In 2025, the Indivisible network became arguably the most prominent partner and promoter of demonstrations against the Trump administration. Their fingerprints have been on agitations such as the “No Kings” rallies, the Tesla protests targeting Elon Musk, opposition to immigration enforcement, and resistance to the federal intervention against crime in the nation’s capital.
The so-called “Tesla takedowns” in March 2025 coincided with vandals lighting vehicles ablaze and engaging in other acts of destruction aimed at the EV maker. In response, Tesla Takedown organizers issued a statement claiming they were “a nonviolent grassroots protest movement” that opposed “violence and destruction of property.”
If they’re not in the business of burning and breaking things, then what has Indivisible actually accomplished since their creation nearly a decade ago? That’s harder to discern. Ironically, the greatest proven success has been something they said at the outset they would not do.
The group’s roots go back to late 2016, after the November presidential election and shortly before Donald Trump was sworn in the first time. That’s when a group of Democratic congressional staffers released a peevish political manifesto. “We’re not starting an organization and we’re not selling anything,” they claimed in Indivisible: A Practical Guide For Resisting the Trump Agenda.
But then they created the Indivisible advocacy infrastructure that so far has raked in at least $145 million. And that’s a low-ball number because as of this writing most of the network’s revenue for 2024 and 2025 has not yet been publicly disclosed.
The 2016 manifesto has since been superseded by Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, issued after Trump was elected again in 2024. Their vow of poverty from the 2016 edition has been prudently removed.
And there are other strategic omissions. What 2025 Indivisible claims to be accomplishing looks a lot less impressive when juxtaposed against what 2016-2024 Indivisible set out to do.
The new TEA Party?
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Had Indivisible truly understood what lay behind the TEA Party’s initial success, they might have avoided the TEA Party failures that they instead swiftly replicated.
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The 2016 edition began with (at times) generous compliments for the accomplishments of the TEA Party movement that arose in early 2009. Born as a reaction against the federal bank and other bailouts that ensued after the 2008 financial crisis, the TEA Party is widely credited as a major force behind the Republican takeover of Congress during the 2010 mid-terms.
At the top of the first page of the 2016 Indivisible guide, the authors identify themselves as “former progressive congressional staffers who saw the Tea Party beat back President Obama’s agenda.” The first few paragraphs laid out what their guide was meant accomplish:
The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party. We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own members of Congress to reject President Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism – and they won.
We believe that protecting our values and neighbors will require mounting a similar resistance to the Trump agenda – but a resistance built on the values of inclusion, tolerance, and fairness. Trump is not popular. He does not have a mandate. He does not have large congressional majorities. If a small minority in the Tea Party can stop President Barack Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.
In the pages that followed, they broke down what they believed was the success of the TEA Party and advice for how a left-wing movement could replicate it. But their analysis repeatedly fails to properly define who and what they were trying to imitate.
To begin with, they wrote that the success of the TEA Party agenda was due to the . . . lack of an agenda:
Groups focused on defense, not policy development. The Tea Party took root in 2009, focused on fighting against every proposal coming out of the new Democratic Administration and Congress. This focus on defense rather than policy development allowed the movement to avoid fracturing. Tea Party members may not have agreed on the policy reforms, but they could agree that Obama, Democrats, and moderate Republicans had to be stopped.
Even Wikipedia, no stranger to botched and biased coverage of right-leaning causes, knew better. This is from the Wiki profile:
Participants in the movement called for lower taxes and for a reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit through decreased government spending. The movement supported small-government principles and opposed the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), President Obama’s signature health care legislation.
This much was obvious from the name itself. In the beginning it wasn’t the “Tea Party,” but instead the “TEA Party.” The name was both an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already” and an homage to the Patriot tax protesters who tossed tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773.
The 2016 Indivisible guide misstates and misunderstands all of that history, right back to the founding event of the TEA Party movement.
This occurred in mid-February 2009, during a broadcast on the CNBC financial news network. The anchors and guests were discussing the ongoing federal bailouts of banks and mortgages that began during the Bush administration and carried over to the new Obama administration. Then they pulled in Rick Santelli, reporting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
He denounced the bailouts, the banks, and the politicians of both major parties for subsidizing destructive financial behavior. “I don’t think they were worth saving,” shouted Santelli, pushing back against the conventional narrative that Congress had saved capitalism by bailing out—i.e.: “saving”— the big banks.
