A retired engineer from Downers Grove who leaned liberal but was never overly engaged in politics, Bill Blair has had an awakening since Donald Trump was elected president a second time.
The 70-year-old joined the grassroots progressive group Indivisible and attended a downtown Chicago rally with 1,500 others demanding Democratic U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth “fight the fight” rather than look for any common ground with Trump’s administration. He also fired off letters to members of the U.S. House, rallied again in DuPage County to protest proposed Medicaid cuts and logged on to a telephone town hall meeting with his congressman, Democratic U.S. Rep. Sean Casten.
“People talk about how Democrats are exhausted, and I get it. But it was a gut punch for both my wife and I,” he said of Trump’s November election. “It just means something to know that although you’re a small pebble in a large pond, at least you’re doing something.”
Across the Chicago area — and, indeed, the country — thousands of people like Blair are ramping up their political activity in response to the whirlwind early days of the second Trump administration. Some members of Congress are feeling the public outrage in the sheer volume of people calling their offices, attending virtual gatherings and appearing at rallies and public events.
In more conservative regions, Trump’s cuts to federal programs and funding freezes have led to angry confrontations at town halls for Republican members of Congress, many of the tense interactions being shared on social media. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana on Tuesday advised GOP lawmakers to stop holding any more in-person town halls.
But there’s also palpable dissatisfaction over inaction from rank-and-file Democrats. And those lawmakers are facing constituents of their own who are anxious, especially as their representatives increasingly plead powerlessness to block the new administration’s actions.
As they scrambled to develop an effective messaging campaign to combat Trump, many Democratic members of Congress representing Chicago, the suburbs and Springfield followed the standard playbook and held telephone town halls that typically garner about 1,000 participants. This year, they said, those calls each attracted 10,000 listeners or more.
Many members of the public who spoke during those town halls expressed support and encouragement for their Democratic representatives. But there also was some frustration as callers urged the lawmakers to do whatever they could to stop or stall Trump’s efforts.
“Why is it when we had the last Congress, with the House, the Senate and the presidency, that the Republicans (were) always blocking everything, and we didn’t get anything done?” one woman asked U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson. “Why can’t we as Democrats do the same thing?”
Leslie Robinson, one of Jackson’s constituents from Chicago’s Southwest Side and a deacon at Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church, questioned the congressman about what could be done to stem presidential overreach.
“With all of this going on, in the White House with the new administration and everyone basically knows it’s wrong — why can’t anyone come together and shut it down?” Robinson asked. “I don’t know the process, but I know something should be done.”
‘Don’t call the Democrats’
Jackson during his opening remarks didn’t leave a lot of hope. As Democrats don’t have the White House and don’t have the majority in either the House or Senate, he went so far as to say that instead of contacting Democratic lawmakers, his constituents should call Republican senators in other states to oppose the confirmations of Trump administration officials.
“Don’t call the Democrats,” said Jackson, whose district stretches from Chicago to Kankakee. “You can call a Republican senator from another state. We’re all federal elected officials.”
When during an early February telephone town hall a constituent asked U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, who represents the north suburbs, why “Democrats are not pushing back more strongly on all of these attacks on democracy … in a more visible way so the people know you’re opposing what the president is doing,” Schneider answered, “I’ve been on TV more in the last few weeks more than I normally am.”
“We’ve been on the floor. We’ve been holding press conferences. We’re doing everything we can,” he said. “It’s not just me; it’s every one of my colleagues. It’s hard to keep pace.”
One person Blair has reached his limit with is Durbin, who at 80 years of age is weighing whether to run for a sixth term as Illinois’ senior senator.
“I am willing to fight to try to get people that aren’t fighting — such as Dick Durbin — to retire,” Blair said, adding that his main complaint is that Durbin has voted for some of Trump’s nominees and works too closely with Republicans.
