Maxine Waters knew it would come to this. Since 1990, she has represented California in the United States House of Representatives. In that time, she has seen President Bill Clinton weather impeachment, President George Bush drag us into endless war, and President Barack Obama survive the scandal of his tan suit. In other words, she can distinguish between real and partisan horror. And she has sounded the alarm on this president for months.
In September 2017, at comedian Dick Gregory’s funeral, Waters said, “when I get through with Donald Trump, he’s going to wish he had been impeached.” In May 2017, she asked, “Why would we let…Trump, a con man, come in here and turn it all upside down with his lies and his disrespect?” She would keep at it, she promised, “until he’s impeached.” In November 2017, she led thousands of people in an “Impeach 45!” chant at Glamour’s Women of the Year Awards. It took some time, but the House of Representatives has now heeded her call.
But as much as Waters is vindicated, she is also under fire. The representative is a frequent target for such right-wing conservatives as Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and the hordes of internet trolls who follow them. In October 2018, Waters was one of over a dozen Trump critics who was sent a bomb—in fact she received two—in the mail. She tells Glamour she still gets death threats. But Waters is as resolute as ever: Now is no time to back down. Here, she talks impeachment, Republicans, and what’s next for America.
Glamour: From the beginning, you have been a voice in the wilderness, warning America about this president.
Rep. Maxine Waters I watched this president all during the primaries and the way that he treated his peers. I watched him talk about grabbing women by their private parts. I’ve watched him name-call—he name-called me. I watched him promote violence at his rallies. I watched him embrace [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and refuse to denounce him even after our intelligence committee basically confirmed that the Russians had hacked into our election system. And now I’m watching him, with this telephone call that really has gotten a lot more people into understanding and believing how dangerous he is, how corrupt he is. A tough call where he tried to talk the Ukrainian president into getting involved in some kind of phony investigation so that he could get dirt on [former Vice President Joe] Biden.
In what many observers are calling a thinly veiled threat, President Donald Trump on Monday afternoon took his feud with California Congresswoman (and Glamour Woman of the Year) Maxine Waters to a new level with a tweet telling her to “be careful” what she wished for.
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” she said. “And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
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Waters’ remarks came after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted that she had been refused service at a restaurant because of her position in the Trump administration.
Now President Trump has responded via Twitter, writing, “Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!”
Waters has yet to comment on the most recent tweet, but she previously spoke to Glamour about her thoughts on Trump’s character. “The most upsetting part is discovering that the person who won the election and became the president of the United States of America is a man who has no good values. His character astounds me,” Waters said in 2017. “I can’t believe that we have a president who would lie, who would distort, and who does not appear to have an appreciation for government and how it works.”
Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat who holds a leadership position on the Congressional Black Caucus, told Glamour in a phone interview that the president’s Twitter attack on Waters struck her as “malicious” and “over the top.”
Clarke said that by her reading of Trump’s message, “It is very evident from what he said that he is wishing her ill… There is an implied harm that could visit her because of her statements.”
The congresswoman called it “beneath the office of the presidency to [imply] that someone could be harmed because they make a statement about what is taking place in this administration,” she said.
Clarke said she planned to discuss the Trump tweet with the CBC as well as the Congressional Caucus on Black Women & Girls: “We all have to sit up and take note. Women need to sit up and take note. He’s found ways to silence women throughout his candidacy and his presidency.”
Asked if she’d ever seen a president make a comparable statement in the past, Clarke replied, “Never, never — we are in uncharted territory where the breaking of norms [is] becoming the norm. The lack of civility, the lack of true respect for one another is leading to the point where the antagonism and the hostility is palpable.”
Additionally, Clarke said, “We have to talk to Capitol Police to ensure that there is security for Maxine Waters” given that “we’ve already seen unhinged individuals in this climate” who are willing to commit acts of violence. In one example, Clarke noted that Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson got extra security in response to death threats she received after a public disagreement with Trump last year.
As many rush to Waters’ defense, others have condemned her statements about confronting members of the Trump administration, calling it “harassment.” Prior to Trump’s latest comments, Democratic congressional leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted out a story about Waters’ comments and—without naming her directly— wrote, “In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey made similar comments in a Monday interview with NPR when asked about Waters encouraging Americans to protest the Trump administration at every turn.
“You know, protest is good, and I’ve been encouraging people there be a lot of protests at the Mall and cities all across America protesting this really – these morally despicable actions by the Trump administration separating folks from families,” he said. “But this is also a time, I believe, as Americans who seek to create a beloved community, who believe in a more what I consider a radical love, love thy neighbor – no exceptions. And whether that person is coming over the border or whether that person is somebody who votes differently than you, we’ve got to be a nation that treats each other with our highest ideals.”
As for Trump, this is not the first time he has used Twitter to warn someone to “be careful,” Yahoo! News managing editor Colin Campbell points out.
However none of those instances used the word “harm” in the framing of the tweet, (it should also be noted that Waters did not implicitly call for any harm to come to administration officials in her speech), one denotation that many say is the clear difference between a petty insult and an actual threat.