“We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July,” Santelli shouted, as the traders behind him cheered. “All of you capitalists who want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing it!”
The TEA Party didn’t wait until July, and it wasn’t contained to the south shore of Lake Michigan. Hundreds of large rallies were held across the nation on April 15, 2009, income tax filing day. The seas of homemade signs in those early crowds included many placards that clearly spelled out the “TEA” acronym.
Even one year later, a New York Times survey showed a combined 57 percent of self-identified TEA Party supporters believed that the “MAIN goal” of their movement should be cutting the size of the federal government, its budget, or the taxes used to fund it.
Those people knew why they were there and what they wanted. They didn’t vaguely oppose the Obama administration and the Democratic-run congress for rank partisan reasons, let alone the racism alleged in the Indivisible guide. They did so precisely because those political figures stood in the way of a clearly-stated TEA Party agenda.
Had Indivisible truly understood what lay behind the TEA Party’s initial success, they might have avoided the TEA Party failures that they instead swiftly replicated.
The biggest reason we don’t have an influential TEA Party today is because the movement eventually did forget the “TEA” motive in their agenda. They drifted instead into divisive social issues and “birther” conspiracy theories about President Obama. As this occurred, the mainstream TEA Party support dwindled away. And now, we see Indivisible following a similar path.
Resisting Trump: take one
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From its birth through the end of the Biden administration, Indivisible positioned itself on the radical, conspiratorial, and policy fringes of the Democratic Party, let alone the general electorate.
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During the first Trump administration, the consciously issue-free Indivisible was ready to jump straight to promoting the baseless conspiracy theories.
Russiagate has now been thoroughly discredited as a hoax hatched by the 2016 Clinton campaign. But for at least the first two years of its existence, Indivisible promoted it seriously and aggressively. In May 2017, right after Trump fired FBI director James Comey, The Nation ran a report titled “Americans Are Taking to the Streets to Demand the Truth on Trump and Russia.”
The Nation put Indivisible right in the middle of it all:
Then James Comey was fired, and within a few days Marches for Truth were in the works in 40 cities. At that point, says Uhle, “a bunch of other groups with more experience doing these kinds of things approached us and we took on a number of partners.” They included Indivisible, the Townhall Project, the Working Families Party and a dozen others . . .
It’s hard to remember now, but the Democratic Party establishment wasn’t initially on board with the Russiagate hoax. In June 2017 Roll Call ran a report titled “Democrats Stick to Health Care Message Amid Russian Intrigue: Party sees health care as more salient campaign issue.”
The account featured multiple quotes from Democratic congressional leaders who wanted to stick to real issues. But it ended by noting that “Indivisible and MoveOn.org both called for impeachment proceedings immediately after the Comey hearing …”
Six months into its existence, Indivisible was already far off track from the stated mission of replicating the early TEA Party. But rather than climb out of conspiratorial rabbit holes, they kept digging.
By February 2019 the hoax peddlers were anxiously anticipating that the Mueller Report would finally prove the Russia collusion conspiracy. According to a report in the Washingtonian:
Common Cause is part of a coalition progressive nonprofits and advocacy groups that have planned pro-Mueller demonstrations in the past, called Nobody Is Above the Law. MoveOn, Indivisible, Public Citizen, and Stand Up America are also among the groups involved in the effort. Should events warrant, the organizations will together spearhead a major DC rally (no specific location has yet been chosen). [emphasis original]
In March 2019, just as the report was to be released, Indivisible introduced “Mueller Time” t-shirts, which aped the Miller High Life beer logo.
When a redacted version of the report was released and showed no collusion, Indivisible and allies kept pursuing anyway. On April 3, 2019, Indivisible announced more hoax demonstrations:
On Thursday, April 4, Indivisible will mobilize for the “Nobody is Above the Law” Day of Action to call on Attorney General William Barr to release the full, unredacted Mueller report. Alongside coalition partners — including MoveOn, Public Citizen, People For the American Way — Indivisible will hold more than 300 events across the country on Thursday to make it clear that people want the report to be made public.
