We Need a Great Talker as Our Next Speaker

This moment calls for more than just decent legislators.

There’s a new kind of Democrat winning right now. Candidates who keep beating the machine by running as fighters. Melat Kiros in Denver. Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez in New York. Mai Vang in Sacramento, who earned a November showdown with a twenty-year incumbent. Many of us have been hoping and working for candidates like them to start winning, and now they’re winning, and they’re on their way to becoming members of the House. And for it they’re under vicious attack, from the right and from the Democratic center both.

Trump is calling these elected officials the greatest threat to America, more of a threat than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, and 9-11. What he’s calling for is violence. Violence from the state. After all, they have NSPM-7 at their disposal, the directive he signed last September that turns the FBI’s terrorism task forces and the IRS loose on anyone whose politics the White House decides to call extremism, the organizers, the nonprofits, and the people who fund them. What are the Weimar Democrats like Josh Gottheimer doing? Cheering him on and rejecting the idea that we need fundamental change.

How they answer that pressure is going to decide what their wins were worth. Because the pull is going to be toward falling in line, with the old leadership and with the old way of doing things. Kiros showed us what refusing looks like. One of the first things she did with her win was say she won’t vote for anyone for a leadership position who takes corporate PAC money, and that includes Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker.

That’s different from what Lander did. Lander beat Dan Goldman, an incumbent the establishment lined up behind, and he ran as the fighter. Two days later, on June 27th, he put up a post that said “Thank you Hakeem Jeffries. Looking forward to electing you Speaker in January.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said she’ll back Jeffries to stay in charge. Voters have to believe in this new crop of candidates if they’re going to show up in 2026 and again in 2028. That won’t happen if the newest, loudest voices of our movement line up behind failed leadership because it’s the way things are done.

Conventional wisdom says if Democrats take back the House this November, Hakeem Jeffries is the next Speaker, and the left is handing him the gavel. I think that’s a mistake, and whether it’s a mistake comes down entirely to what you think the job is.

A lot of people are worn out from watching Democrats lose the fights they say they care about. They want fighters. They want somebody standing up for them and sticking up for them. They want leaders who’ll help them afford their lives, force some accountability, go in and improve the system.

And the reason a lot of people are excited about Hakeem Jeffries is that he’s been in the process a long time. He knows the House. He knows the committees. He knows the caucus. People figure he can wrangle the members and keep everybody unified. The argument’s already being made that it’s his turn, that he’s put in the time. But it doesn’t matter how much time he’s put in, and it doesn’t matter whose turn it is. What matters is who’s the best person for the job. And picking him for his tenure assumes the most useful thing we can do as a party for the next two years is more strongly worded letters, more investigations, more committees, more subpoenas, more information. And it assumes we’d do something better with all of that than we did last time, when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker and Donald Trump got impeached twice and was never convicted, never removed, never even curtailed, and came back a little bit stronger after the whole thing was over.

Jeffries has already shown us his brand of fighting. He’s tried legislative tactics, he’s tried committee tactics, he’s tried all sorts of different ways to rein Trump in, and he’s proven time and again that he can’t do it. It doesn’t work in the moment we find ourselves in.

Because the job isn’t just a legislative job anymore. It’s a talking job. It’s an inspiring job. What we’re in a battle for right now is the minds of the voters, the minds of America, the question of its future. And that battle won’t be won with interesting legislative maneuvers. It’ll be won by somebody who can capture the American attention, who can win hearts and minds and make the case for what’s happened. Not with mountains and mountains of paperwork and investigations, but with things so obvious they don’t need much investigating, with ideas so basic and so understandable they feel like common sense. We need that fight happening out in the media, out on the playing field of the people. And the playing field of the people isn’t legislative. That’s not how you stop MAGA, and it’s not how you win over its voters. You do that with inspiration and trust. And the way you earn trust is you go out there and talk about the problems people are already seeing with their own eyes, and you tell them the real solutions for fixing them.

The problem with the Democratic Party’s leadership right now is that it thinks with enough clever research and enough appeasement of the various interest groups, it can cobble together solutions that work for everybody. There aren’t solutions that work for everybody if some people want to be trillionaires and centibillionaires.

Health care. Housing. Child care. And we have to be able to say plainly that we’ve been funding a genocide, and that there’s going to have to be accountability for it, here at home and in Israel. That’s how you show people we’re a party that’s ready to change a broken system.

