — and the bad news — is that Republican leaders aren’t very good at what they do. So we can hopefully expose them for that and have them trip over themselves in the process.