And just as the air was coming out of the Russia delusion, Indivisible was pivoting to another one.
The group’s founding document may have advised against taking on policy positions that risked fracturing the movement, but in a January 2019 group letter sent to Congress, Indivisible and several hundred allies urged passage of the so-called “Green New Deal.” The climate alarmist proposal is so loopy and extreme that Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed it as the “green dream or whatever they call it.” When it was brought up in the Senate, the Green New Deal did not receive a single “yes” vote.
In addition to opposing the continued use of hydrocarbon fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) the Green New Deal petition also opposed the inclusion of “nuclear, biomass energy, large scale hydro and waste-to-energy technologies” within its list of acceptable energy sources. If implemented, this would have excluded more than 97 percent of all energy currently used in the United States.
This idea couldn’t have been more radical or less green. Nuclear energy is already our largest source of electricity that doesn’t produce greenhouse gas emissions, providing more than triple the combined energy kicked out by all the wind turbines and solar panels currently in use. Nuclear is also, unlike wind and solar, limitlessly scalable. Hydro-electric dams are also a source of carbon free power that would be excluded by the “green dream or whatever they call it.”
This foray into extremist policy was typical for the first stage of Indivisible. During the summer of 2018, Indivisible promoted the election of left-wing democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in her ultimately successful primary against incumbent Democratic Congressman Joe Crowley. Ezra Levin, Indivisible’s co-founder and co-executive director, announced this was a win against the Democratic establishment:
The resistance just sent its own message. We’re building the big blue wave, and you can help, or you can get out of the way. Democrats and Republicans alike: if you ignore us or take us for granted, we’ll replace you.
When she arrived in Congress in January 2019, “AOC” became the chamber’s main champion of the Green New Deal.
Indivisible’s war against the “Democratic establishment” picked up after that, as it worked to elect and retain “The Squad” – AOC’s closest left-wing allies. During the 2020 election the top five recipients of support from the Indivisible Action political committee were AOC, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). In 2022, Jayapal and Omar were once again in Indivisible Action’s top five. And while just two House candidates were sent Indivisible checks in 2024, Jayapal was one of them.
From its birth through the end of the Biden administration, Indivisible positioned itself on the radical, conspiratorial, and policy fringes of the Democratic Party, let alone the general electorate. This hubris was stoked with a generous and suspiciously swift assist from the regime media.
“We’re not starting an organization . . .”
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The ink was barely dry on the guide’s assertion that the authors were “not starting an organization.” But in short order, they’d create three of them…
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The origin myth of Indivisible may be that it was a bottom-up, grassroots effort, like the TEA Party. But the smell of institutional astroturf is all over its founding.
Going back to January 2, 2017, the co-authors of the then-just-released Indivisible guide were granted a platform on the New York Times opinion page to promote their idea. During the two weeks before that, the Indivisible guide was granted puff-piece profiles in New York magazine, the National Observer, Slate, Mother Jones, and Talking Points Memo. “It’s the Tea Party playbook, minus the nooses,” claimed a smarmy Slate report.
Lefty influencer and former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich endorsed the Indivisible guide on December 15. Vox promoted Indivisible on January 5, and The Guardian on January 8.
Indivisible appears to have been the main thing MSNBC host Rachel Maddow featured on her January 4, 2017, broadcast. (The network has since reflagged as MSNOW, but ghost pages promoting three separate January 4 Maddow videos are still available at the Wayback Machine.) Maddow apparently thought her advocacy was so successful that just two days later, on January 6, she ran another Indivisible segment titled “Interest in anti-Trump organizing guide flourishes.”
While this sample of the coverage is far from complete, everything mentioned so far occurred at least a dozen days before Trump was even sworn in. The ink was barely dry on the guide’s assertion that the authors were “not starting an organization.” But in short order, they’d create three of them, and that’s counting only the national nonprofits and political committee, not the many local Indivisible affiliates.
