Daley-Harris is the author of “ Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy ” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
In a Washington Post column in early July titled, “ It’s time to ask: Can America still produce great leaders? ” Garrett M. Graff asks, “So, what does good leadership look like in practice? How do we find good leaders, and how are they trained and shaped?. … And, desperately, how can we please make more of them?” While Graff’s focus is on leaders in politics, government and business, my focus is on citizen leaders and the organizations that train and shape them. But we ask similar questions.
Recently I spoke with activists who got their start in transformational advocacy in Chicago and Nashville. Since so many of us find it hard to get started, I wanted to know how they began.
Fred LeMay was a commercial insurance underwriter and saw how changes in the climate were affecting the insurance and reinsurance markets. “I was reading climate articles,” he said, “and getting concerned for my kids and grandkids and the future of the planet. I thought maybe I should try to be more active.” LeMay co-leads the Middle Tennessee chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
Cindy Levin was a mechanical engineer and corporate type. “When I quit my job to provide full-time care for my kids, I lost my social network and my purpose,” she told me. “I did have this purpose to be a mom, but it was also isolating. Activism was a way to be relevant in the wider world.” Levin is now an author, speaker and activist who coaches others on how to develop relationships with their elected representatives. She received much of her training from RESULTS, the grassroots anti-poverty lobby I founded in 1980.
These volunteer activists and thousands of others benefited from the brilliance of another activist, Dorsey Lawson, who died recently at age 95. A giant in the early days of RESULTS, Lawson and the team of volunteers she built around her in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1980s were our research and development department.
They developed the laser talk — a short statement about a problem, examples of solutions and a call to take specific action — that advocates use in meetings with members of Congress, the media and others they want to mobilize.
Lawson and her fourth grade English as a Second Language class devised the process for teaching the laser talk — delivering the talk, then asking leading questions and having the group shout out the answers to see what they remember, and then asking the questions again and having them just think the answers to themselves. Learning and using laser talks is a key strategy in the work of effective grassroots advocacy organizations such as RESULTS and Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
RESULTS’ pioneering work around building a relationship with a member of Congress who opposes a global poverty bill you are advocating for and bringing them on board as a supporter also came from Lawson and her team of volunteers, starting more than 40 years ago with their Rep. Carlos Moorhead (R-Calif.).
The commitment to encouraging breakthroughs, to encouraging volunteer activists to move out of their comfort zone, was given voice by Lawson too.
While I was on one of my 21-city trips to start RESULTS groups in 1984, Lawson — writing in her role as assistant executive director — described one volunteer’s splitting headache and another’s feeling of nausea while completing op-eds they’d been invited to write.
“If you’re scared to do this kind of stuff, know that we are too,” Lawson wrote. “I felt flushed and feverish driving off to a reception for forty people with Rep. Matthew Martinez (D-CA). If you don’t have any discomfort, look at what would be a stretch for you. RESULTS is people breaking through the thought, ‘I don’t make a difference,’ to emerge as community leaders. Those who have pressed themselves to new heights of participation know the joy of this. What’s next for you?”
As always, she signed the letter, “Love, Dorsey.”
Lawson knew that joy followed the discomfort. She knew that it mattered to make big asks of volunteers — it mattered to the issue they cared about, and it mattered to the volunteers themselves.
When Lawson’s group developed the laser talk in 1984, UNICEF reported that 40,000 children around the world were dying every day from malnutrition and preventable disease, things like measles coupled with malnutrition. RESULTS volunteers have lobbied on these issues every year for the last four decades. Over that period, the latest figures show a 66 percent decline in global child deaths, a greater than 90 percent decline in deaths from dehydration and an 80 percent decline in child deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases.
Graff asked, “How do we find good leaders … how are they trained and … how can we please make more of them?” The innovations that Lawson and her team developed are one answer to Graff’s question. The difference she made with her life lives on in tens of millions of children’s lives saved and thousands of activists’ lives changed and will contribute to building more leaders well into the future.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.