Beto O’Rourke and the Populist Push for Power

Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas Congressman who later ran for U.S. Senate, President, and Governor of Texas, held a town hall event with approximately 350 guests at the Scott Conference Center on the University of Nebraska-Omaha campus.

It was one of several events O’Rourke is holding nationwide, in part to speak about and raise funds for Texas House Democrats who fled the state to break quorum in protest of the state’s mid-decade redistricting.

O’Rourke described the redistricting as a power grab by President Trump that could effectively end America as we know it. “He’s not going to win unless he cheats ahead of time, trying to steal the 2026 election in the summer of 2025,” O’Rourke said. “If we fail to stop them and to stand up for this great country, 249 years into this most noble experiment, then the consolidation of authoritarian power in America, I believe, will be nearly unstoppable.”

O’Rourke’s speech was laden with apocalyptic rhetoric, describing Trump as an authoritarian figure akin to Adolf Hitler, employing “Gestapo tactics,” and comparing America today to Germany in 1932.

“We can no longer await the punch thrown by these would-be fascists. I’m asking you to throw our punch first and to throw it harder,” O’Rourke said. “Do everything we have to do right now before it’s too late. Because as you know from your history, there was a resistance in Germany. There was a resistance in France. There was a resistance in Poland. There was a resistance in the ghettos. That resistance came too late for too many millions of people over the course of the 1940s in Europe. We cannot wait. We must learn lest we repeat what happened to them.”

According to O’Rourke, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini was one of two forms of populism that emerged in the 1930s. The other was a “democratic populism” in the United States, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom O’Rourke cited as his favorite Democratic president. O’Rourke argued that wielding power decisively, as FDR did, is a necessary counterbalance to fascism.

“When FDR won power, he knew that he had to use it, because he understood what the alternative meant for America. And if he had failed in that first term to wield that power to make everyday Americans’ lives better, that power would have been ceded to the fascists, the tyrants, the Nazis. That could have very well been our future.”

The need for Democrats to seize and decisively wield power, as FDR did, was a recurring theme throughout the evening. During the Q&A, one guest lamented that Democrats failed to add seats to the Supreme Court when they had the opportunity.

“He [FDR] tried to pack the Supreme Court, and he got caught,” O’Rourke said. “He was unsuccessful in doing that. It was a step too far. But God bless the man for trying to go past the bounds of the power that had been prescribed to him. He was gonna do everything that he possibly could with the most powerful office in the land to change this country for the better.”

On immigration, O’Rourke said, “No more promising comprehensive immigration reform. When we win power again, going forward, we drive the car like we stole it. We rewrite this country’s immigration laws in our own image, based on our values, reflecting our reality.” This meant full amnesty and U.S. citizenship for “dreamers,” their parents, and “every hardworking American doing the backbreaking work that builds this country in the first place.”

Despite O’Rourke’s concerns about President Trump’s authoritarian actions, he advocated for Democrats to decisively seize and wield power to counter them. “We have to care more about power than we care about anything else,” O’Rourke said. “Winning that power in the first place, and then using that power to its maximum extent to change this country for the better.”

With the 2026 midterms heating up over a year in advance, O’Rourke’s call for Democrats to seize and wield power in a tit-for-tat against perceived threats of authoritarianism will likely ramp up the political temperature in the year ahead.