• Hundreds of thousands people across the country spent part of their Saturday at ‘Hands Off’ rallies to protest President Donald Trump and his administration. Organizers say there were more than 1,300 rallies scheduled, from Portland, Maine, to San Diego, California. But while progressives and liberals pretty much agree on what we’re against, we’ve been struggling to figure out what, exactly, are we for? And if Democrats are the party that believes governance is good, why aren’t the outcomes better? Marc Dunkelman, the author of the new book ‘Why Nothing Works,’ joins us to answer some of those questions.
• And in headlines: A judge ordered the Trump administration to return a man wrongfully deported to El Salvador, a second unvaccinated child in Texas has died of measles, and TikTok lives to see another day in the U.S.

• Check out Marc’s piece – https://tinyurl.com/4mdprz4a
• Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8
• What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast

Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/

TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, April 7th, I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show congratulating a Santa Cruz Galapagos tortoise named Mommy, yes her name is Mommy, on having four babies at the youthful age of 97. Now the headlines may say she’s the oldest first time mom of her species, but we all know life really gets going at 98. [music break] On today’s show, a judge orders the Trump administration to return a man wrongfully deported to El Salvador back to the U.S. by tonight. And TikTok lives to see another day in the U S. But let’s start with the anti-Trump protests that overtook cities and towns and pretty much everywhere else across the country this past Saturday. Called the hands off protests, as in get your hands off our Social Security, Medicare, free speech rights and economy. The rallies attracted hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Organizers said an estimated 100,000 people attended a hands-off protest in D.C. Here’s Florida Democratic Representative Maxwell Frost speaking on the National Mall. 

[clip of Representative Maxwell Frost] They’re the ones that are screwing us over on the job. They tell us that trans people are a threat to our children, but they’re the ones dismantling public education. They’re the ones denying the climate crisis. They’re the ones poisoning our planet. They’re the ones doing nothing about the national public health emergency of gun violence. 

Jane Coaston: Another 30,000 people joined a rally in Chicago, according to the local NPR affiliate, WBEZ. And when I say across the country, I mean it. There were protests in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

[clip of unnamed news reporter] Well today, Chopper 5 flying over a massive demonstration at the Utah State Capitol, thousands of people gathering this afternoon as part of a nationwide protest of the Trump administration. 

Jane Coaston: And in Charlotte, North Carolina, here’s attendee, Britt Castillo. 

[clip of Britt Castillo] Regardless of your party, regardless of of who you voted for, what’s going on today, what is happening today, is important. It’s disgusting and as as broken as our current system might be, the way that the current administration is going about trying to fix things is not the way to do it.

Jane Coaston: And in Missoula, Montana, where more than a thousand people came together on the courthouse steps to stand up to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, people like Debbie. 

[clip of Debbie] Being older, of course, I’m worried about Social Security, um but I’m also worried about human rights. And Medicare. 

Jane Coaston: You go, Debbie. She gets it. We learned a lot from these protests, namely that lots and lots of people don’t like what President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk are doing on any number of issues. Some cited the administration’s attacks on trans folks. Others made signs about tariffing uninhabited islands. You can bring a lot of people together to say we do not like this. And let’s be clear, that’s good. Be like Debbie. Don’t be too cool to make a sign and stand with your neighbors. It is good to protest what is happening right now. It is good to say, this isn’t it. But there’s an important question that a lot people are thinking about right now, progressives and liberals pretty much agree on what we’re against, but what exactly are we for, and how can we create it? And if progressive governance is good, which we think it is, why haven’t the outcomes been better? Why aren’t we doing big things? High-speed rail, affordable housing, meaningfully combating climate change, making life better for people like, you know, we keep saying we want to. One of the people who has been thinking about this issue is Marc Dunkelman. He’s a fellow at Brown University and author of the new book, Why Nothing Works: Who killed progress and how to bring it back. We talked about why he thinks progressives hamstrung the way the government works. Marc, welcome to What a Day. 

Marc Dunkelman: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: So your book is coming at an interesting time. I imagined you wrote most, if not all of it long before the 2024 election. Yet here we are with Trump as president again and Democrats even more adrift than they were eight years ago. So to start, I wonder if you can put that loss in the context of what you’re writing about in this book. How do you see them related? 

Marc Dunkelman: Well, I think that government doesn’t work, that Democrats are fundamentally the party of government, and if government doesn’t work, that’s a problem for us politically. 

Jane Coaston: That’s actually extremely straightforward. Um.

Marc Dunkelman: Yeah.

Jane Coaston: So your book sidesteps the ways that the Republican Party is more than happy to throw spokes into the wheels of progress. And for the sake of time, we will too. So with that said, why are Democrats also to blame for, as the title of your book says, why nothing works anymore? 

