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Greg Casar Pitches a ‘Resistance 2.0’ for Democrats in the Age of Trump
When he was a 29-year-old on the Austin City Council, Greg Casar led a charge to repeal a ban on camping in the city so that homeless people would not rack up criminal records that could make it harder to find permanent housing.
Tent cities sprang up, conservatives protested and residents voted to reinstate the ban.
These days, Mr. Casar, 35, is the chairman of the House Progressive Caucus and a rising star in a Democratic Party struggling to find its footing during the second coming of President Trump. He has shifted his emphasis to respond.
“We can’t be known as the party of just the most vulnerable people,” Mr. Casar, the bilingual son of Mexican immigrants, said in a recent interview in an Uber en route to a town hall in Thornton, Colo. “This isn’t just about lifting up the poorest people, and that’s where the progressive movement has been.”
Mr. Casar’s goal now is winning back the working people who feel as though the Democratic Party is not for them anymore. He said that also means making economic matters, rather than cultural or identity issues, the party’s bread and butter.
“I’m shifting and changing,” he said. “On immigration, for example, in 2017, I would say, ‘Immigrant rights are human rights.’ I still believe that, but I’m now saying, ‘We need to make sure that all workers have equal rights.’ ”
He and his team refer to it as Resistance 2.0, and Mr. Casar took it out for a test drive last week. On a school stage here in this city north of Denver, more than 900 miles away from his district, he stood beside a cardboard cutout of a Republican lawmaker whose feet had been replaced with chicken claws.
The rest of the cutout’s body depicted Representative Gabe Evans of Colorado, a hard-right lawmaker elected in November who has held just one town hall since being sworn in. So here was Mr. Casar instead, hoping to show Democrats that their leaders were working to fill the void and defeat politicians too scared to show their faces in their districts amid a public backlash against Mr. Trump’s policies.
It was Mr. Casar’s third town hall in a Republican district, and he pushed back on the idea espoused by veteran party strategists like James Carville that Democrats should simply keep a low profile and “play dead,” letting Mr. Trump’s unpopular agenda win elections for them. If Democrats don’t make vast changes, he said, they will pave the way for a President JD Vance.
“A corpse is not an inspiring political leader,” Mr. Casar said at the town hall. “We need to be out there picking a villain and saying, ‘Elon Musk is stealing your Social Security money for himself.’”
Many attendees did not sound convinced that the Democratic Party was doing much inspiring at all. One after another, they lined up for questions and expressed general fear and pointed concern that the Democrats were not standing up to Mr. Trump in any real way. They demanded to know what, exactly, the plan was.
“I’d like some confidence that my Democratic votes are actually going to result in strengthening a system and protecting it,” Deb Bennett-Woods, a retired professor, told Mr. Casar.
“It’s frustrating when we feel like our Democrats — I’m sure they’re doing the work, but we don’t hear it,” another woman vented at the microphone.
As a young leader in his second term in Congress, Mr. Casar may be uniquely positioned to answer such angst. He is sprightly — in high school, he placed sixth at the Texas state championships in the mile and once ran a 4-minute, 17-second pace. Despite the anxiety of the current political moment, Mr. Casar presents as a sunny, happy warrior. And his roots are in the progressive populism of Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, whom he endorsed early in the 2016 presidential campaign and introduced at Mr. Sanders’s first Texas rally of that campaign.
“Isn’t our party supposed to be working for the many against the few that are screwing them over?” Mr. Casar said in the interview.
Ahead of the town hall on Thursday, Mr. Casar popped up at a Hyatt in downtown Denver to meet with workers fighting their employer for an extra dollar an hour in pay that they said they were promised in their last contract negotiation.
“You deserve a raise,” Mr. Casar told them, first in English and then in Spanish. “I’m here with you in this. I’m not here asking for your vote. Your vote is your business, but what I want is to make sure that we all push for other politicians to be out here with you. Workers in this country deserve a big raise.”
He then accompanied them to hand-deliver a letter outlining the pay raise request to the head of human resources at the hotel, who looked uncomfortable and begged the group not to film her.
Standing with the workers, he said, was the most fun he’d had all day.
“It feels a lot more productive,” Mr. Casar said. “I prefer to do this than just voting ‘no.’ So often in Washington, we just get trapped in these senseless meetings.” (He likes to kick off his own caucus meetings by playing Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin, hoping to distinguish them from the tedium.)
Those workers, he noted in the car, may not have voted in past elections. Maybe this kind of outreach from a Democrat could change that in the next one.
