On a wet spring night time, about 30 miles north of Manhattan, New York Legal professional Common Letitia James marched onto the stage at Westchester Neighborhood School. Standing almost six toes tall and wearing a drapey black swimsuit (not in contrast to a judicial gown), she smiled broadly. 4 of her comrades in authorized arms—Minnesota Legal professional Common Keith Ellison, California’s Rob Bonta, Illinois’s Kwame Raoul, and New Jersey’s Matt Platkin—adopted carefully behind, as a multiracial crowd of a whole bunch rose and cheered raucously.
Since January, these AGs have challenged the Trump administration 30 occasions (and counting). However James has stood out, not solely from the opposite AGs but additionally amongst prime Democrats within the Empire State. This crowd was right here for her.
New York Metropolis is dwelling to essentially the most highly effective Democrats in Congress: Senate minority chief Chuck Schumer and Home minority chief Hakeem Jeffries. However the best and standard Democrat representing New York is the Brooklyn lady generally known as Tish—a former Authorized Help legal professional, legislative aide, Metropolis Council member, and New York Metropolis public advocate—who was elected legal professional common in 2018. She’s a savvy politician, endorsing Zohran Mamdani proper after he gained the June Democratic mayoral main, when different celebration leaders stored their distance.
However James’s greatest declare to fame is as a fierce fighter towards Trumpism.
No legal professional common within the nation is battling President Donald Trump extra proficiently—and drawing extra of his fireplace—than James. When Trump was out of workplace, she introduced the successful civil case charging him and his firm with enterprise fraud for alternately inflating and deflating the worth of his belongings to be able to cut back property taxes and procure favorable charges from banks and insurance coverage corporations. The case resulted in a $454 million high quality, which Trump is interesting.
Since Trump’s reelection, James has emerged as a North Star within the chaos, inspiring progressives in New York and nationally. “Tish James and the opposite state AGs on the entrance traces of this struggle will not be solely defending a Structure and federal legal guidelines towards a Supreme Chief and lawless autocrats,” says Consultant Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “They’re additionally displaying the nation what actual attorneys common do by appearing for the individuals and the rule of regulation as a substitute of a right-wing political putsch.”
James and her companion AGs have hit the president with a barrage of lawsuits which have briefly halted a few of his worst orders previously seven months. Their instances blocked efforts to freeze federal funding; stopped the termination of federal staff fired illegally; blocked Elon Musk’s DOGE from entry to delicate US Treasury materials; halted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to decimate Well being and Human Companies staffing; and briefly restored $11 billion in well being grants to states and cities. In early June, a courtroom blocked the Trump administration’s transfer to shutter the AmeriCorps program after New York and 24 different states joined a lawsuit to guard the favored federal community-service initiative.
However whereas James is happy with the work of the AGs, she is sincere about the truth that it isn’t almost sufficient given Trump’s all-out assault on democracy. Congressional Republicans, James says, “have simply handed over their authority to the chief. They, too, are afraid of MAGA. And so they’ve simply conceded their constitutional authority…. And so our job [as attorneys general] is clearly making an attempt to make change with these lawsuits, but additionally to arrange and to have occasions like we had in Westchester.”
Whether or not their authorized actions will assist to completely blunt the worst of Trump’s agenda stays to be seen, provided that main instances stay pending within the Supreme Courtroom. However they’re actually getting individuals’s consideration. Eileen O’Connor, a nurse practitioner and chief of the NYCD16/15-Indivisible group, attended the city corridor and thanked James for her work defending the Trump-threatened funding for Medicaid, Medicare, public security, and public schooling. “When it comes to the pro-democracy motion, it’s necessary that she’s persevering with to face as much as Trump. Individuals are actually heartened by that: ‘Oh, yeah, Tish, she’s doing it!’” Too many individuals are discouraged and not sure the way to struggle again throughout this second Trump regime, O’Connor says. “However Tish breaks by means of lots of the noise, and that’s necessary.”
That skill to interrupt by means of the noise has earned James reward—and a hefty enhance—amongst a lot of her state’s in any other case disgruntled Democratic base. “It’s my nice pleasure to introduce… our badass legal professional common, Tish James!” Westchester County Government Ken Jenkins mentioned to the excited city corridor crowd.
The night was billed as a “hearing” to collect info on Trump’s assault on your complete public sector, however James likened it to a “street present” that she and her AG colleagues had been taking across the nation. They’re not simply gathering proof; they’re additionally making an attempt to buoy the resistance to the second coming of Trump.
“This isn’t a neighborhood assembly, this can be a rattling rally,” Tom Hart, the president of Local 94 Operating Engineers in New York City, advised the group as he praised James and others for not less than briefly restoring healthcare for disabled 9/11 survivors and first responders. 9-year-old Kory Skipper-Miller wowed the group by explaining to “Ms. Tish” and the others the significance of sustaining the social and veterans’ advantages that his mom, grandmother, and brother depend on. Along with Kory, others talked about their worries over veterans’ providers which have already been declining and are slated for extra cuts, whereas different audio system lamented the approaching instructional cuts.
