Hotel Art

Reading the New Yorker profile of Hakeem Jeffries, one kind of feels bad for the guy. He’s not a bad person. He’s not a bad congressman. In decent times. he’d not be a bad leader. But these are not decent times and he’s just out of depth entirely. The piece opens with him trying to decide to actually respond to Donald Trump in the way he needs to be responded to:

Earlier this year, Hakeem Jeffries, who represents New York’s Eighth Congressional District, was headed to a meeting with a Democratic donor in Palm Beach when he checked his phone. As the House Minority Leader, Jeffries has spent much of the past eighteen months hopscotching across blue America’s high-income Zip Codes, soliciting campaign contributions in Palo Alto and Palm Desert, Martha’s Vineyard and Greenwich. The evening before, he had headlined a Democratic Party fund-raiser at a lobbyist’s office in Miami. Now, as he was being driven north, in a Capitol Police S.U.V.—a staple of the twenty-four-hour security detail provided to congressional leaders—Jeffries saw that one of his staffers had alerted him to a video on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account. The clip, which promoted various conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, included a depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

Jeffries, who is the highest-ranking Black elected official in the United States, had criticized Trump for what he once called “a troubling pattern of racially insensitive and outrageous at times behavior.” He’d branded the President a “racial arsonist” and the “birther-in-chief.” At the same time, he had steadfastly refused to call Trump a racist. In 2019, when CNN pressed Jeffries on another remark—he’d dubbed Trump “the grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”—he replied, “I did not use the word ‘racist’ in any of my comments.” But as Jeffries watched the video from Trump’s feed he seethed. “The guy is so disgusting and out of control in so many different areas,” he told me. “My reaction was visceral.”

Anger is not an emotion typically associated with Jeffries. His favorite mantra, one he frequently repeats to colleagues and staffers, is “Calm is an intentional decision.” This has not always endeared him to some Democratic partisans. In the early months of Trump’s second term, when Jeffries held readings in several cities to promote “The ABCs of Democracy”—a children’s book he wrote that contains lessons such as “American values over autocracy,” “benevolence over bigotry,” and “the Constitution over the cult”—he was often greeted by protesters from local progressive groups who chanted “Grow a spine!” and carried signs that read “Jeffries! Be Ruthless” and “Book Tour? NOW?” This past February, after Jeffries asked Democratic members of Congress to sit in “silent defiance” during Trump’s State of the Union address, Stephen Colbert cracked that “silent defiance” was “a bold rebrand of doing jack squat,” adding, “As Martin Luther King once said, ‘Sh-h-h.’ ” Amanda Litman, the head of the liberal group Run for Something, offered a “Godfather” reference, complaining to the Times that Jeffries “is not well suited to being a leader of the opposition—a wartime consigliere.”

..

Still, Jeffries knew that he needed to strongly condemn Trump’s video. Even Republicans, who usually feigned ignorance about the President’s social-media outbursts, were weighing in. “I do not feel the need to respond to every inflammatory statement made by the White House,” Representative Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio, wrote on X. “However, the release of images of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama is offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable. President Trump should apologize.” Jeffries didn’t think that a post on X would suffice—“I wanted to do a direct-to-camera on this,” he said—but he wasn’t about to commandeer the living room of a donor’s Palm Beach mansion. He asked his security detail to take him to a public park. “The question was: Am I just gonna say what I’m really feeling about it?” he recalled. “I decided, you know, I’m not gonna hold back.” Standing beneath a sea-grape tree, his suit jacket buttoned and a wireless lavalier microphone attached to his lapel, Jeffries looked into an aide’s iPhone and said, “Fuck Donald Trump!”

Almost immediately, Jeffries began to waver. He instructed staffers back in Washington to bleep the word “fuck.” A few younger aides objected to the self-censorship but didn’t press the point. Jeffries then asked his team to hold off on posting the video until he was done tending to the donor; he wanted to see how things played out. Later that day, when he learned that the White House had claimed that a staffer, not Trump, had “erroneously” made the post, his anger returned. “I think that’s what probably put me over the edge,” he said.