Marc Dunkelman: So my view is that for a long time, progressivism was focused on building up big institutions that could solve big problems. 

Jane Coaston: And just for for the purposes of conversation, how are you defining progressivism? 

Marc Dunkelman: I mean everyone who thinks that government has some role to play in making things better. So it’s basically people who aren’t conservative. So everyone from the far left to the moderate center who would like to see government do more to solve big public problems. And the argument that I’m making here is that for the bulk of the movement’s history from the late 19th century through the 1960s and 1970s, we were all about building up big institutions that could solve big problems. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Marshall Plan, the Social Security Administration, Medicare, Medicaid, all of these programs were efforts to take power where it existed and move it up into big institutions, that could solve problems that people couldn’t solve for themselves on their own. But then we sort of woke up in the 60s and 70s and noticed that this establishment that we progressives had created had also done a lot of terrible things. The quintessential example is Robert Moses, who in the book The Power Broker is depicted by Robert Caro as this monstrous figure, which I think in many ways he was. He reshaped the city of New York in powerful and horrible ways in some cases and also built incredible infrastructure in others. But the fact was that in 1974, when Robert Caro writes The Power Broker and it wins the Pulitzer Prize, he is essentially taking one example of power gone wrong, of power corrupting, and everyone sees it as an emblematic of a much broader phenomenon. And so we spend 50 years trying to make sure that we never get another Robert Moses. 

Jane Coaston: Is there a moment you can pinpoint? You mentioned Robert Moses and talking about the 1970s, but is there a specific time where this shift starts? Because I’m thinking about the Great Society, for example.

Marc Dunkelman: Yeah.

Jane Coaston: And you have LBJ announcing the Great Society at the University of Michigan at graduation, basically saying like, we’re gonna end poverty, we did it. And you have this whole campaign of people, you know Life Magazine goes to Appalachia and is like, we can change this, we can electrify rural areas, we can do anything and then something happens and–

Marc Dunkelman: Yeah.

Jane Coaston: Like is that what the pinpoint is there a moment that you see in your research? 

Marc Dunkelman: Well, my view is that there are two impulses within progressivism that have been there from the very start. One is this Hamiltonian impulse to do exactly as you said, what LBJ was talking about, which was to pull power up into institutions that can solve big problems. And then a second, which is to say, oh, there are these powerful figures and we want to push power down. That’s all a Jeffersonian counter reaction to those old Hamiltonian efforts. So you see the the tumult at the 1968 convention, the folks inside are largely Hamiltonian. They want to do exactly as you said, they want to burnish the great society and create new big institutions that are going to do great things. And the folks marching on the outside are saying, no, no, no. We don’t want big powerful institutions anymore, we want to pull power down away from those big institutions. And after ‘68, the real zeitgeist within progressivism, I think, turns and embraces the view of the people outside the convention, the marchers, the Chicago Seven, the kids who objected to the old establishment. And so like that is sort of the turning point. By the time you’ve got the Watergate babies being elected in the ‘70s, and you’ve got Gary Hart, you know, running for the Senate in Colorado, his mantra is we are going to pull power away from the establishment, right? That becomes sort of mainstream within democratic and progressive thinking. So that I mean, that’s the that is the turning point at some time between the late ‘50s and the early ‘70s. Now, we’ve sort of come again to a cycle, the end of a cycle and we need to have institutions that can do big things again. 

Jane Coaston: So the tiny libertarian who lives inside me.

Marc Dunkelman: Yeah.

Jane Coaston: Is a little worried because–

Marc Dunkelman: Sure.

Jane Coaston: I want government to work, I want big projects and to do big things, but I also want government to be accountable to voters. I am concerned about eminent domain. I am concerned about the ways in which government, you know, we keep hearing from the Trump administration of like, we can just do things and just forget about the courts, we don’t need them, which makes me anxious. So can government work? If politicians are also held accountable to voters outside of when they’re running for re-election, are these mutually exclusive? 

Marc Dunkelman: I think they need to be balanced. I think that the challenge here is not to say that the executive branch should be able to do whatever it wants. And it’s not to allow the courts to basically have such rigorous standards for every decision that no one can make a trade-off where there are clearly competing priorities. Right? You’ve got to build the transmission line that’s bringing the clean energy from the remote village or the remote waterfall into the place where the electricity is going to be used. That transmission line is going to go through some forest. Someone needs to be able to make that decision about where it’s going to. That’s gonna be an executive branch official, not a judicial official. And so what you need is some balance between the Hamiltonian impulse to pull power up into the executive branch and the Jeffersonian impulse to ensure that the judiciary is able to ensure that no individual is you know really trampled in the process. 