Democratic Representative Maxine Waters of California,—she who made “reclaiming my time” a rallying cry—will be is now claiming the spot following President Donald Trump‘s first State of the Union address next Tuesday. Directly after his speech, she’ll be popping by the beginning of BET’s Trump-focused Angela Rye’s State of the Union, a quarterly special bringing political commentator Rye and BET together to comment on Black American issues, according to Buzzfeed.
Waters is known for her fierce outspokenness, including a few viral moments during the past year, whether it’s been for her grilling of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin during which she infamously “reclaimed her time”, or for that moment when she started an “Impeach 45!” chant at the 2017 Glamour Women of the Year Awards. She’s also a feminist icon: she recently wrote an essay for Glamour.com about how the Women’s March revived her faith in the younger generation.
Don’t expect her told hold back during the BET special. “Auntie Maxine,” as her devoted fans call her, has already made her feelings about the president quite clear. While politics is often jargon and spin, Waters hasn’t been afraid to say what’s really on her mind when it comes to Trump—or really anything.
“The most upsetting part is discovering that the person who won the election and became the president of the United States of America is a man who has no good values. His character astounds me,” she said in an interview with Glamour.com last June. “I can’t believe that we have a president who would lie, who would distort, and who does not appear to have an appreciation for government and how it works.”
Waters’ speech is not the official Democratic response to Trump’s first State of the Union—Representative Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts will be delivering that. But official or not, surely Waters will have plenty to say. Perhaps she’ll coin a new catchphrase?
January 21 marks the one-year anniversary of the Women’s March, the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. All this week, Glamour will be spotlighting the stories, people, and issues that framed the March, as well as where we go from here.
Backstage, before I spoke at the Women’s March in Washington, my mind went immediately to the many marches I’ve been involved in during my lifetime. I couldn’t help but reflect on the work of fellow activists in my past, people like Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and so many others. I met up with Gloria backstage and my heart fluttered to see her, and we embraced and talked about old times.
But I will be honest: I was also feeling as if there had been a long gap. So much time had passed between when we had been together on those marches, what we had accomplished, and today. I had really begun to think that the women’s movement was lost, that younger women didn’t appreciate what we had done, and why. I thought they were more focused on their careers, thinking that a women’s movement didn’t enhance their opportunity for upward mobility, that they didn’t want to be aligned with it. They didn’t think they needed it.
Going in, I had been feeling disappointed, even a bit resentful,
toward the younger generation. But seeing the
size and passion of the crowd… [I realized] I’d
been completely wrong.
I lined up to speak, and I could not believe what I saw. I had heard there would be 250,000 people present; it was more like a million. It was unlike any march I’d been to before. For one thing, there were the pink hats everywhere. The signs were the most creative that I have ever seen. And the women who had organized the march had included people of all cultures and backgrounds in their leadership and planning.
Going in, I had been feeling disappointed, even a bit resentful, toward the younger generation. I was under the impression that they thought what we had done for women’s rights wasn’t important. But seeing the size and passion of the crowd and realizing that the younger women there recognized what we had done and that they were carrying our torch made me realize I’d been completely wrong. And as I left the stage and marched with groups of young women, I saw that they did know the history. Some of them even recognized me and called out my name, and it was thrilling to me to connect with the younger generation. We walked from the stage all the way to the White House and I was in a state of euphoria. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.
Excerpted from Together We Rise: Behind the Scenes at the Protest Heard Around the World, available for purchase now.
One of the highlights of this year’s Glamour Women of the Year Awards (which took place Monday, November 13) was honoree Maxine Waters’ speech, where she repeatedly called for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Yup.
“You recognize when a leader is irresponsible. You recognize when a leader is dishonorable and disrespectful. You recognize when a leader is dangerous,” the California congresswoman said. “Even if that leader is the President of the United States of America.”
With this, the crowd that filled Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre erupted into applause, and their excitement only grew when Waters started chanting, “Impeach 45! Impeach 45!” It quickly turned into one of the evening’s mantras, and by the end of her speech, nearly everyone in the crowd was yelling it too.
She continued, “And I want you to have courage. I want you to know that you can stand up to him or anybody else. For those who say to me, ‘You are asking for something too soon and too early, be careful, don’t jeopardize yourself, don’t say what you’re saying right now,’ I will continue to say, ‘Impeach him! Impeach him! Impeach him!”
Waters became a social media sensation when millennials noticed her progressive and incredibly inclusive political viewpoints. Her popularity reached a fever pitch in the summer of 2017, when a video of her repeatedly saying, “reclaiming my time” to an interrupting United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin went viral. (She was questioning him during a House Financial Services Committee.)
Zendaya introduced Waters at the awards ceremony, and her tribute speech was equally as inspiring. “Have you ever been the only woman in a room? What about the only Black woman in a room? Our next honoree has reminded us over and over again when we are faced with the despair and defeating odds of that room, we can not allow it to intimidate us,” she said. “[Waters] she teaches us how to let it fuel us…She reminds us that we must be fearless in how we represent ourselves in a room where we are not always being represented.”