Whereas it might appear as if James and her fellow AGs emerged as authorized freedom fighters in a single day, in actuality their efforts had been months within the making. As James advised me, the AGs—usually working collectively underneath the umbrella of the Democratic Attorneys General Association—started assembly to debate combating a second Trump administration earlier than the 2024 election.
“It was not the end result that we anticipated, nevertheless it was one thing that we needed to put together for nonetheless,” James advised me three weeks after the Westchester city corridor. We had met for espresso at a café in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, the place waitstaff and constituents warmly interrupted us. “And so we analyzed Challenge 2025 based mostly on material,” she continued. “We checked out jurisdiction, we checked out standing, we checked out previous practices, we checked out who had been lively in sure areas, and we determined to assign our staffs totally different obligations based mostly on attainable instances. And we began getting ready complaints and briefs.” California Legal professional Common Rob Bonta, who sued Trump greater than 120 occasions in his first time period, advised The Hill that the group even wrote briefs upfront of Trump’s orders, so officers “simply have to cross the Ts, dot the Is, and press print and file it.”
They gathered primarily on Zoom, with as many as 23 Democratic AG places of work taking part within the calls, Ellison advised me. New York and California “are considerably greater than the remainder of us,” he famous, and that made collaboration important. “They’ve extra assets at their command and are ready to do issues that no person else is absolutely capable of do. [James has] chosen to be maximally beneficiant and work with all the remainder of us who’re a lot smaller, sharing assets, sharing herself.”
James laughed at that. “After I was elected,” she mentioned, “I found after attending a Nationwide Affiliation of Attorneys Common assembly that the earlier attorneys common of New York, who I can’t point out, had not cooperated.”
“It was stunning once I walked right into a convention and somebody yelled, ‘New York is right here!’” James continued. “I’m like, ‘So?’ However New York had by no means been there, and that’s unhappy. My strategy is to share the huge assets of the New York State Workplace of the Legal professional Common with smaller states, significantly at a time after we’re all underneath assault and when it’s going to take all of us to face up.”
The New York legal professional common’s workplace employs 1,700 individuals, 700 of them legal professionals; California’s has 5,400 staff, together with 1,100 attorneys. In contrast, Ellison employs 440 staffers, 193 of whom are attorneys or legal professional managers, and Rhode Island’s workplace—run by Peter Neronha, one of many Democratic AGs on this alliance of 23—employs 257 individuals and 103 attorneys.
“So Tish may commit three or 4 staffers on a problem, whereas I’d have the ability to spare one or two and a few states, none,” Ellison mentioned. Their efforts have been a lifeline to different state leaders. “Many people in state governments, not simply New York, actually rise up each morning saying, ‘Our solely hope is the courtroom system,’” mentioned New York state Senator Liz Krueger, a longtime ally of James. “We want an legal professional common to face up and say, ‘This isn’t authorized—we’re going to go to courtroom.’ And that’s precisely what Tish James is making an attempt to do on many important points.”
Of their quest to carry Trump accountable, James and her fellow Democratic AGs have develop into arguably much more necessary as we speak than they had been throughout Trump’s first time period, after they boasted an 83 percent win price in instances difficult the administration’s agenda. Since January, they’ve develop into the primary actors holding the road towards the administration’s unprecedented lawlessness.
The Democratic AGs don’t all the time win. However they usually delay and complicate Trump’s agenda, and they’re establishing a authorized report for finally upending it. Simply as necessary, they’re taking the struggle to Trump and the administration with a boldness that’s usually lacking on Capitol Hill.
As an example, James and her companion AGs had been prepared for Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship the day he introduced it. “Of 23 Democratic AGs, two are birthright infants,” James mentioned with a chuckle. (They’re Illinois’s Kwame Raoul and William Tong of Connecticut.) A number of federal judges instantly blocked Trump’s order, however the Supreme Courtroom ruled in June that district courts have far much less energy to impose nationwide injunctions, although the courtroom didn’t rule on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship itself. As of publication time, a third court has blocked the birthright citizenship order from going into impact.
Likewise, when anti-deportation protests escalated in Los Angeles, and Trump despatched within the Nationwide Guard towards the needs of the state’s governor, California AG Rob Bonta sued him and Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth in federal courtroom. James shortly filed an amicus brief, however a federal district courtroom panel dominated towards Bonta, permitting the administration to proceed controlling the Nationwide Guard troops.
Even when there are setbacks, James says she isn’t discouraged, citing the AGs’ constant victories within the decrease courts. “The courts have held up,” James advised me. “They’ve been one establishment that has held up towards fascism, towards this consolidation of government energy, this reorganization of presidency. They’ve held up regardless of the threats and the harassment to the courts—to the purpose the place judges must get non-public safety.”
