Maxine Waters, Patron Saint of Resistance Politics

Waters had been elected to Congress two years prior, but in many ways, she exemplified the energy of that time — a fierce champion for women with a record of decisive policy victories. Waters also came to Congress with a strong connection to the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, having served on the board of the Ms. Foundation and organizing the Women’s National Conference under Jimmy Carter with Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem.

“Women are new to this place,” Waters told the Los Angeles Times after the tussle with King. “Women are supposed to know their place. I exercise my rights and it’s new for men. It’s not easy for them to accept women as equal partners.”

Thirteen years later, the first female nominee for president from a major political party would be defeated by a candidate who openly bragged about sexually assaulting women. In the weeks and months that followed, a grassroots resistance movement would form, jumping from the pages of social media to the streets of Washington, D.C. and other cities around the world. The day after the inauguration, millions would join in what would become the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

And Maxine Waters would be there, ready to lead.

It’s a sweltering hot day in mid-May, and Maxine Waters — who has just walked half a mile in high heels — barely has a chance to lower herself onto a bench in the hallway of the National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C., before someone approaches her.

“I saw you on T.V. this morning, telling it like it is!” the woman, a hostess with the lunch club, tells the California representative. “You say it like it is,” she repeats, emphatically. “That’s good.”

Waters smiles, and thanks the woman, who, seemingly satisfied with the interaction, returns to the small hostess stand at the end of the hallway. While the room behind Waters is still buzzing, it’s time for the congresswoman to head back to work.

These days, Waters is unusually busy. The 78-year-old, 14-term representative from California’s 43rd Congressional District, which encompasses much of South Los Angeles County, is frequently up before sunrise to do media hits before coming into the office. In Congress, she serves as the ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, and is an active member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus. After work, there are fundraising dinners or more media hits. Most days, her staff works until 9 or 10 at night — and Waters works with them.

Waters has worked this hard since she first entered politics in 1976, winning a seat in the California State Assembly. Fifteen years later, she became only the eleventh woman of color elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In the years that followed, she led campaigns against apartheid in South Africa, helped pass legislation aimed at broadening breast cancer survivors’ access to mastectomies, and fought for better consumer protection against predatory loans and Wall Street banks.

But the election of Donald Trump to the White House shifted Waters’ priorities and filled her with a new sense of purpose. These days, she’s squarely focused on leading the resistance against the Trump presidency.

“When Trump emerged as the leader of this nation, I decided to take the handcuffs off,” Waters said. “It was bigger than my district. It was bigger than just about financial services or regulation or deregulation. It was bigger than even apartheid. This is about our democracy. This is about the direction of this country.”

Unrestrained criticism of the president is not unique in the current political environment. But Waters has an ability to sense where the larger resistance movement is headed long before the rest of the Democratic party. She called for Trump’s impeachment months before U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-TX) took to the floor of the House to do the same, for instance, and refused to attend Trump’s inauguration long before more than 50 lawmakers eventually joined the boycott.

“I have to attribute to this president that he so offended me that he inspired me,” Waters said. “He inspired me to do something about him.”

Waters’ fiery authenticity has earned her a devoted following of young, progressive voters disillusioned with the institutions that seem to offer little check on the Trump administration’s rampant abuses of power. But her rising profile also raises an essential question in contemporary American politics: in the age of Trump, when politicians are as much a cult of personality as an avatar for policy, and when institutions seem ill-equipped to contain the malfeasance oozing from the White House, how should Democratic politicians respond?

It’s an especially important question as the Democratic party attempts to regroup after a series of electoral losses, culminating in the 2016 presidential election. Already, a number of tight special elections in stalwart Republican districts show signs of a political environment that favors Democratic candidates. But party leadership seems stuck between swerving left into the kind of all-out resistance that their base is clamoring for and maintaining the middle in an attempt to appeal to a wider swath of American voters.

For Waters, the path forward was simple.

“I didn’t sit down and develop a strategy,” Waters said from her Washington office. “I was driven by what I think a lot of people are driven by now — being absolutely disappointed with and fed up with the way things were.”

“Politicians learn how to be protective,” she continued. “But I think this is what has turned off a lot of young people. We have been so protective that they have not been able to get from us the kind of truth that they are looking for.”

Maxine Waters holds several truths to be self-evident. First, she believes that Trump has proven himself to be the kind of person who will never enact meaningful public policy in this country. She watched his campaign — full of dog whistles thinly veiled as domestic policy — and almost immediately felt that he would be dangerous and detrimental to the country.

“Long before he was elected, which I didn’t expect, I knew that he was not someone that I could ever work with, that I could ever support, and I would in no way honor him by attending the inauguration or any of the State of the Union messages or anything that he would do,” Waters said.

Second, she believes the administration’s corruption is rooted in the connection between people in Trump’s orbit and the Russian government. In interviews, she unfailingly rattles off the numerous Trump associates with reported ties to Russia — Carter Page, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Rex Tillerson, Jared Kushner. She’s taken to calling them the “Kremlin Klan,” a catchy double-entendre that mocks the administration for its ties to both Russia and the white nationalist movement that helped propel Trump to victory.

“When I began to see who these people around him were, and where they came from, and I began to see the connection that brought them together, I kind of thought everybody else was going to see it too,” Waters said. “I never thought about being the only one.”

