Representative Jasmine Crockett doesn’t have time for me today.
It’s something I realize almost as soon as we meet in the lobby of her Washington, DC, apartment building, after a day of rescheduling and changes of venue for our conversation. The Crockett who greets me isn’t the snappy firebrand now famous for her creative insults toward her MAGA colleagues, nor the poised and polished politician at a town hall or stump speech.
This Jasmine Crockett seems drained. Her shoulders slump as she leads me to a table in a common area, sitting beside me and fiddling with her phone. She tells me she’s worried this won’t be a good interview, that our conversation won’t give me what I need for our agreed-on story about her career and political life thus far. She doesn’t have it in her to give a canned answer or a soundbite, a sparkling quote that I can spin into a clickable headline.
It’s late July, at the end of what has been a bruising first seven months of a Donald Trump administration, and the strain is apparent in Crockett’s body language and her eyes. The 44-year-old second-term congresswoman from a Dallas-area district has watched as, in her mind, decision after decision—from DOGE to the so-called Big Beautiful Bill and tariffs—has wrought chaos and confusion in the federal government, destroying Democratic norms and permanently altering the US and what it stands for.
“I think the most American thing you can do is to revere the institution,” she says. “But having reverence for the institution is understanding that it’s being decimated, and figuring out how you are going to salvage what you can and rebuild it bigger and better.”
To Crockett, what the president has done to our Democratic institutions is akin to setting a house on fire. At what point, she wonders, will we need to reckon with what that means?
“You may love a home, but at some point you’ve got to get out of it if you’re going to save yourself,” she says. “You have to be committed to building it back and in a more sustainable way so you don’t have to worry about it burning down again. I don’t think enough people have flipped the switch on that second part, and recognize that smoke inhalation is about to hit pretty hard, so we’ve got to get out. And that means actually fighting the fire, putting water on it. That means trying to figure out if we have a foundation that’s still standing and can rebuild from there.”
Leaning into the analogy, I ask her where, in her mind, we are at. Have we begun to feel the effects of the hypothetical smoke in our lungs? She looks at me straight in the eye.
“I think we’re already choking,” she says.
The biggest issue on Crockett’s mind is her home state of Texas. The fight over the Republican state government’s attempt to gerrymander its congressional districts is much more of a local dust-up at this stage than the national news story it will grow into.
In the coming weeks, Texas’s Democratic lawmakers will flee the state in an attempt to stop its GOP legislature from drawing a map that disenfranchises their voters and leaves Crockett’s House colleagues in danger of losing their seats in 2026. One state lawmaker, Representative Nicole Collier, will be locked in the Capitol building rather than accept a mandated state escort monitoring her whereabouts. Ultimately, though, the gerrymandered map will pass, being signed into law by Republican governor Greg Abbott on August 29.
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Crockett, though, is deep in the fight when we speak. Her main worry isn’t the potential impact to her own political power, but something much more expansive. The Texas fight, in her mind, is yet another canary in the coal mine that indicates how much we are sliding toward authoritarianism.
“I’m concerned about the people that I serve,” she says. “I’m concerned about them not having the representation that they’re entitled to, the representation they thought they were getting. I’m concerned about that. I’m concerned about the number of people…who deserve better, who did nothing wrong, to be shitted on.”
But while the Texas Democrats’ fight was ultimately unsuccessful in changing the outcome of the redistricting, they were victorious in another, powerful way. As a New York Times op-ed put it, “They lost, but they lost loudly.” Their fight became a cause celebre for the left, with powerful Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ JB Pritzker joining the cause and many cheering them on.
It was exactly the type of move that many Democratic constituents have been pleading with their elected officials to make, often to no avail. Crockett shares their frustrations.
“Democrats are still not equipped for the fight that has come to our doorsteps,” she says of her colleagues in Congress. “We still want to believe in the rule of law. We still want to believe that there are rules to be playing by. But with every passing day, [Trump]’s breaking new rules, breaking new laws, breaking new norms, all in the name of power.”
She’s not sure what else it will take to demonstrate to her colleagues that playing by the rules is no longer an option.
“I think it’s very clear that regardless of how much lipstick you put on these ugly pigs of bills that he’s passing, they still will just be pigs and [Republicans] know it and they don’t want to be held accountable,” she says. “They’re cheating. And I don’t know that Democrats are really ready to go toe to toe with a bunch of scumbag cheaters.”