Jane Coaston: Do progressives need to accept that sometimes there will be, inevitably, losers in any big top-down decisions that come when you concentrate power in fewer hands? 

Marc Dunkelman: I mean, I think that’s the essence of what government is. It is taking a situation where not everyone can win and choosing who the losers are gonna be. And I think for the last 50 years, progressives have had a dream that if you just bring everyone to the table, if you give everyone a voice, if you everyone a veto over what might happen, you will find some way where everyone is happy. And the truth is that when you’re building a high-speed rail line, somebody isn’t gonna like it. When you’re going to build new housing, there’s going to be a neighborhood that objects. If you’re going to build a transmission line or a clean energy grid, there are going to be people who come out as losers and the goal of government is to find some process where those decisions can be made fairly but equitably. 

Jane Coaston: So how do progressives start solving this problem, especially when it comes to like an existential issue like climate change? How do we find the balance you say has been lost? 

Marc Dunkelman: In that case, I think we need to say who we need to ask ourselves the question, who is it that should make this decision? The reason that we don’t have housing, the reason that we don’t have a cleaner grid, the reasons that we don’t have high-speed rail is that too many people have no’s, right. Whether it’s through an environmental review process or a community review process, or some other judicial mechanism and that the challenge here is to give everyone a voice, but not a veto, to make sure that someone ultimately is responsible so that we end up actually building the stuff that we need. 

Jane Coaston: Are you optimistic that the modern-day Democratic Party is up to the task of making these changes? Because it seems to me like part of the challenge here is that Democrats, understandably, want everyone to have a voice, and everyone’s voices are mad at everybody else’s, and then nothing happens. 

Marc Dunkelman: Yeah, well, I think that is certainly the pattern. You know, you look at these changes in the history of progressivism. No one at the turn of the 20th century could have imagined the sort of the huge bureaucracy that was created by the point of the New Deal or the Great Society. Nobody at that point could have imagined that the judiciary or that these these individual rights would come to the point where they were so powerful that the establishment basically didn’t exist anymore. The establishment exists somewhat today but doesn’t have the power that it had generations ago. I just think it’s inevitable that Americans are going to see the frustrations or feel the frustrations of government not working and eventually embrace an agenda that allows controversial things to get done again. 

Jane Coaston: Marc, thank you so much for joining me. 

Marc Dunkelman: Thanks so much for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Marc Dunkelman, author of Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of Jennifer Vasquez Sura] I was very scared.

[clip of unnamed CBS news reporter]Why?

[clip of Jennifer Vasquez Sura] Because I’ve seen news of that prison, and I know they take criminals there, and my husband’s not a criminal. 

[clip of unnamed CBS news reporter] What was your biggest fear when you identified him? 

[clip of Jennifer Vasquez Sura] I was scared for his life. 

Jane Coaston: A federal judge doubled down Sunday on her demand that the Trump administration bring back a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was detained on March 12th. His wife, Jennifer, recalled the incident to CBS. She says she’s concerned her husband will face retaliation from a violent gang while being wrongfully detained in the infamously dangerous Salvadoran prison. Garcia has been in the United States for over a decade and received a protective court order in 2019, forbidding his deportation to El Salvador in order to avoid retribution from the gang. The Justice Department admitted last week that Garcia had been sent to El Salvador by mistake. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the White House to bring Garcia back to the U.S. by end of day Monday and condemned the administration, saying, quote, “‘Congress said you can’t do it, and you did it anyway.'” The Justice department claims the court has no power to order Garcia’s return, but on Sunday, the judge rejected their request to rescind her order. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a five four decision Friday to cut teacher training grants they deem in violation of the president’s executive order to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The Supreme Court ruling lifts a temporary block put in place last month by a Massachusetts federal judge to allow the grants to be distributed while the courts litigate the case. The lawsuit was brought by eight Democratic-led states that argue more than 100 grants were unlawfully pulled from programs that support teachers in quote, “underserved communities,” and with the goal of hiring educators who, quote, “reflect the communities in which they will teach.” The decision marks the first major ruling the court has made in Trump’s favor over litigation brought against an executive order this term. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent that her conservative colleagues’ eagerness to get involved in the case was, quote “equal parts unprincipled and unfortunate.” She said the court doesn’t usually exercise jurisdiction over temporary restraining orders and that this one shouldn’t have been an exception. A second unvaccinated child in Texas has died from complications related to measles. In February, another child died in the ongoing outbreak, marking the first measles death in the U.S. in a decade. There are currently more than twice as many measles cases in the US than there were in all of last year. The outbreak was originally detected in West Texas, and nearly 500 cases have been reported in the state. Measles cases have also been confirmed in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former anti-vaxxer, I guess that is what he would want us to call him, visited the grieving family Sunday and tweeted in support of the measles vaccine. This is surprising because just last month, RFK Jr. told reporters that this is all super normal. 

[clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] There have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country, last year, there were 16. So, it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year. 

Jane Coaston: The White House is still downplaying the outbreak. A Trump administration official told the New York Times that the child’s cause of death is, quote, “still being looked at.” President Trump on Friday granted TikTok another reprieve by announcing he would extend the deadline again to keep it online in the United States. The will-they-won’t-they ban on TikTok has users across the country on their toes. A law passed last year, and later upheld by the Supreme Court over national security concerns, requires the app’s Chinese ownership to separate from TikTok’s U.S. operations or potentially face a nationwide ban. It’s the second time Trump extended the deadline. Trump wrote on Truth Social that his administration has been working hard on the deal to save the app and that he would issue an executive order allowing it to stay online for another 75 days. While prospective buyers have been emerging, it’s still up in the air if TikTok owner ByteDance will bite. However, the company did acknowledge Friday that it’s been in discussion with the U.S. government over a potential solution. According to multiple outlets, Trump’s extension came as White House officials were closing in on a deal. But according to a person who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity, China put the deal on pause after Trump announced his new tariffs last week. Trump said in his Truth Social post Friday, quote, “we hope to continue working in good faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our reciprocal tariffs”. And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. Politics is not just about governance and working together. It’s about selling an idea or a set of ideas to millions of people and hoping they buy in. And currently, MAGA influencers on the internet are trying to sell a brand new idea on Donald Trump’s tariffs. Actually, money is meaningless. And also, you don’t really need to buy things, do you? Here’s right-wing influencer, Benny Johnson. Incidentally, according to an indictment released last fall, he received hundreds of thousands of dollars as part of a Russian influence campaign. Now he’d like to tell you that actually, going broke could be good for you. 

[clip of Benny Johnson] Losing money costs you nothing. This is just the reality of life. You’re like, were you young and dumb? How much money did you lose? Everyone loses money. Everyone loses might. It costs you nothing. In fact, it builds quite a bit of character. 

Jane Coaston: And in case you were wondering, yes, Benny Johnson was among the right-wing influencers that spent much of 2024 complaining that President Joe Biden was making everyday essentials too expensive. But now who needs money? You maybe, but not Benny Johnson. It’s like a swath of the American right took the sound like my very nice liberal mom in 1993 challenge. One big right- wing account tweeted on Thursday, quote, “You do not need the new iPad, you do not need the new cell phone, you do not need the new video game console, you want them. There is a big difference, and if you look at the people whining about the tariffs, I challenge you to ask them how their lives have been affected in any way.” You hear that, American voters? You may have voted for Donald Trump because you thought he’d bring back the economy of 2019 when you could afford things you wanted and things you needed more easily. But in 2025, if you can’t afford a cell phone because of Donald Trump’s tariffs, you didn’t need it anyway. Finally, the Republican Party is taking a stand against consumerism, despite the fact that, as we speak, Donald Trump is selling meme coins to, you know, make money. Which, remember, doesn’t matter. And they’re also suddenly very excited about working in factories, despite having never worked in factories. And not really planning on starting now. Right-wing influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, perhaps best known for making money off saying things like, quote, Feminism is cancer, tweeted quote, “Men are depressed and addicted and broken because they have nothing to do. They get no stimulation or satisfaction from BS email jobs. I’m telling you, white Americans will love working in factories again, making things in the image and likeness of God the maker.” Now, he will not be working in the factories. He’s a British right-wing influencer. The factories will be for you, a person who wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or anything else. Just not work in a factory because someone decided you should. Just like how these right-wing influencers will continue to be able to afford consumer goods even if you can’t. Because this is a sales technique, not an ideology. It doesn’t have to make any sense because it’s not really supposed to. And we haven’t really gotten into the people tweeting about how they don’t care about the economy and hope everything burns down because burn it all down, women suck, something something something. But it’s a sales technique that given how the American people work and live and enjoy buying food and cars and the occasional pair of sneakers, I am very dubious will work. 

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, do not look at the stock market, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how it is probably not a good sign that billionaire investor and big Trump fan Bill Ackman is tweeting about how we need to delay the tariffs by 90 days or risk, quote, “an economic nuclear war,” like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and once again, Donald Trump said he wanted to do tariffs. He’s been saying this for like 40 years. He was saying that to Larry King in 1987. Like come on! What A Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.