Teen Vogue: "Resist, Obstruct, Protect Our People": Maxwell Frost Has a Plan for Taking on Trump
As the chaos of the Trump — and, de facto Musk — administration bashes the attention spans of Americans, many of those trying to follow along have wondered where, exactly, the Democrats have been. Jon Stewart recently bemoaned the attempt to send out Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), one of our blandest posters, to counter Trump’s attempts to impose tariffs on US allies. Critics have wondered if the Democrats intend to stand up to Trump’s onslaught at all — particularly with Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) backing Republicans’ anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act.
That was the question Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), 28, put to a crowd of his Congressional colleagues and hundreds of protesters during a rally outside the Treasury Department yesterday: “Are we the minority or are we the opposition?” Along with representatives Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), and other members of Congress, Frost tried to enter the Treasury, seeking answers about Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of federal financial data. On Wednesday, Frost and other Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tried to subpoena Musk to get more information; Republicans on the committee ultimately killed the motion.
“The plan is, obstruct where we can, and we have a lot of vehicles to do that,” Frost tells Teen Vogue. “If you are a House member and you're just saying, ‘Well, we're in the minority. There's nothing we can do,’ we've already lost the battle. And that's what Trump really wants us to do — essentially bow down and not do anything to fight. We want to see Democrats get more involved.”
Frost spoke to Teen Vogue at length about the Democrats’ plan for taking on Trump and what he’s willing to risk to obstruct the Trump administration.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Rep. Maxwell Frost: In any opposition “the plan” belongs to many different groups of people. If you are depending on House Dems to do everything at this moment, we’re f*cked. We’re cooked. It has to be outside organizations, because we can't do the litigation. We have to work with the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], we have to work with the unions. We all work together. We work with Move On and Indivisible on the mobilization.
Specifically, for Democrats in the House, we need to be super active and involved in all of it and helping them coordinate. But also it's important that we use every tool that we have in the legislature to obstruct what's going on right now.
That is a legitimate place of frustration that a lot of folks have had. It's like, why is a single Democrat voting to confirm any of these Cabinet nominees when at the same time we have a constitutional crisis and an unelected billionaire, Elon Musk, is being given access to [sensitive records of] the federal government?
Democrats have to take a step back and see this isn't a normal beginning of a presidency; it's not just a conservative president that's coming in and proposing conservative things. It's a far right, authoritarian president who has crowned a billionaire, and given him the ability to do whatever he wants, even if it's illegal, so we have to look at it that way.
There's many different things we can do from the legislative place to obstruct and push back…. In the Senate, we see more and more Democrats saying, “You know what? I'm voting no on every single nominee. I'm going to do what I can do to help push back against this guy.” The big thing here is it's a question of oversight. This is the reason why we have ethics rules with a lot of top government officials when they have access to private data.
That's the big issue with what's going on with Elon, on a bigger scale. I mean, this man has multiple businesses, and [multiple of them have received] direct subsidies and funding from the United States government. And now that guy's in charge of the government efficiency of the entire government?! It’s not ethical, and there's absolutely zero oversight. I said yesterday that if someone asked me, “Hey, is Elon Musk stealing money from the government?” I don't know. And the fact that I don't know, as a member of the Oversight Committee, is a big deal.
I organized about two dozen members to go to the Department of Treasury. It's not a normal thing for members of Congress to pull up to Treasury. Usually, Treasury comes to us and we do a hearing. But these aren't normal times. We do have to demand access to these buildings. If they don't let us in, we need to then walk out to the front door and have a thousand people there and protest. That's what we did yesterday, with a thousand people, after we were denied access to the Treasury. I know people are doing it today at the Department of Labor.
MF: I'm glad you brought that up, because over-compliance — this is what happens when you have authoritarians come into office. [Some] companies were getting rid of their diversity, equity, inclusion [DEI] programs; a lot of things were being done before [Trump] even got inaugurated. Being an authoritarian leader, that's part of their goal — they don't want to have to pass legislation, they just want it done.
One way members of Congress can push back on this locally is they need to contact the hospitals themselves. A lot of members of Congress have relationships with hospital CEOs and folks like that for other reasons, and they need to be calling and saying, “No, under federal law, you don't need to do this. Why are you doing this?” And if they refuse to answer, they need to go ahead and make things public and make a big deal about it, because we might be in this moment now, but we won't be in this moment forever.