The Indivisible Project, a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit, was created just weeks after Trump’s inauguration and by the end of 2017 reported more than $2.6 million in revenue. Indivisible Civics, a tax exempt 501(c)(3) education affiliate and controlled entity of the Indivisible Project, was formed sometime in 2018 and reported almost $5.3 million in revenue by the end of that year. And for the 2018 mid-terms, Indivisible Action, their 527 political action committee, reported raising almost $2 million.
Married couple Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg are listed as the principal officers on the nonprofits. They are also primary co-authors of the 2016 Indivisible guide that claimed they wouldn’t be starting any organizations. Both are veterans of Democratic congressional offices and left-leaning nonprofits.
That avalanche of early and slavishly favorable media coverage looks like a smart use of their professional Rolodexes. To put it mildly, the nascent TEA Party in early 2009 did not receive such a friendly rollout.
As noted above, the three Indivisible groups combined (after deducting fund transfers between them) have by this point pulled in at least $145 million. That’s a lot of loot for a formal organization that wasn’t supposed to exist.
The pair of nonprofits—Indivisible Project and Indivisible Civics—are not legally required to report their donors. So, most of the $114.7 million in combined revenue they took in through the end of 2023 is not publicly known. Some clues are available by looking at reports from the private foundations that donated to them. This information is tracked by Foundation Search, a charitable recordkeeping service.
The largest donor to Indivisible Civics that can be positively identified is the Sandler Foundation, which has given at least $3.75 million, according to Foundation Search. Funded from the fortune of billionaire bankers Herb and Marion Sandler, the foundation has been a reliable donor to left-leaning causes such as the Center for American Progress.
Another lefty institutional donor funding Indivisible Civics to the tune of at least $1.5 million so far is the Freedom Together Foundation (formerly the JPB Foundation). A recent Capital Research magazine profile of Freedom Together provided this summary: “Its story illustrates how a fortune that was committed to charity can be deployed by professional activists to fund distinctly political causes—even radical ones aimed at completely upending society.”
All of the largest identifiable donors to Indivisible Civics are similarly supportive of left-leaning causes. This includes at least $750,000 from the Schmidt Family Foundation, founded and funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy; $430,000 from the Wallace Global Fund; $350,000 from the Shared Ascent Fund; $300,000 from the U.S. Energy Foundation; $281,000 from ImpactAssets; $250,000 from the James Irvine Foundation; $230,000 from NEO Philanthropy; and even $105,000 from the Barbra Streisand Foundation.
Foundation Search records report similar giving profiles for the donors to the Indivisible Project advocacy nonprofit. The George Soros-funded Open Society Action Fund (formerly the Open Society Policy Center) has shipped at least $5 million. Other hefty-lefty donations to the Indivisible Project have included $5.8 million combined from the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy, $3.5 million from Fund for a Better Future, $600,000 from the Wellness Advocacy Fund, and $500,000 from Future Forward USA Action.
As of this writing, the Indivisible Action political committee has raked in at least $35.2 million, of which $5 million was transferred in from the Indivisible Project advocacy nonprofit.
Karla Jurvetson, a California physician and megadonor to Democratic Party causes, has given more than $1 million to Indivisible Action. This makes her the largest known individual donor to the political committee. (Interestingly, her ex-husband, billionaire investor Steve Jurvetson, is a close enough friend of Elon Musk to have been a board member at both Tesla and SpaceX.) The next largest individual donor has been tech CEO Rob Glaser and his firm, Glaser Investments, which have combined to give at least $350,000.
Resisting Trump: take two
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Indivisible didn’t explain how the boycott could or should alter Home Depot’s reluctance to stand up to armed federal agents. Perhaps the store managers were supposed to grab nail guns and go shoot it out with ICE in the parking lot?
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What did they get for their money? The new edition of the Indivisible guide, released after the 2024 election, had to grapple with the failures of the original effort.
Chapter one of the new guide includes this admission:
But the painful 30,000-foot reality we see clearly in the results is that we simply were not able to convince enough people that the threat posed by Trump to democracy, to abortion, and to all our rights and freedoms outweighed their frustration with the status quo.