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I ask her the question that so many on social media are perpetually screaming when it comes to this issue—why? Why do so many Democratic representatives insist on sticking with decorum, finger-wagging instead of, as Crockett puts it, focusing on the burning house?
It’s pretty simple, she thinks. For whatever reason, a lot of her peers aren’t ready to meet the moment. When it comes to actually looking the threat in the eyes, they hesitate. They continue to believe that if they are role models for what a “good” politician looks like, Republicans will fall in line.
“They are not recognizing that [Republicans] couldn’t care less,” she says. “That the Republicans have decided that their model is a 34-count convicted felon who is and has been held liable for sexual abuse.”
She adds: “That’s crazy. It’s insane. So I mean, anybody that tries to act like we’ve got to do our jobs, and that looks like just sitting here, is truly delusional.”
It’s often the case that those who are the most vocal in fighting oppression are those who face the most risk in doing so. Crockett, for instance, continuously puts herself in the center of the opposition to Trump’s overreach, despite the fact that as a Black woman, she faces a heightened torrent of abuse and safety concerns each time she does.
Currently, she tells me, she’s using donations she gets to fund her personal security team. Though Trump gets taxpayer-funded protection—despite being a convicted felon, she points out—neither she nor many other members of Congress do, even though she faces death threats when Trump or another Republican goes after her on social media.
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“Unfortunately the target is on some people’s backs who are the loudest and most resistant,” she says. “And so I’m thankful [for donors] because the federal government is failing me.”
She describes travel as the time she feels most vulnerable, flying through airports without her staff and completely open to the general public, some of whom, she says, have been conditioned to hate her by the most powerful person in the country. It’s not just her, and it’s not just Democrats, she notes. The current environment leaves everyone at risk.
“The threats come on both sides, and they’re waged by the same person,” she says. “We had members that left Congress last term because in the middle of all the [House] speaker fights. MAGA…started threatening people and started threatening their wives. It is always MAGA. If we laid down the reports, whether it’s threats that are being waged on Republicans or waged on Democrats, I can guarantee you 90% or more were Trump supporters. The violence comes from one space—period.”
It’s clear to me that Crockett is done trying to act like any of this is normal or okay. When I bring up various topics—from Project 2025 to the current state of reproductive rights in Texas—she seems exasperated.
Yes, she says, the Heritage Foundation’s so-called road map for how to reshape the US in its image is as bad as it seems. She tried to ring alarm bells many times, both when she was a Texas state legislator and now in Congress, to watch Project 2025 be continuously downplayed. In Texas, which she describes as the “training ground” for some of the laws now being targeted on a federal level, she watched the tactics at work.
“I know that they are despicable pieces of shit as they were passing the heartbeat bill through the Texas legislature,” she says of a restrictive abortion bill passed before the Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade. “They were the ones that were doing the focus groups to determine what types of things would get people emotionally riled up to the point of distraction…. Part of me says, I did everything I could to warn people. They decided not to listen.”
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At some point Crockett looks at me ruefully and apologizes for being such a downer. And I have to admit—listening to a sitting member of Congress describe our political system—which I, my loved ones, and everyone I know live under—as an out-of-control burning house doesn’t make me walk away feeling that great.
But that’s the revelatory part about Crockett beyond the viral memes and snappy headlines. She’s not interested in the bullshit, or the political doublespeak that’s perhaps led to the complacency we see now. It’s as bad as we think, and Crockett isn’t going to pretend that it isn’t.
At times Crockett seems almost resigned to the risk she puts herself in every time she walks out of her house. She doesn’t want to be attacked, injured, or worse for the work she does, but she also doesn’t see a world in which she doesn’t fight back against the current reality.
She often thinks of civil rights leaders, like Representative John Lewis, who sacrificed their own safety in order to fight for justice. Given her current position, how can she do anything less?
“I feel like I’m a sellout if I can’t raise my voice when they did so much more,” she says. “They believed in this true American dream; they believed in equality. Who am I to sit back and just be okay with the status quo and not do my part to make sure that this road is easier and not more difficult for those coming behind me? It’s just a weight that I carry with me everywhere.”
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