I think that's on members of Congress, but also on organizers, advocates, people locally, to put that pressure on hospitals now. The litigation is also important [for stopping these policies]: Recently a judge put a pause on the executive order having to do with forcing [trans] people who are inmates in prison to go to [the wrong gender] wing [of prisons].
So much of what this guy is doing is just blatantly illegal, but that's also part of their strategy. They are hoping and praying it goes to the Supreme Court, which they have stacked [with conservative justices], and they're hoping that the Supreme Court will then overturn long-standing legal precedent.
So people should stay alert when you see something struck down. That's a win, but also realize we are far from the end because they will appeal it, and they want it to go up and up and up in the courts until it gets to the top court.
You bring up a good point that even in so-called blue states and blue cities, we're still seeing the over-compliance, a lot of times because those areas haven't worked up the muscle to fight these kinds of battles that a lot of people in blue states take for granted. They take those rights for granted. They take where they're at for granted. But people need to realize that no matter if you're a blue state or red state, when an authoritarian is the president of United States, we all have to be ready to fight back.
MF: I've been deeply involved in direct action. What we did yesterday was a direct action. I've seen some of the comments under the action we did yesterday, people say, “Why don't you just jump the fence or run through it?” Number one, the number of people willing to show up to actions like we did yesterday is limited. Those numbers are growing. I organized that in, like, 12 hours, because of organizing work I've done before.… But what I also need people to do is realize we also need to think strategically, and we need to be here to do our jobs, to do this work.
People want to see the maximalist action done up front, and I get it. I'm someone who's been arrested multiple times in Florida, so I get it. But before I was arrested, I was a part of 80 or 90 protests and actions where I wasn't arrested. I think sometimes, unfortunately, the online world romanticizes the most extreme parts of movement.
We see this a lot with strikes. You see a lot of people online talking about strikes being a fun, cool thing. If you talk to any actual union organizer, you don't want to get to a place where you have to be on strike. Strikes are hard on people. Strikes are hard on families, the workers, they're risking being fired. They could be losing their pay. People don't want to get to that point. It is a tool that could be used, but the whole point is, what's before the strike? There's tons of negotiations, there's other direct actions, there's demonstration pickets, there's all these things that go on. You don't just go to the thing that people have romanticized.
If I would have just stormed this gate — which, by the way, is at the Treasury Department, which is pretty much the White House — I can promise everybody not only would I have been arrested, but I would have been arrested and been made an example. I probably would have been charged with a felony of trying to storm a federal building.
The irony is, a lot of things that the January 6th-ers were charged with and were just pardoned for, I promise you, I would have been charged with the full extent of the law and be out of commission for a long time, taking up resources and attention on something that I don't think will yield a great result in this moment.
People shouldn't question if I'm willing to be arrested. I've been arrested, but it's not about that. It's not just about members of Congress making decisions to try to get on TV and stuff. We're working with groups, working with unions. We're trying to figure out, over the next four years, how are we going to resist, obstruct, protect our people? Let me do the next two years, because we want to take back the House and have real institutional power to stop what's going on. But right now we don't have the institutional power, we have the people power, which is so powerful, but we got to be strategic.
MF: It sucks that constituents have to reach out to their office and say, “Hey, this isn't normal. Look what's going on.” But unfortunately, there’s a lot of grifters in politics, and there’s a lot of people who see this moment and they want to curry favor with the authoritarian, which I think is what you're seeing in the Senate with some people.
Number one, I don't think history is going to look kindly on those people at all, because things are bad now, but I do think things could get worse, and we have to be fighting back. So to people who have been frustrated, I get it, and I'm with you on it — and that's why we did what we did yesterday.
People are starting to see the representatives be more active, and that's a good thing. There are some people who would say it's not important, but I think it is important. I hate Trump, but there's one thing we should look at when it comes to him, and it's that he loves making sure his base always is feeling the love. In any political movement, that's very, very, very important, and our base is telling us, “Hey, we want to see more of what you're doing.”
The vibe has changed, for sure, and that's because people have been speaking out, and that's important. We're in a very sh*tty time, but I've been telling people, we’ve got to choose hope in this moment, and we will get through it. We've been here before, our people have been here before. And if we submit prematurely — we submit at all — we have actually lost.
I would say we haven't lost right now, we're just in a really bad place, but we can't actually lose. I'm not gonna let that happen.
By: Lex McMenamin
Source: Teen Vogue