Hakeem Jeffries has a plan for Donald Trump and for his Democratic critics

Backstage in Virginia Beach the Saturday before the midterms, Hakeem Jeffries sat in a room by himself.

He read over the speech he was about to give, versions of which he’d given dozens of times in all sorts of tough districts — first in his head, then mouthing the words and practicing how he’d throw his hands around for emphasis.

Jeffries was there to campaign for Elaine Luria, the Navy veteran trying to win back the seat she lost in the 2022 midterms. He then rushed to Alabama to pump up Rep. Shomari Figures, whom Republicans targeted as part of an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting effort that Jeffries had spent more than a year fighting, state by state.

At that point, Democrats needed to net three seats to win the House. Now, Jeffries is set to have a margin well into the dozens as the last races finish counting. Luria and Figures, each considered underdogs earlier in the year, both won.

“A lot of people counted us out and claimed the Democratic Party was dead in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election,” Jeffries told CNN a week later, speaking via Zoom from New York Democrats’ traditional post-election gathering in Puerto Rico. “And now it appears that we’ve roared to life.”

Jeffries, 56, is set to become the first Black speaker in American history, leading a historically large majority in battle against a president who just picked his most hard-line aide as chief of staff. Until the Democratic presidential nominee emerges, Jeffries will be perhaps his party’s most important leader, defining the agenda that candidates will have to answer for as they fan out across early primary states.

But he also takes the gavel with his party in perpetual existential churn, the many members who won in swing or Trump districts already worried about overreach that could empower Republicans — and an activist left wing labeling him a shill of corporate interests and big money.

He’s heard the criticism and insults from liberals, seen the sombrero memes from conservatives, and knows that some people say he’s not Nancy Pelosi, who leaves Congress in January. He responds by comparing himself to his hometown basketball team, which just won its first NBA championship in 53 years.

“My track record speaks for itself,” Jeffries told CNN in a pair of extensive interviews. “If I’m the Knicks right now — you can take all the incoming in the world that you want, but they can sit there and say, ‘Our track record speaks for itself,’ and mean it. Our view as House Democrats is that we have fought hard and battled Republicans on every single issue to get us to this point.”

Jeffries smiles thinking back to February 2025, three months after Democrats’ devastating 2024 losses, when he stood at a press conference in the basement of the Capitol and said of the House GOP, “You’ve lectured America that you had a big mandate — where is it?”

“It was always to me a combination of arrogance and incompetence that House Republicans in particular — who narrowly held on to their majority, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s overwhelming victory across the country in terms of the battleground states, would somehow convince themselves that they had an overwhelming mandate,” Jeffries said.

During the interviews, Jeffries kept pointing to the scoreboard: all the wins in districts that Republicans tried to gerrymander Democrats out of, the incumbents he convinced to stick through uphill fights, the hundreds of millions of dollars he raised, the places all over the country where he was seen as a benefit to appear for candidates like Luria, walking out to Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair” and getting crowds riled up by talking about making him speaker.

That final weekend, Jeffries wasn’t listing a number of seats he expected Democrats to win, but he knew enough from aides’ math that they were likely to get the majority — as he predicted a year and a half ago.

“There were people who thought I was out of my mind when I made that statement and clearly meant it,” Jeffries told CNN.

How he plans to deal with Trump

Jeffries has been talking with Sen. Chuck Schumer, the current Democratic leader and a fellow Brooklynite, about how to try to corner Trump. The president in recent days has veered between saying he’d work with Democrats and threatening to become “Mr. Veto” while selling $40 “VETO” red hats.

Jeffries told CNN he wants to use as a model this summer’s housing bill, which passed with bipartisan support and became law in July after the president let enough days go by without action.

“Donald Trump decided not to sign it, but he also understood he couldn’t veto it,” Jeffries said. “Perhaps that’s a pathway forward as it relates to what’s going to happen into the future, which means the one thing you can guarantee is that Democrats are going to relentlessly work to get things done and then it will fall to Donald Trump to decide as to whether he’s willing to partner with us to make life more affordable for everyday Americans.”

Asked whether Trump has called him since Tuesday, Jeffries skipped his standard long-winded answers for just, “No.” Asked whether he’d called Trump: “No.”

He hasn’t spoken to the president or to Vice President JD Vance since their one Oval Office meeting in September 2025. Trump hasn’t said much publicly about Jeffries since he posted AI images of the Democrat wearing a cartoon sombrero in the aftermath of that meeting.

Jeffries has never had a direct conversation with Stephen Miller, the incoming chief of staff, whose promotion he greeted by referring to Miller as a “malignant tumor.”

In the spring, Jeffries took the unusual move of personally whipping votes on an Iran war powers resolution. He wanted every Democrat, even those cheering to see Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed despite no congressional authorization, to vote for the resolution in opposition to the war. But that was less to appeal to voters on foreign policy or constitutional grounds, he thought, than to corner Republicans on gas prices. Ultimately, four Democrats broke with the rest of the caucus.

While some outside advisers warned against centering the fight against Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” on Medicaid cuts — dismissing them as only about poor people, according to a person briefed on the conversations — Jeffries said he was sure that was the way to go.

And at the end of last year, he again pushed to focus the Democrats’ message on the lapsed healthcare subsidies, leading to a government shutdown. He felt the weight of what he was doing and how it might go wrong, at one point calling aides from the airport, stressing about whether he should return to the Capitol.

“He’s just really good at being in the moment, not making decisions before he needs to. And then once he makes it, he’s prepared to go and doesn’t allow himself or others to be distracted,” said Rep. Joe Morelle, a close ally in the caucus and the lieutenant he dispatched to work on retaliatory gerrymandering in their home state of New York.

Al Sharpton has known the president going back to New York in the 1980s. He has also been a Jeffries friend and political ally for 30 years.

