At half past eleven last night, Democratic campaigner Marianne Williamson joined us on our epic six-hour livestream. Marianne has run to be the Democratic presidential candidate twice: in 2020, when she ultimately endorsed Bernie Sanders, and in 2024, against Joe Biden. By the time she joined us, Trump’s win looked inevitable. We asked her what her initial reactions were. What follows is an edited transcript of her response.
Well, obviously I’m not happy about it. But I also feel that everything that went wrong is what I’ve been saying would go wrong for the last year and a half. I ran for president because I knew that the traditional Democratic playbook—the corporate Democrats are in charge of that playbook now—would not be enough to defeat Trump this time. I’ve said repeatedly that this election would be more like 2016 than like 2020, and it’s very clear to me that the elites of the Democratic Party and media don’t know how to read the room. The Democratic elite should resign their positions tonight. Many of those people have not sauntered out of their gated communities long enough to have made sense of what is going on out there.
Over the last year and a half, we could have been having a robust conversation about the following facts:
46 percent of Americans are regularly skipping meals in order to pay their rent.
70 to 90 million people are underinsured or uninsured.
Over half of our bankruptcies are medical bankruptcies.
One in four Americans live with medical debt.
1.3 million Americans are rationing their insulin.
Over 70 percent of Americans say that they are living with chronic economic anxiety.
People are feeling hopeless out in America now. In my opinion, Donald Trump offers false hope. He’ll name a pain, but he will not name a policy that’s going to fix it. But people will take false hope over no hope.
And the Democratic Party offered no hope. Instead of talking about these things, what the Democratic elite did was this: They just decided on an agenda. We weren’t even supposed to discuss what an agenda might be. They suppressed a presidential primary. They felt, in their smug arrogance, such a sense of entitlement: They would choose Joe, then they would choose Kamala, and they would suppress any candidate or any conversation about the wider issues that could have provided a compelling alternative—a compelling vision—for the American people.
Watch Marianne Williamson discuss why the Democrats failed:
Where do we go now?
You could say: We went through four years of Donald Trump before! Things didn’t fall apart that much! But it’s different now, especially since the Supreme Court has given him this outrageous immunity. They have basically established that we have a king rather than a president. And so there is a sense of collective trauma among those of us on the left.
My priority now is that we not look to the DNC to rescue us. They will spin some narrative about where we need to go from here. They are going to blame everybody and everything except themselves. The last place to go to is the people who took us to this place. There needs to be a real reckoning. And that includes at CNN, that includes at MSNBC. It includes the Jon Favreaus, it includes the ladies on The View. Enough is enough.
The lesson for the Democrats is to become the Democratic Party again. You know, FDR said we would not have to worry about a fascist takeover as long as democracy delivered on its promises. And that’s what the Democratic Party used to stand for. It used to stand for the unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States. That would mean universal healthcare, like in every other advanced nation. It would mean tuition-free college and tech school, like in every other advanced nation. It would mean standing for fair taxation. It would be recognizing that we now have a society in which governmental and financial resources just flow to the top one percent—at the expense of everyone else.
The Democratic Party in this campaign was trying to make it so the right would like us. I feel sometimes that the Democratic Party today is almost—maybe subconsciously, I don’t know—intending to shrink their base. The real progressive issues that the Democratic Party has traditionally stood for were thrown overboard in this race. And sometimes all that Donald Trump does is just say: Hey! You left that diamond on the beach! I’ll take it! You’re not going to talk about how to create peace in the world? Fine! I’ll take it! I’ll pretend that I’m a peacenik!
I mean, he’s a very shrewd salesman. And so the Democratic Party will have to become the Democratic Party again. But I think it will be in terrible shape for years and years and years to come—as long as that elite crowd that I mentioned feel that they are entitled to suppress the candidates that they don’t want, to de-amplify who they don’t want, to shame who they don’t want, to make a joke of who they don’t want.
The narratives in this campaign were so absurd, such as: We don’t primary an incumbent president. Well, I’m old enough to remember Eugene McCarthy. I’m old enough to remember Senator Robert Kennedy Sr., who primaried Lyndon Johnson. That primary actually pushed Johnson out—because of the Vietnam War. But with this 2024 campaign, the elite didn’t want any conversation coming in that wasn’t convenient to their purposes.
We have to ask ourselves: What happened to the critical thinking on the part of the average Democratic voter? When did we become the party who just said: Okay, whatever the DNC says! What has happened with the Democratic Party is the nightmare that George Washington and John Adams were afraid of. The role of the party is supposed to be to stand to the back, let the voters decide, and then the party steps in. But if your main media partners suppress, blacklist, de-amplify anybody but their chosen candidate; if they are willing to lie and smear anyone else to make sure that nobody even wants to hear them, even if they know they exist, then where we go is where we got to. They’ve done this twice. They did it in 2016 by suppressing Bernie Sanders. I don’t know who would have won that primary if they had taken their fingers off the scale, but I do think Trump would never have been president either way, because the Democrats would have shown up, more happily.
So this is a real inflection point for the Democratic Party, and if the Democratic Party will not stand once again, unequivocally, unabashedly, for the working people of the United States—and clearly the Republicans don’t do that, but at least they’re smart enough to say they do—then something else will emerge, some phoenix will rise from this. I don’t know what it will look like, but it’s got to happen, or this country will be in very, very bad shape for years to come.
Marianne Williamson is a New York Times best-selling author and a longtime political activist. Follow her on Substack, and listen to her appearance on Honestly by clicking below:
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