He gave his team the green light to post the video on Instagram. The response was immediate. Popular liberal accounts on Bluesky and X—not always the safest spaces for Jeffries—reposted the video. “🚨HUGE: Leader Hakeem Jeffries says ‘FUCK DONALD TRUMP,’ ” @CalltoActivism, which has 1.2 million followers, wrote on X. “His ENTIRE statement is 🔥.” That evening, MS NOW led with the video on its prime-time show “The Weeknight.”

When I visited Jeffries in his office at the Capitol six days later, he still seemed to be savoring the moment. “There were pastors and other civil-rights leaders that I ran into that just said, ‘Thank you for saying that, because that’s what we all were feeling,’ ” he told me. Yet, as he sat in a silk-upholstered chair in front of a fireplace, he also couldn’t quite hide some discomfort. Jeffries, who is fifty-five, with hazel eyes and a warm smile, is friendly but guarded; in interviews and even in casual conversation, he speaks in the same studied, staccato style that he uses on the House floor. Discussing the episode, he avoided repeating the phrase “Fuck Donald Trump,” instead referring to “those three words.” “It’s not like I’m gonna adopt the practice of regularly speaking in this way,” he said. Jeffries steepled his hands and let out a small sigh. The praise from the internet was nice. The praise from the pastors was even nicer. But, he said, “I haven’t heard from my mother yet, so I’m a little concerned about that.”

Look, maybe I’d like to live in a world where we say “fuck” less in politics. It’s a crude world. It’s also the actual world. This dithering over the point is exactly why people say Jeffries is no wartime consigliere. The problem is it’s unclear if he’s any good at the job of leading the Democrats period. He is a consensus builder, but one with minimal success and lacking the kind of dominant personality of, say, Nancy Pelosi. A couple other bits here get at the issue.

Jeffries’s “light touch,” as several members described his leadership style, has also had some success. On February 26th, two days before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint assault with Israel on Iran, Jeffries announced that he planned to force a vote on a war-powers resolution that would prohibit further military force against the Islamic Republic without congressional approval. The onset of hostilities was enough to persuade around a hundred and eighty Democrats to support the measure. But there were still as many as thirty Democrats, many of them staunch supporters of Israel, who were not yet on board. On March 3rd, Jeffries invited several of the holdouts, including Gottheimer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Florida, and Greg Landsman, of Ohio, to his office for a meeting. Gottheimer and Wasserman Schultz explained why they were still undecided; Landsman laid out his opposition to the resolution. Jeffries argued that, whatever members thought of Israel, or even of Iran, this was a vote for Congress’s constitutional checks on the President. He later told me, “My view is that the best possible communication with people is to hear their thoughts, concerns, and ideas, if they’re in a different place initially. And then just to make the case.”

The war-powers resolution was ultimately defeated, but only four Democrats, including Landsman, voted against it. Jeffries told me that it was probably his “most aggressive whip effort” as leader. I mentioned that Gottheimer—who, along with Wasserman Schultz, ended up supporting the measure—had said he didn’t feel like he’d been whipped especially hard. (“I walked away feeling heard, not pressured, if that makes sense,” Gottheimer told me.) Jeffries responded, “And how did he vote?”

So not keeping the caucus together enough to defeat the resolution is a sign of his success? That’s not to say he has an easy job, but when failure is how we define Democratic success, well….the problem is obvious. But really, what better sums up Jeffries that this damning with faint praise?

Jeffries—who likes to describe his caucus as spanning the ideological spectrum from Ocasio-Cortez (its “most progressive member”) to Gottheimer (its “most moderate, centrist member”)—is not perceived as someone who holds strong positions on many issues. “He’s intentionally trying not to stand for anything,” a former Democratic congressional aide told me. “He’s sort of like hotel art. He just is. And it’s satisfactory.”

There’s our future Speaker!