“He’s the same Hakeem, except better at it,” Sharpton said.

Sharpton broke into a broad smile when imagining what the Trump-Jeffries dynamic will look like.

“Trump will be in the awkward position of meeting with a Black guy smarter than him,” Sharpton said. “The question is whether he’s been so humiliated by this defeat that he’ll just have to take it.”

Many on the left dislike Jeffries — and he knows

Some Democrats are already arguing that Jeffries isn’t bold enough, that he won’t bring down the hammer on Trump or Democrats who defect.

Jeffries has remained a prime focus for the left — some because of his cautious resistance to their causes, particularly on his support for Israel; some irritated over his snapping back at critics, some noting his outreach to Republicans like Jared Kushner. A Change.org petition that declares Jeffries “simply not the right choice” for speaker has racked up a million signatures since it was launched in September.

Popular radio host Charlamagne tha God turned Jeffries’ well-known love of hip-hop against him with the nickname “AIPAC Shakur.” In September, Palestinian journalist and author Rula Jebreal called him an “AIPAC monkey” and an “errand boy,” comments widely condemned as racist for which she later apologized.

Jeffries almost faced a primary this year from Chi Ossé, the city councilman from Brooklyn who argued top Democrats had failed to respond effectively to Trump or to provide leadership for the party.

While Jeffries tends to avoid responding to critics, talk of a primary challenge led his political operation to declare, “If Team Gentrification wants a primary fight, our response will be forceful and unrelenting.”

Ossé didn’t run after being pushed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stand down, though he picked up the charge on Wednesday morning, mocking Jeffries for saying the wins were about America and not about Democrats — a post that was boosted by the Sen. Bernie Sanders-inspired group Our Revolution.

Earlier this year, as a picture of Jeffries flashed on the screen at the primary victory party for Rep.-elect Claire Valdez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the crowd chanted, “You’re next!”

“It was very interesting to me, as observed by others,” Jeffries told CNN, “that there was almost zero diversity in that crowd.”

Jeffries pays attention to loyalty and trust. He values those who didn’t start paying attention to him when he was already en route to being a big deal. He is deferential to elders in politics, especially in the Congressional Black Caucus, and after growing up working class and representing one of the poorer and most Black districts in the country, he dismisses those he sees as newcomers to the cause.

He took a different approach to the incoming members themselves, working with even the socialists who blasted him in their campaigns over the summer and fall.

Among his most useful allies is former President Barack Obama, whom Jeffries endorsed for president in 2008 over then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton — something that nearly led to Jeffries’ excommunication from local political circles. Over phone calls and regular meetings at Obama’s Washington office, the former president has been impressed by Jeffries’ message discipline and his ruthlessness leading the efforts to fight back on gerrymandering.

Obama is closer in age to Jeffries, and while he worked closely with Pelosi, an adviser told CNN, he sees the incoming speaker as the next generation taking the baton.

Former presidents Joe Biden and Bill Clinton called on Wednesday too, offering to help. So did a few of the candidates likely gearing up to run for the White House in 2028.

Some have yet to commit to backing Jeffries for speaker, though the size of his majority — potentially approaching 260 members — makes a few holdouts moot. Underscoring the breadth of his support, Michigan Rep.-elect Will Lawrence, a co-founder of the climate activist group Sunrise Movement and a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America, now plans to vote for Jeffries, reversing his position earlier in the campaign. Sunrise has promoted primary challenges against Democratic incumbents over their support for Israel.

“It’s all just a question of what your leverage is at any given time. And there are times when we are having these debates within the party, and there’s times to come together with unity to focus on the bigger task,” Lawrence said.

Lawrence was asked how he reconciled the corporate PAC money Jeffries raised in the midterms with his own demand to get all corporate money out of politics.

“Politics is full of contradictions,” Lawrence responded.

Inscrutable by design

Jeffries started Tuesday in New York and traveled to DC for lunch with party officials — eating at the same crab shack where Democrats dined on midterm day in 2018, when they flipped the House in Trump’s first term. When he went before the cameras in Washington to claim victory on Tuesday night, he switched his walk-on music to another favorite: the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Unbelievable.”

But Jeffries is so private that aides and colleagues sometimes joke that he doesn’t even want them to know where he lives, or what exactly he does when he sometimes holes up by himself in big moments. His own account of his phone call with his mother on Tuesday night: “She said, ‘Love you and proud of you.’” Pushed to elaborate, he would only say, “We had a longer conversation, but that was the gist.”

Ask members of Congress who consider themselves close to him for their favorite Jeffries story and they struggle to come up with specifics, though they gush about how much they like and trust him.

“I call him ‘Silk’ because he’s so smooth,” said his close ally New York Rep. Greg Meeks, who variously compared him to a chess player, famed Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, and in terms of tuning out the noise to focus on the mission, Martin Luther King Jr.

In a politics that has become a running soap opera, Jeffries is determined to remain more of an enigma in public than a character — though he also rejects that he is an enigma.

“Seems to me that there’s nobody in the district that I represent currently or in the district that I previously represented in the assembly thinks that I’m introverted,” Jeffries said. “At the end of the day, we’re a team within the House Democratic caucus in the Congress. It’s an honor to be the quarterback of that team. But we have to remain focused on actually winning for the American people. And we do that together.”

Sitting in Puerto Rico, pressed by CNN to describe how he felt himself about the wins, the arc that got him there, the history-making he’s about to do, Jeffries finally relented.

“You never thought that hip-hop would take it this far,” he said, quoting a different Biggie Smalls song, “Juicy.”

That’s it?

“That’s it,” he said. “That says a lot, means a lot to me — without saying a whole lot.”

CNN’s Manu Raju contributed to this report.