Durbin said he has watched what initially was “almost apathy” after the election among rank-and-file Democrats shift into anger. But he thinks it is misdirected at Democrats in Washington and that there’s been a growing realization “that we just don’t have the numbers.”
“They reached out to protest and where did they start? With their friends,” he said.
“So we do everything we can do. The battle has been waged in the courts with great success. There’s been some success on the floor of the Senate, but we need to do a lot more,” Durbin said Friday outside a Stand Up for Science rally in Chicago. “I’m as frustrated as they are but we got to hang together through this,” he said, urging Democrats to keep voicing their anger “but direct it toward the source.”
Other lawmakers are also taking note of the displeasure.
U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who represents the north suburbs, pointed to the feedback in announcing she would not attend Trump’s address to Congress last week. “I have heard from thousands of constituents who want me to resist,” she said.
Democratic encouragement
In Illinois, many elected Democrats are actually encouraging the public outpouring, even to members of their own party.
Gov. JB Pritzker, with Democratic members of Illinois’ congressional delegation sitting behind him a little more than a week ago, said that citizens can’t be silent during “an important time in the history of the United States.”
“The public needs to speak up, speak out, show up at their congressional town hall meetings, they need to pick up the phone to call Congress, they need to call their friends in other states,” he said. Pritzker even used an appearance on MSNBC to recite the U.S. Capitol switchboard number.
The governor recalled the town halls preceding the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement in 2009.
“That tended to be Republicans that were showing up. What you see now is people on both sides of the aisle showing up,” Pritzker said at the news conference, which was a rally in support of Medicaid funding.
In an interview, Duckworth also asked constituents to talk with their elected officials.
“Tell your stories,” the senator said. “Make sure they hear them loud and proud and just as many times as you can, because I don’t want my Republican colleagues to continue to hide in their shells, like turtles. They need to stick their heads up, grow a spine and stand up to this president.”
When pressed on why disgruntled members of the public should call Democratic lawmakers who agreed with them on policy, Duckworth said the calls make a difference.
“I got two (callers) reinstated to their jobs at the Veterans Crisis Hotline. They reached out to me on Valentine’s Day when they got the termination letters, and I was able to get them reinstated,” she said. “So it does work.”
Phones ringing ‘nonstop’
U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood, a Democrat from the west suburbs, said during a late February virtual town hall that she hears the worries about the Trump administration’s funding freezes and program cuts whenever she’s in her district.
“Our phones have been ringing nonstop from organizations throughout our community — domestic violence shelters, food banks, after-school programs for our kids — all of them unsure if they’re going to keep their doors open because the Trump administration is threatening their critical funding,” she said.
Casten said his office has received more calls than at any time since he took office in 2019 and that more than half of the callers have never before reached out. A telephone town hall Casten hosted in early February also set records with more than 30,000 people joining at some point, he said.
The town hall came in response to billionaire Elon Musk and his team of tech workers gaining access to U.S. Treasury data, an issue that generated more calls than any other issue during Casten’s tenure.
“The mood of the country has moved really rapidly from ‘This is a third-tier issue’ to ‘The house is on fire!’” Casten said.
Many of the newly energized members of the public, like Blair, have followed politics for years but have never been so engaged.
Megan Ramelli, who lives in downtown Chicago and works in advertising, said she hasn’t been active in politics since doing some work for President Barack Obama’s campaign years ago. But “when Trump won the election in November, I woke up on Nov. 6 and realized I needed to do more.”
She got involved with Indivisible and used her professional expertise to help with the group’s social media and email outreach. Ramelli also joined about 40 members of the group as they met with her representative in Congress, U.S. Rep. Danny Davis.
“There are ways that Democrats have traditionally pushed back. They have a procedure. They go by the book,” she said. “But us being there — whether it’s in a smaller meeting where we can share our stories or through a protest or a rally — really shows that these are real things impacting real people.”
Two weeks ago, she rallied outside of an event in Chicago where House Democratic leader U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York was promoting his book and on Presidents Day she protested in front of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in downtown Chicago.
