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Extremely long article dropped Sunday. Gave the reporter all access for quite some time seems like..
Crockett told Dexter that she had big plans for Oversight. She wanted to take hearings on the road, and to show voters that “these motherfukkers”—Republicans—are all “complicit” in Trump’s wrongdoing. She wasn’t worried about her own reelection. “I guess it’s my fearlessness,” she told Dexter.
Dexter asked Crockett about her relationship with leadership. Another young firebrand, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had bumped up against then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she arrived in Congress, Dexter noted. Crockett dismissed that concern, explaining that she had never wanted to “burn it down” and prefers to be seen as working on behalf of the party. The national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is a good idea, Crockett said, but it “kind of makes people be like, Oh, it’s about them, right?Instead of the team.” (Through a spokesperson, Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment. Crockett told me that the two have a positive relationship.)
Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?
By the end of the meeting, Dexter was ready to vote for Crockett. But she would never get the chance. Five days after Crockett’s fundraiser in Atlanta, Punchbowl News reported that she had “leaned into the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump,” which spooked swing-district members. Representative Robert Garcia of California was quickly becoming the caucus favorite. Like Crockett, he was relatively young and outspoken. But he had spent his campaign making a “subtle” case for generational change, Punchbowl said, and he’d told members that the Oversight panel shouldn’t “function solely as an anti-Trump entity.”
The same day the Punchbowl report was published, 62 Democratic leaders met to decide which of the four Oversight candidates they’d recommend to the caucus. The vote was decisive: Garcia, with 33 votes, was the winner. Crockett placed last, with only six. Around midnight, she went live on Instagram to announce that she was withdrawing her name from the race; Garcia would be elected the next morning. In the end, “recent questions about something that just wasn’t true” had tanked her support, Crockett told her Instagram viewers. She hadn’t campaigned on impeaching Trump, she told me later; she’d simply told a reporter that, if Democrats held a majority in the House, she would support an impeachment inquiry. And why not? She was just being transparent, Crockett told me, “and frankly, I may not get a lot of places because I am very transparent.”
Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats find that candor refreshing. “People don’t necessarily agree with her aggressive communication style,” Representative Julie Johnson of Texas told me. “I’m thrilled she’s doing it, because we need it all.” Garcia, in a statement from his office, told me that Crockett is “one of the strongest fighters we have,” and that, “as a party, we should be taking notes on the kinds of skills she exemplifies.” But several other Democrats I reached out to about the race seemed uninterested in weighing in. Thirteen of her colleagues on the Oversight and Judiciary committees, along with 20 other Democratic members I contacted for this story, either declined to talk with me on the record or didn’t respond to my interview requests. Senior staffers for three Democratic members told me that some of Crockett’s colleagues see her as undisciplined but are reluctant to criticize her publicly. “She likes to talk,” one of the staffers said. “Is she a loose cannon? Sometimes. Does that cause headaches for other members? 100 percent.”
www.theatlantic.com
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All the comforts of a Waldorf Astoria city-view suite did not, at that moment, seem to cheer Jasmine Crockett. The 44-year-old Texas Democrat known for her viral comebacks was frowning as she walked into her hotel room in Atlanta last month. She glanced around before pulling an aide into the bathroom, where I could hear them whispering. Minutes later, she reemerged, ready to unload. She was losing her race to serve as the top
Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she told me, a job she felt well suited for. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were planning to vote for the senior-most person in the race, even though that person wasn’t actually a Black Caucus member, Crockett complained. California members were siding with the California candidate. One member was supporting someone else in the race, she said, even though “that person did the worst” in their pitch to the caucus. Crockett was starting to feel a little used. Some of her colleagues were “reaching out and asking for donations,” she said, but those same colleagues “won’t even send me a text back” about the Oversight job. To Crockett, the race had become a small-scale version of the Democratic Party’s bigger predicament.
Her colleagues still haven’t learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper, fiercer communicators. “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” Crockett told me.
Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there. That approach, her supporters say, appeals to people who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024, including many young and Black voters. “What establishment Democrats see as undignified,” Max Burns, a progressive political strategist, told me, “disillusioned Democrats see that as a small victory.” Republicans understand this, Crockett said: “Marjorie is not liked by her caucus, but they get her value, and so they gave her a committee chairmanship.”
Perhaps inadvertently, Crockett seemed to be acknowledging something I heard from others in my reporting: that the forthrightness her supporters love might undermine her relationships within the party. Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats worry that her rhetoric could alienate the more moderate voters the party needs to win back. Some of the Republican targeting of Crockett is clearly rooted in racism; online, Trump’s supporters constantly refer to her as “ghetto” and make fun of her hair. From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’ None of this appears to be giving Crockett any pause. The first time I met her, a month before our conversation in Atlanta, she was accepting a Webby Award, in part for a viral exchange in which she’d referred to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina as “child” and Mace suggested they “take it outside.” Backstage, in a downtown-Manhattan ballroom, I asked Crockett whether she ever had regrets about her public comments. She raised her eyebrows and replied, “I don’t second-guess shyt.”
The state-House drama was short-lived: After one term, Crockett became the handpicked replacement for 15-term U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. Crockett sailed to victory, and less than a year later, her breakthrough moment arrived: While questioning a witness in a committee hearing, Crockett held up a photograph of several boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. The classified documents, she said, looked like they were “in the shytter to me!” Trump critics praised her as an “absolute star” and their “new favorite Congresswoman.” Not everyone agreed. Johnson felt that the freshman representative was dismissive of her experience and advice, according to two sources familiar with the relationship. “I don’t think it was a secret” that by the time Johnson died, in December 2023, “she had had second thoughts about Jasmine,” the Texas-based Democratic strategist said.
They couldn’t leave the dead out of this?
In late May, Crockett brought me along to a private meeting in the green-walled office of a freshman member—Maxine Dexter of Oregon—where she made her pitch: The Democrats have a communication problem, Crockett said. “The biggest issue” with Joe Biden’s presidency wasn’t “that he wasn’t a great president,” she explained. “It was that no one knew what the fukk he did.” (Crockett acknowledged to Dexter that the former president is “old as shyt,” but said, “He’s an old man that gets shyt done.”) Crockett highlighted her own emphasis on social media, and the hundreds of thousands of views she had received on a recent YouTube video. “The base is thirsty. The base right now is not very happy with us,” Crockett continued, and if any lawmaker could make them feel heard, “it’s me.”Crockett told Dexter that she had big plans for Oversight. She wanted to take hearings on the road, and to show voters that “these motherfukkers”—Republicans—are all “complicit” in Trump’s wrongdoing. She wasn’t worried about her own reelection. “I guess it’s my fearlessness,” she told Dexter.
Dexter asked Crockett about her relationship with leadership. Another young firebrand, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had bumped up against then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she arrived in Congress, Dexter noted. Crockett dismissed that concern, explaining that she had never wanted to “burn it down” and prefers to be seen as working on behalf of the party. The national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is a good idea, Crockett said, but it “kind of makes people be like, Oh, it’s about them, right?Instead of the team.” (Through a spokesperson, Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment. Crockett told me that the two have a positive relationship.)
Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?
By the end of the meeting, Dexter was ready to vote for Crockett. But she would never get the chance. Five days after Crockett’s fundraiser in Atlanta, Punchbowl News reported that she had “leaned into the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump,” which spooked swing-district members. Representative Robert Garcia of California was quickly becoming the caucus favorite. Like Crockett, he was relatively young and outspoken. But he had spent his campaign making a “subtle” case for generational change, Punchbowl said, and he’d told members that the Oversight panel shouldn’t “function solely as an anti-Trump entity.”
The same day the Punchbowl report was published, 62 Democratic leaders met to decide which of the four Oversight candidates they’d recommend to the caucus. The vote was decisive: Garcia, with 33 votes, was the winner. Crockett placed last, with only six. Around midnight, she went live on Instagram to announce that she was withdrawing her name from the race; Garcia would be elected the next morning. In the end, “recent questions about something that just wasn’t true” had tanked her support, Crockett told her Instagram viewers. She hadn’t campaigned on impeaching Trump, she told me later; she’d simply told a reporter that, if Democrats held a majority in the House, she would support an impeachment inquiry. And why not? She was just being transparent, Crockett told me, “and frankly, I may not get a lot of places because I am very transparent.”
Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats find that candor refreshing. “People don’t necessarily agree with her aggressive communication style,” Representative Julie Johnson of Texas told me. “I’m thrilled she’s doing it, because we need it all.” Garcia, in a statement from his office, told me that Crockett is “one of the strongest fighters we have,” and that, “as a party, we should be taking notes on the kinds of skills she exemplifies.” But several other Democrats I reached out to about the race seemed uninterested in weighing in. Thirteen of her colleagues on the Oversight and Judiciary committees, along with 20 other Democratic members I contacted for this story, either declined to talk with me on the record or didn’t respond to my interview requests. Senior staffers for three Democratic members told me that some of Crockett’s colleagues see her as undisciplined but are reluctant to criticize her publicly. “She likes to talk,” one of the staffers said. “Is she a loose cannon? Sometimes. Does that cause headaches for other members? 100 percent.”
A Democrat for the Trump Era
Jasmine Crockett is testing out the coarse style of politics that the GOP has embraced.
www.theatlantic.com
MORE
All the comforts of a Waldorf Astoria city-view suite did not, at that moment, seem to cheer Jasmine Crockett. The 44-year-old Texas Democrat known for her viral comebacks was frowning as she walked into her hotel room in Atlanta last month. She glanced around before pulling an aide into the bathroom, where I could hear them whispering. Minutes later, she reemerged, ready to unload. She was losing her race to serve as the top
Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she told me, a job she felt well suited for. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were planning to vote for the senior-most person in the race, even though that person wasn’t actually a Black Caucus member, Crockett complained. California members were siding with the California candidate. One member was supporting someone else in the race, she said, even though “that person did the worst” in their pitch to the caucus. Crockett was starting to feel a little used. Some of her colleagues were “reaching out and asking for donations,” she said, but those same colleagues “won’t even send me a text back” about the Oversight job. To Crockett, the race had become a small-scale version of the Democratic Party’s bigger predicament.
Her colleagues still haven’t learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper, fiercer communicators. “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” Crockett told me.
Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there. That approach, her supporters say, appeals to people who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024, including many young and Black voters. “What establishment Democrats see as undignified,” Max Burns, a progressive political strategist, told me, “disillusioned Democrats see that as a small victory.” Republicans understand this, Crockett said: “Marjorie is not liked by her caucus, but they get her value, and so they gave her a committee chairmanship.”
Perhaps inadvertently, Crockett seemed to be acknowledging something I heard from others in my reporting: that the forthrightness her supporters love might undermine her relationships within the party. Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats worry that her rhetoric could alienate the more moderate voters the party needs to win back. Some of the Republican targeting of Crockett is clearly rooted in racism; online, Trump’s supporters constantly refer to her as “ghetto” and make fun of her hair. From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’ None of this appears to be giving Crockett any pause. The first time I met her, a month before our conversation in Atlanta, she was accepting a Webby Award, in part for a viral exchange in which she’d referred to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina as “child” and Mace suggested they “take it outside.” Backstage, in a downtown-Manhattan ballroom, I asked Crockett whether she ever had regrets about her public comments. She raised her eyebrows and replied, “I don’t second-guess shyt.”
The state-House drama was short-lived: After one term, Crockett became the handpicked replacement for 15-term U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. Crockett sailed to victory, and less than a year later, her breakthrough moment arrived: While questioning a witness in a committee hearing, Crockett held up a photograph of several boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. The classified documents, she said, looked like they were “in the shytter to me!” Trump critics praised her as an “absolute star” and their “new favorite Congresswoman.” Not everyone agreed. Johnson felt that the freshman representative was dismissive of her experience and advice, according to two sources familiar with the relationship. “I don’t think it was a secret” that by the time Johnson died, in December 2023, “she had had second thoughts about Jasmine,” the Texas-based Democratic strategist said.
They couldn’t leave the dead out of this?
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