The Trump administration is currently embroiled in several investigations into whether members of the campaign knowingly colluded with the Russian intelligence agents to influence last year’s election. And since Waters first started speaking out in January about the administration’s questionable connections, a deluge of controversies have further entangled the administration — from Flynn resigning as national security adviser after it was revealed that he had back-channel communications with Russia about lifting sanctions, to Trump reportedly leaking classified information to Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office.

An extraordinary ability to anticipate grassroots political movements has been theme throughout Waters’ career. Always a vanguard progressive, Waters opposed the Iraq War in 2002. She referred to the citywide unrest that engulfed south-central Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict in 1992 not as riots but as a “rebellion,” and she supported opening diplomatic and economic channels with Cuba as early as 1998. She was one of the few Democratic legislators to vote against the 1994 crime bill, now criticized for helping fuel mass incarceration.

She also has a long history of operating just outside of the Democratic establishment. In 1984 and 1988, she served twice as national co-chair for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, largely viewed as a grassroots challenge to established, centrist Democratic politics. In 1990, when she ran for Congress, the national Democratic party endorsed her opponent.

She herself has not been immune to political controversy — from 2008 to 2012, she was the subject of an ethics investigation for potentially violating House rules and federal ethics codes in setting up a meeting between Treasury officials and representatives from minority-owned banks, which critics argued favored a bank in which her husband held stock. She was eventually cleared of all charges.

Her public statements have often been as radical as her political positions. In 1997, she told the Los Angeles Times that the CIA was “guilty” for the Los Angeles crack epidemic of the 1980s. In 1998, she called the Republican-led effort to impeach President Bill Clinton a “coup d’etat.” In 2011, she said that the Tea Party “can go straight to hell.”

It’s a level of authenticity and fearlessness that some longstanding politicians might deem dangerous. But for Waters, it’s reflective of the larger shift in the way Americans think about, and interact with, the people who represent them. People, she said, are no longer interested in politicians who exist only to raise funds, campaign, and participate in the system. In a sense, the American public is moving towards the kind of politician Maxine Waters has always been — unfettered, uncensored, and unafraid of consequences.

“Traditional politics is ‘be safe, don’t take any risks, let the institutions work in the way that they work, and we will keep talking about what we need to talk about,’” Waters said. “This is unusual politics, and it requires a different kind of response.”

At the beginning of May, in the windowless basement of a hotel ballroom, Democratic leaders gathered to share their vision for the future of the party. Progressive stars like Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) spoke about policies to foster criminal justice reform, ballot access, and job growth. But when Waters took the stage towards the end of the day, she didn’t talk about future elections or policies for 2020 and beyond. Instead, she talked about getting Trump out of office as soon as possible.

“We can’t wait that long. We don’t need to wait that long. He will have destroyed this country by then,” Waters said. “We cannot wake up every morning to another crisis, to another scandal. We cannot have the uncertainty.”

For many Democratic politicians and political pundits, hers is an uncomfortable position. There’s a school of thought, popular among Democratic leaders, that the party can’t build its identity around what it’s against (in this case, Trump and his entire administration). Instead, to resonate with voters across the country, the party will have to prove what its members stand for, and it will have to an affirmative message and clear policies to support that vision.

To Waters, that’s a false paradigm — one that completely misses the swelling of grassroots resistance that has packed protests from the National Mall to airports across the country. Waters has seen most of those protests firsthand, addressing the Women’s March after Trump’s inauguration, joining protesters at Los Angeles International Airport following the roll-out of Trump’s Muslim ban, and leading a chant of “Impeach 45!” at the Tax March in April.

“They are missing the point that something is happening out there,” Waters said of Democratic party leaders. “It is a resistance movement that is saying to us, ‘No, this is not politics as usual.’ When did you ever see 750,000 women gather in one place and march, and then they are joined by women all over the country and all over the world? That’s extraordinary politics.”

To hear Waters explain it, opposing Trump is fundamental to the type of public policy the Democratic party needs to stand for. She uses financial reform as an example, arguing that with Trump as president, crucial reforms to regulations like Dodd-Frank are at risk of being repealed. Financial reform has long been a signature issue for Waters, who has sat on the House Financial Services Committee since 1991. In 2012, she officially became the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee.

Less than a month later, dogged by revelations of at least five sexual harassment accusations from former Fox employees, the network dumped O’Reilly. Waters has not gone anywhere.

“When you reach that stage of knowing who you are, you cannot be brought down by people who criticize or hate you,” Waters said. “I sleep very well at night.”

It’s almost one in the afternoon, and Waters is back in the Rayburn House Office Building, heading back to her office for a meeting with financial committee staffers. As the elevator begin to close, a security guard — the one who had waved Waters through the line just minutes earlier — slips through the doors.

“Ms. Waters!” he says, and she smiles, the easy smile of a woman who has become increasingly used to being recognized by a growing group of fans.

“I have a question… Can I get a picture with you? I want to send it to my wife,” he explains. “She loves you!”

Waters laughs, and obliges. They step out of the elevator, and she suggests they walk to her office so the picture can be taken there. He seems thrilled.

“My wife asked me, ‘Do you ever see Representative Maxine Waters?’” he tells her. “And I said, I’ve seen her for 14 years! She will be so excited with a picture.”

Minutes later, the two are in Waters’ office, standing beneath the painting of Rosa Parks. The security guard beams as the picture is taken. Then he shakes Waters hand, thanks her for her time, and returns to his post.