Mr. Evans’ spokeswoman responded to Mr. Casar’s presence in Colorado’s Eighth District by calling him a “defund the police activist who wants to see socialism and transgenderism take over America.”
Mr. Casar rolled his eyes at that. But he said he had made a purposeful pivot to responding to the political crisis in which he finds himself and his party. It means fewer purity tests, and a bigger tent.
And it means allying himself with more moderate Democrats who represent competitive districts and emphasize their military backgrounds to get elected — the types who would never fight for urban camping rights for the homeless.
He is on a text chain with Representatives Pat Ryan of New York and Chris Deluzio in Pennsylvania, two Democrats representing swing districts who also want the party to focus on working people and make villains out of the billionaires benefiting from Mr. Trump’s policies.
“We’re just talking about issues that are central: utility bills, health care bills, housing affordability,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview. “We can rebuild a broad American and patriotic coalition.”
Mr. Ryan does not love the “Resistance 2.0” framing, but he and Mr. Casar share a vision for what the party needs to be about.
“If we’re resisting something, we’re resisting harm to our constituents, from a big corporation or a billionaire or a corrupt government official,” he said.
Mr. Casar concedes that he has made some mistakes since taking over the Progressive Caucus, a group of nearly 100 lawmakers that is one of the largest in the House. It was his idea for Democrats to hold up signs that read “Musk Steals” and “Save Medicaid” during Mr. Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress. The signs were widely panned, and Mr. Casar now admits they were a bit dopey.
“Looking back on it, I think that just showing up and then leaving would have been better,” he said. “We get pressured into acting like we never make a mistake. I learned that some of the things we pushed for in 2017 became too-easy targets, so we’ve got to change. And I learned from that speech that when the president is just going to lie through the speech, it’s probably best just to walk out.”
But he has been consistent since Election Day that economic populism is the right approach for his party.
After the election, when Democrats were bemoaning that incumbents worldwide lost because of inflation, Mr. Casar advised his colleagues to take a look at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s decisive victory in Mexico, where a representative of the incumbent party won on a populist economic agenda.
Since then, he has participated in a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally with Mr. Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. He sees himself as a team coach, and he refers to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as “the No. 1 draft pick we’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Jetting around constantly can take a toll, especially on a young person attempting to have a normal life. He got dinged last year for skipping President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s address to House Democrats and going to a Joni Mitchell concert instead. It has also been tough at times on his partner.
“It’s really hard,” his wife, Asha, a philanthropic adviser, said of the realities of being married to an ambitious politician. “Greg is my favorite, but it’s not my favorite.”
He knows this, but Mr. Casar uses the word “resolute” to describe his commitment to the job and the fight ahead.
“There is a level of anxiety across the country that did not exist under Trump 1,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview, referring to Mr. Trump’s first term. “Greg understands that the future of American politics is to do what the Democratic leadership does not understand. That is to start addressing the serious crises of working families.”
A cotton field in north Louisiana.
Dylan Hawkins
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Dylan Hawkins
NEW ORLEANS – James Davis had the best year in his entire farming career this year.
The third-generation Black row crop farmer estimated picking almost 1,300 pounds of cotton, an average of 50 bushels of soybeans, and an average of around 155 bushels of corn on 2,500 acres of his farmland in northeast Louisiana.
But with U.S. commodities facing steep retaliatory tariffs overseas, he says he and many other farmers can’t sell their crops for enough to cover the loans they take out to fund the growing season.
The tariffs, Davis said, are making it almost impossible to survive.
“To have that kind of yield and still not be able to pay all your bills, that tells you something is broken in the farming industry,” Davis said.
In order to plan for next year, farmers need relief now, Davis said. At a recent meeting with his banker, the bank projected 2026 revenues in order to secure crop loans, and the cash flow math wasn’t adding up — the farm’s expected income wasn’t enough to cover operating loans once input costs, equipment notes, land rent and insurance premiums were factored in.
The Trump administration announced just this week a new $12 billion package of one-time bridge payments for American farmers like Davis, aimed at helping them recover from temporary market disruptions and high production costs.
“This relief will provide much needed certainty as they get this year’s harvest to market and look ahead to next year’s crops,” Trump said during a White House roundtable event. “It’ll help them continue their efforts to lower food prices for American families.”
Davis says that type of help can’t come soon enough.
“Without bailouts, it is hard to make crop loans work on paper,” he said in an interview with NPR on Monday.
James Davis asks a question at a panel on farm finances at the National Black Growers Council conference in New Orleans on Dec. 10, 2025. Davis is a third-generation Black row crop farmer who said that despite having the best year he’s ever had in his farming career, he’s still struggling to pay his bills.
Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom
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At the same time, however, the Trump Administration dismantled decades-old USDA programs designed to assist Black farmers by eliminating the “socially disadvantaged” designation, including programs like the 2501 Program, which many Black row-crop farmers rely on for access to credit, technical assistance, and conservation support that are otherwise difficult to secure at county-level USDA offices. The USDA did not respond to requests for interviews or comment.
Those supports, experts said, were designed to help smaller farmers and farmers of color remain on the land.
Welcome relief may not come in time
The Farmer Bridge Assistance Program accounts for up to $11 billion of the newly announced package, and offers proportional payments to farmers growing major commodities, including row crops like soybeans, corn and cotton.
Payments are expected to begin by February of next year, and are designed to offset losses from the 2025 crop year.
For many farmers, that isn’t soon enough. While the bridge payment may help with crop loans, there are immediate bills due for many in the coming weeks.
“This needs to show up like Santa Claus underneath the Christmas tree, to be honest with you,” said PJ Haynie, a fifth-generation Black farmer with rice operations in Virginia and Arkansas and chairman of the National Black Growers Council, which met in New Orleans this week for its annual conference.
“Our landlords want their money by the end of the year — our seed and input and chemical and equipment companies that we have to make payments by the end of the year,” he said.
Some farmers may have relationships with bankers and companies that will work with them and extend payment deadlines a few months, Haynie said — others don’t. And farmers are grateful for any support they receive, but, Haynie said, the one-time bridge payments aren’t enough.
“They still won’t make us whole because of the losses that we’ve incurred because of the markets, the tariffs, the trade,” he said. “But every dollar helps.”
Farmers already face challenges like unpredictable weather, pests and stagnant commodity prices, as well as rising input costs including machinery and fertilizer purchases. “We plant and we pray,” as Haynie put it. Tariffs have only compounded those challenges.
Black farmers face additional challenges
Black farmers like Haynie and Davis make up less than 2% of all U.S. farmers — and Black row-crop farmers, like those at this week’s conference, are an even smaller slice of that.
“Our herd is small,” Haynie said, “and if we can protect the herd, the herd will grow.”
Black farmers have asked the federal government for loan relief and other assistance for decades. A century ago, Black farmers owned at least 16 million acres of land. Today, Haynie said they hold around 2 million.
Following the Civil War, Black Americans were promised “40 acres and a mule” by the federal government, but many say that promise never came to pass.
Over the course of the past 100 years, the amount of Black-owned farmland dropped by 90%, according to Data for Progress, due to higher rates of loan and credit denials, lack of legal and industry support and “outright acts of violence and intimidation.”
Advocates say the inability for Black farmers to get a start, and later the sharp drop in farming population, is in part due to what they call USDA’s discriminatory lending practices, and often specific loan officers’ biases. The agency is the subject of an ongoing discrimination class action lawsuit by Black farmers and additional litigation due to those and other allegations.
Much of that history plays into how Black farmers approach the Trump administration.
“The Black row crop farm community needs the support of the administration,” Haynie said. “I can’t … buy an $800,000 combine to sell $4 corn. The math doesn’t math on that.”
All farmers — “Black or white” — are responding to the same depressed prices, he said. But Black farmers, he argues, already a small percentage of total U.S. growers, and often operating at a smaller scale, have less buffer to absorb sudden market shocks.
As farmers look at their projected costs next year, economists say they’re also navigating deep uncertainty in global markets.
“I think that a lot of farmers are still very much looking at the next year with some trepidation, thinking that their margins will continue to be very, very tight,” said Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington D.C.
U.S. trade with China — historically the top buyer of American soybeans and other row crops — has not rebounded to pre–trade war levels despite a new agreement. Meanwhile, Glauber said, countries like Brazil have expanded production dramatically, seizing market share during the trade war and becoming the world’s top soybean exporter — a long-term structural shift that U.S. growers now have to compete against.
Finis Stribling III (left) and John Green II (right) take a break during the National Black Growers Council conference in New Orleans on Dec. 10, 2025. Both Stribling and Green were plagued by bad weather at the start of this year’s growing season, and both said tariffs have only made things harder.
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He added that crops grown in the Mississippi River Delta, such as cotton and soybeans, have been hit especially hard by low prices and retaliatory tariffs.
Finis Stribling III farms 800 acres of cotton, rice, corn, soybeans and wheat in Arkansas and Tennessee. At the National Black Growers Council’s conference, he told NPR 2025 was another year of what he calls “farming in deficit.”