“We have been very focused on demanding that our reps and senators respond to Trump’s power grab in a stronger and more unified way. We didn’t see this at first — which led to things like Democrats voting in Trump’s nominees in an attempt to work across the aisle — but every day, we are seeing the signs that they are listening,” she said.
No Senate Democrats, for example, voted for Linda McMahon’s nomination as Trump’s education secretary last week, and Democrats blocked legislation to ban transgender students from women’s and girls sports teams, Ramelli noted.
In the west suburbs, members of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Naperville are organizing to find nonpartisan ways to push back on Trump administration efforts to dismantle initiatives to fight climate change and to roll back transgender rights, said Becky Klein-Collins, who leads the church’s new political engagement group. The church has been active on those issues for decades, leading it, for example, to protest Naperville’s use of a coal-fired power plant.
But at the congregation’s annual meeting in January, it was clear church members wanted to broaden their reach.
“People are voicing their anger and disappointment in what they’re seeing from D.C. in particular right now,” Klein-Collins said.
Redefining ‘everything we can’
Jessica Nastal, a writing instructor at the College of DuPage, has called her senators to encourage them to vote against all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees.
She is particularly worried about Trump’s work to dismantle diversity initiatives, especially after her local library in Downers Grove was forced to cancel a planned drag queen bingo over right-wing threats.
“Getting involved and doing things in person and meeting other people makes me feel more empowered to continue,” Nastal said.
Kathy Tholin, the chair of the Indivisible Chicago Alliance, said she encourages people to push their representatives to do more than they’re accustomed to doing.
“We’re redefining ‘everything we can’ all the time,” she said. “Part of this is helping our elected officials understand what all the tools they have are because, honestly, they’re not used to using all these tools. They’re not used to the resistance. They’re not usually as vocal as we want them to be. They’re not as dedicated to getting the word out. … They’re not used to trying to obstruct bad things from happening.”
She said some members of Congress used to be organizers and understand the importance of “pushing from the inside and people pushing them from the outside” but that others aren’t used to the extra scrutiny. “By telling them how much we care and how bad we think it is, that pressure is helping them,” she said.
During a recent meeting with Duckworth, some Chicago-area federal workers told the senator she should not help Republicans pass funding for the federal government before it runs out of money later this month.
Colin Kramer, a legislative representative and union steward for at the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704, said his local is doing something different this year by explicitly not calling for an avoidance of a government shutdown. Normally, keeping the government open is the union’s top priority.
“We are not and would never call for a government shutdown,” explained Kramer, a chemist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Chicago area. “But … we cannot condone giving budget votes to the system as it is currently working. Because if we do, it just means they are further going to dismantle our agencies and our work.”
Ethan Roberts, the president of AFGE Local 3247 and an employee of the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, said he personally feels a confrontation is necessary.
“If the Democratic Party wants to pry any sort of concessions out of the Republican Party,” he said, “they will have to shut down the government.”
Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran, declined to go that far.
“I’m always going to be for keeping the government open, but I understand what they’re saying,” she said. “Frankly (shutting down the government is) not going to help veterans, that’s not going to help kids, that’s not going to help people with special needs, that’s not going to help Americans pay our bills or our economy.”
Amie Lulinski, an analyst and researcher in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities, has worked in advocacy roles throughout her 30-year career. But she’s been reaching out to members of Congress in recent months because she is concerned about the potential impact that cuts to Medicaid would have on people with intellectual disabilities, their families and the health care workers who support them.
“Pressure does work,” Lulinski said, pointing to the 2017 defeat of the efforts to repeal Obamacare. “The unfortunate thing is that the very people who are expected to do the advocacy are busy keeping their kids alive. … Do you really think they have time in the middle of the day to go meet with their representative? No, they don’t.”
Chicago Tribune reporter Rick Pearson contributed.