If we went into the House and pushed reforms to keep politicians from cashing out as lobbyists the minute they’re out of office, to stop them getting bankrolled by giant money and trading on inside knowledge, to ban members from trading stocks at all, people would start to feel different about our leadership. If we were out there calling corruption what it is, including the corruption and the constitutional violations at the Supreme Court, and saying clearly that some of those people need to be impeached, people would feel different. And it would steady a lot of folks if we just told them the truth about the Federal Reserve. That it isn’t independent. That it’s been swallowed whole by Wall Street. That there’s a revolving door between the financial sector and the people setting our policy, and that it’s been using American pain to fight inflation, using American inequality to fight inflation.

People may not know every acronym. They know the shape of the thing. They know the system’s rigged. They know the pain always rolls downhill and the rescue always flows up. The next Speaker has to be able to say that.

That’s why I don’t think Hakeem Jeffries is the one. He doesn’t believe these things. He doesn’t believe this country needs a radical transformation. He doesn’t believe our health care system needs to be rebuilt from the studs, that we need to make more doctors and nurses and medical schools, more mental health professionals and dentists and eye doctors, at the rate we’d build them if we were fighting off the Nazis. If he believes we need to break the power of the corporate landlords and the bankers and the monopolists and the lobbyists and the captured courts, he sure hasn’t made it the center of his leadership.

Jeffries would be the first Black Speaker of the House, and in a country with our history that carries real weight, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. But the gavel’s a job, and the job right now is to move a country that’s stopped believing us. The finest political communicator of my lifetime was Barack Obama, a Black man who could walk into any room in America and make people believe again. So this was never about race. It’s about that gift, and we’re starving for it. If the person who has it would also make history, good. But making history can’t be the only reason we hand over the gavel, not with this much riding on it.

And the same goes for the Senate. Whoever leads the Senate Democrats, majority or minority, can’t be picked because we think they’ll be best at the rules of the Senate. Donald Trump has shown us that the rules don’t mean shit to the people we’re up against. Picking leaders for their command of procedure misunderstands the battle. It misunderstands the mission. The Senate leader has the same talking job the Speaker has, the same battle for the same minds.

People will ask me who instead. I don’t have a name in my back pocket, and I don’t think the answer is to crown somebody new today. The members pick the leader, which means this is ours to decide, if we don’t give it away before the fight even starts. Everybody we send to Washington this fall should do what Kiros just did. Don’t walk in and pledge your vote to the same leadership that lost us the country. Make them earn it. Ask whoever wants the gavel to stand in front of the country and make the case, for rebuilding health care and housing, for ending our part in a genocide, for breaking the power of the landlords and the bankers and the captured courts. If the person who can do that is already in the caucus, good. If not, we find them and we lift them up. What we don’t do is decide the audition is over before it started.

This country is being crushed. Crushed by debt that doesn’t build anything. Medical debt. Student debt. Credit card debt. Rent debt. Public debt spent on contractors and bailouts and war and tax breaks instead of things people can see and use. And crushed by a lack of hope. Unless we reignite the American can-do spirit, the old belief that we can still build things and that things can get done on purpose, the next several years are going to be a long, hard slog.

Newt Gingrich understood the House could be a stage and a school and a weapon and a megaphone, and he used it to tear things down. We don’t have to copy his cruelty to learn from how clearly he saw it. The House can teach the country who holds the power and who abuses it and who pays the price. It can show people the line between their hospital bill and private equity, between their rent and Wall Street landlords, between their grocery bill and corporate concentration, between their hopelessness and the leaders and consultants who keep telling them nothing big can be done.

MAGA won’t be stopped by procedure. It won’t be beaten by another round of hearings that prove what half the country already knows and the other half’s been trained to dismiss. It won’t be beaten by leaders who sound like they’re trying to preserve a system people already think failed them. It’ll be beaten when Democrats become more trustworthy than the people lying to them.

That takes leaders who can talk to the country like they understand what it costs to live here. The next Speaker needs to be able to walk into a union hall, a church basement, a small-town diner, a college campus, a farm county, a Black neighborhood, a Latino neighborhood, a veterans’ hall and a local news interview and say the same thing in plain English. Here’s who’s hurting you. Here’s what we’re going to build. Here’s who’s standing in the way. Here’s the power we need to beat them.

If we don’t have a Speaker of the House and a leader in the Senate who can hit the airwaves with excitement and energy, who can get the American people excited about the American project again, we’re at a disadvantage we don’t have to be at. So yes, the next Speaker should know the House. But knowing the House isn’t enough. The next Speaker needs to know the country. The next Speaker needs to be more than the agent of the caucus. The next Speaker needs to be an agent of the public. And if Democrats are serious about meeting this moment, our next Speaker needs to be a real good talker.

Corbin Trent