Esquire: Maxwell Frost, the First Gen Z Member of Congress, Is Getting Shit Done
The 26-year-old Floridian burst into the public eye after the Parkland school shooting, when he pulled no punches as an organizer of March for Our Lives. What will he do next?
“The joke is, you walk into the capitol, look around, and you’re like, ‘How did I get here?’ ” says twenty-six-year-old U. S. representative Maxwell Frost. “Then you spend a few months listening to some of your colleagues, and you’re like, ‘How the hell did they get here?’ ”
Frost, a Democrat, burst into the public eye after the Parkland school shooting, when he pulled no punches as an organizer of March for Our Lives in Florida. Now he’s got a moniker that’s sure to stick: “the first Gen Z member of Congress.” In 2020, he was arrested for participating in a Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. When Frost was sworn in to represent Florida’s 10th Congressional District, he tweeted his new congressional photo alongside a mug shot from his arrest. “The same streets I was arrested on for nonviolent protest, I’ll be representing in the United States Congress,” he wrote.
Here’s an incomplete list of what he’s witnessed since then: the debt-ceiling debacle, the reversal of affirmative action, state bans on critical race theory, and relaxed gun restrictions. He’s also seen Hunter Biden’s nudes. “Marjorie Taylor Greene literally held up blown-up pictures of someone’s dick pics,” Frost says, eyes wide.
Our conversation happens in the middle of a busy day during Congress’s traditional August recess. Frost was adopted at birth—which was, by the way, in 1997—and raised in Orlando by his mother, a Cuban refugee who teaches special ed at a public school, and his father, a musician. He’s back in his hometown when we talk, dressed in a simple white button-down and slacks. He looks surprisingly fresh-faced for a guy who got up at 5:30 A.M.
Right now his priorities are expanding access to the arts and improving public housing and transportation for Orlando. In just seven months, all of his funding proposals were approved by the Appropriations Committee, securing Frost $11.3 million to invest in his community.
That’s not easy when your coworkers are, well, who they are. But he won’t take the bait. “I see the humanity in all my colleagues, even the ones that say some of the most disgusting things I’ve ever heard. It doesn’t mean I give them a pass for it. Understanding their humanity actually helps me as an organizer—understand the way forward.” So what is the way forward? “I think hope is good, but it’s more than hope,” he says. “I know that we will be successful in this work because I know we’re in it for the long haul. I know we have the people on our side, and I know that time is on our side.”
Source: Esquire