What this means for our next steps. Let’s be real: Trump won a narrow victory in the swing states. It feels shattering because we hoped to see a national rejection; instead, he made gains.
What went wrong?
Recall that the justification for the first Indivisible guide was that the founders were “progressive” political professionals who had witnessed the success of the TEA Party and thus supposedly knew how to replicate it. There are two dozen references to the “Tea Party” in the 2016 edition of the Indivisible guide. It is the main subject of the first chapter, and clearly the example the Indivisible founders were pointing to when they began raising that $145 million.
The TEA Party was their founding mythology, but it has been airbrushed away. There is no discussion of the Tea Party in the 2024 edition of the Indivisible guide. The phrase does not appear once in the document. The first chapter has been totally rewritten, sans the “tea.”
Instead, the first page of the new Indivisible guide includes this admission:
Eight years ago, we wrote the Indivisible Guide to organizing locally to pressure Congress and block the Trump agenda. Now, we’re offering our best advice on how everyday people can organize to stop Trump 2.0. There’s a lot we don’t know about what needs to be done. We’ll need to learn and experiment as we go. [emphasis added]
Examples of the experiments through the first year of “Trump 2.0” have been street actions such as the Tesla Takedowns, rallies against federal roundups of illegal immigrants, and the so-called “No Kings” protests.
Here again, it’s helpful to go back and look at what they initially set out to accomplish. The first sentence of the first Indivisible guide, literally the first thing the Indivisible movement said to the world, was this:
Donald Trump is the biggest popular vote loser in history to ever call himself President-Elect.
This is no longer true. Not only was “Trump 2.0” a popular vote winner, but the 214.5 million combined votes he racked up in his three consecutive races makes Donald J. Trump the undisputed, largest-ever recipient of total presidential votes. Given the likely leveling off of the American population, he may hold that title forever.
So then, what to make of Indivisible’s participation in “No Kings” rallies? They were launched against a decisively and democratically selected president in a nation that stopped bowing to monarchs in 1776, nearly 150 years before the birth of every voter now alive.
The Real Clear Politics polling average provides an objective measure of how this is all working out. As of early December 2025, the RCP average placed the favorability of the Democratic Party at 34 percent, and the Republican Party at 40.2 percent. An August Wall Street Journal survey pegged Democratic Party support at the lowest point in thirty years.
One year into the second act, it’s hard to escape the impression that Indivisible 2.0 has no clue what to do about Trump 2.0.
Their confidently claimed expertise of TEA Party tactics and success is long gone and forgotten. In place of that, Indivisible now offers organized yet ineffective public rages that seem designed to prevent their left-wing base (and donors) from abandoning them.
The final example for 2025 was a Grinchy effort to steal Christmas. Just before the holiday shopping season, Indivisible launched a “We Ain’t Buying It” campaign against Home Depot, Target, and Amazon.
“This Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday – let’s make our dollars count,” announced Indivisible. “We’re asking Americans to hit pause on shopping from major corporations.”
The three retailers were selected based on a variety of alleged and absurd offenses against Indivisible’s far left orthodoxy. Home Depot, for example, was chosen because it was supposedly “allowing ICE agents to illegally detain and kidnap laborers from their stores.”
Indivisible didn’t explain how the boycott could or should alter Home Depot’s reluctance to stand up to armed federal agents. Perhaps the store managers were supposed to grab nail guns and go shoot it out with ICE in the parking lot?
In the run up to the boycotts, media paid attention. USAToday covered it, “We Ain’t Buying It” promoters were interviewed on CNN, and countless local TV news stations got in on the story. But afterwards it was almost impossible to find a news report on how it all came off.
Perhaps, because it didn’t. On Tuesday, December 2, the National Retail Federation announced that 203 million shoppers had turned out over the Thanksgiving holiday—an all time record and 9 percent higher than the previous year. America didn’t buy the “We Ain’t Buying It” campaign.
Karl Marx once claimed that history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce. The Indivisible from Trump’s first term was built as a deliberate, though misguided and ultimately tragic, repeat of the TEA Party. The second incarnation is well on its way to becoming a farce—albeit a very wealthy one.