“We had too much rain early, then drought,” he said. “And when you finally get a crop in the field, the price support isn’t strong enough to cover the cost of production.”
Sitting next to him during a lunch break at the conference, another Arkansas row crop farmer John Lee II, put it bluntly: “What I’m worried about is next year. What do we do in 2026 when we go to the bank to try and get a loan? I’m concerned about the notion of going to the bank this upcoming year and not being able to get a loan because we can’t make the loan cash flow.”
Both also said the new tariff relief will help — but not nearly to the degree many outside agriculture may think.
“From the outside looking in, non-farm community, you say $12 billion seems like a lot of money,” Stribling said. “But when you look at the cost of production and the money that’s spent in agriculture, $12 billion is really just a drop in the bucket. It’s almost like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”
More than 400 law enforcement personnel have been deployed as police search for the suspect in a shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island in which two students were killed and nine wounded, US officials said.
The Ivy League university in Providence remained in lockdown early on Sunday, several hours after a suspect with a firearm entered a building where students were taking exams on Saturday. Streets around the campus were packed with emergency vehicles hours after the shooting, and security was heightened around the city as law enforcement agencies continued their manhunt.
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The suspect remained at large, officials said, as police worked with agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to search streets and buildings around the campus to find the individual.
Saturday’s shooting is the second major incident of gun violence on a university campus this week.
Providence deputy police chief Timothy O’Hara said the suspect had not been identified.
Officials said they would release a video of the suspect, a male possibly in his 30s and dressed in black, who O’Hara said may have been wearing a mask. He said officials had retrieved shell casings from the scene of the shooting, but that police were not prepared to release more details of the attack.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley has confirmed that two students were killed and nine people were injured in the attack.
At a news conference, Smiley said university leaders became aware of the shooting at about 4:05pm local time (21:05 GMT), when emergency responders received a 911 call.
Smiley declined to identify the shooting victims, citing the ongoing investigation. However, he sought to reassure the community, despite a shelter-in-place order for the Brown campus and the surrounding neighbourhood.
“We have no reason to believe there are any additional threats at this time,” he said.
The university’s president, Christina Paxton, explained she had been on a flight to Washington, DC, when she learned of the shooting. She immediately returned to Providence to attend a night-time news conference.
“This is a day that we hoped never would come to our community. It is deeply devastating for all of us,” Paxton said in a written statement.
At the news conference, Paxton said she was told the victims were students.
Suspect remains at large
At approximately 4:22pm local time (21:22 GMT), the university issued its first emergency update, warning that there was an armed man near the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building.
“Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice,” the university said in its update.
“Remember: RUN, if you are in the affected location, evacuate safely if you can; HIDE, if evacuation is not possible, take cover; FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself.”
Upon arriving at the scene, law enforcement swept the building, according to Providence police’s O’Hara.
“They did a systematic search of the building. However, no suspect was located at that time,” O’Hara said.
The university had to withdraw an early announcement that a suspect had been apprehended, writing, “Police do not have a suspect in custody and continue to search for suspect(s).”
US President Donald Trump published a similar retraction on his online platform, Truth Social, after erroneously posting at about 5:44pm (22:44 GMT) that a suspect had been detained.
Mayor Smiley said there were 400 law enforcement officers in the area to search for the suspect.
He also encouraged witnesses to come forward with any information about the shooting.
The seventh-oldest university in the US, Brown is considered part of the prestigious Ivy League, a cluster of private research colleges in the northeast. Its student body numbers 11,005, according to its website.
On December 9, Kentucky State University in the southern city of Frankfort also experienced gunfire on campus, killing one student and leaving a second critically injured.
The suspect in that case was identified as Jacob Lee Bard, the parent of a student at the school.
new video loaded: At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
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At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
Students remained locked in their dorms and classrooms as the police searched for the shooter, who was described as a man wearing black. At least two people are dead, and eight are in critical condition.
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At 4:00 in the afternoon, we received a call. 4:05 was when the initial call came in to Brown University of a report of an active shooter. I can confirm that there are two individuals who have died this afternoon, and there are another eight in critical status. We do not have a shooter in custody at this time. There is a shelter in place in effect for the greater Brown University area. If you live on or near Brown’s campus, we are encouraging you to stay home and stay inside. This is a sad state of our country right now where you have to plan for these things. And hopefully the community takes some comfort to know that their Providence leadership has planned for this occurrence, including very recently.
By McKinnon de Kuyper
December 13, 2025
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