Judges aren’t the one ones dealing with threats. since difficult Trump, James has obtained loss of life threats and has needed to strengthen her safety element, telling Pod Save America in 2023 that she fears a “lone wolf.” However she does her job anyway. In April 2024, 26-year-old Tyler Vogel of upstate New York pleaded responsible to costs that he despatched textual content messages threatening James with “loss of life and bodily hurt” if she didn’t “stop motion” towards Trump within the courts. “Hear, my safety people, they fear about me on a regular basis, however I nonetheless stroll the streets of Brooklyn,” she advised me.
Trump himself often vilifies James, calling her a “low IQ particular person.” The president has a behavior of demeaning girls of colour with that slur, from James to Vice President Kamala Harris to Representatives Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett, a rising Democratic star. In Could, Trump moved from insults to threats, unleashing his Justice Division on James over points associated to her cosigning of mortgage paperwork to assist a niece purchase a house in Virginia in 2023, 4 years after she grew to become New York legal professional common. Certainly one of many paperwork acknowledged, incorrectly, that James would use the house as a main residence.
“They’re accusing me of partaking in all kinds of badassery round these mortgage docs,” James mentioned. “They discovered an influence of legal professional that was ready by another person that I signed, which principally mentioned that I used to be a resident of Virginia. However previous to that, I had indicated that I used to be not going to be a resident of Virginia. I put it in all-caps within the mortgage paperwork! However nonetheless, they’re making this out to be one thing it isn’t.”
James’s legal professional, Abbe Lowell, told the Justice Division that the administration had “cherry-picked an August 17, 2023 energy of legal professional that mistakenly acknowledged the property to be Ms. James’ principal residence…. The dealer understood this, and that Ms. James was not a Virginia resident.”
The Justice Division can be investigating costs that James understated the variety of models in her Brooklyn dwelling, once more for mortgage benefits.
Trump revoked James’s safety clearance and in addition denied her different “federal privileges”—however she says she doesn’t even know what which means: “I am going into federal buildings on a regular basis.”
Trump insists that James is “a complete criminal” and guarantees that his Justice Division will pursue the fees towards her to the fullest. James doesn’t wish to decrease the threats. “I’m extra afraid for my relations in Virginia,” she advised me. “People have pushed by the home in these large eight-wheel vans with Trump flags. On a few of these right-wing web sites, they submit their addresses and their photos. And these are girls and kids, and completely non-public residents.”
Liz Krueger laughs on the costs towards James, however not on the potential hazard to her. “Do I truly suppose the legal professional common of the state of New York signed paperwork saying ‘my main residency goes to be in one other state?’” she mentioned. “No, I don’t. I don’t. However he actually goes after her.”
One other sideshow James has needed to cope with this 12 months was the reemergence of disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was the front-runner to be New York Metropolis’s mayor till his lifeless, cynical marketing campaign was upended by the landslide main win of the democratic socialist state Meeting member Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo has since introduced plans to run as an impartial within the November common election.
James and Cuomo had as soon as been allies. When he was governor, Cuomo appointed James—who had run alongside him because the legal professional common candidate in 2018, to the frustration of her admirers and the progressive Working Households Social gathering, which had been her political dwelling—to analyze the sexual harassment accusations towards him by present and former staffers. For some time, it appeared that Cuomo was hiding behind James. “Let the legal professional common do her job,” he advised reporters at a March 2021 press convention. “She’s superb, she’s very competent, and that will likely be due course of after which we’ll have the information.”
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Lots of James’s supporters fearful about her independence from the governor. “I used to be very involved,” mentioned Lindsey Boylan, a former worker of the governor’s workplace who made an early declare of harassment. “I used to be involved due to the facility he nonetheless appears to exert over different highly effective individuals. Clearly, my fears had been unfounded.”
Finally, James launched a 165-page investigative report in August 2021 discovering that Cuomo had sexually harassed 11 girls. (Within the years since, the variety of accusers has risen to 13.) Cuomo was furious, submitting an ethics complaint towards James that has thus far gone nowhere, and operating up near $20 million in taxpayer-funded authorized charges going after his accusers. He has since characterised James as practising “a model of ugly politics I had by no means seen earlier than” and says that she was pushed by political ambition.
James dropped her personal bid for governor in late 2021. “There was no approach that I may handle the workplace, keep on prime of investigations and litigation, and on the similar time run for governor,” she advised a reporter on the time. “I made a decision to withdraw and in addition acknowledge that my coronary heart actually wasn’t in it.”
As of late, it’s clear the place her coronary heart is—and her power.
Within the weeks since I started writing about James and her fellow AGs’ campaign, the Trump administration’s abuses of energy have solely escalated. In July, Trump managed to safe congressional help, alongside strict celebration traces, for his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which options the biggest cuts to social-safety- internet packages in historical past, in addition to a budget-busting tax reduce for the rich. These cuts—a few of which will likely be enacted instantly, and others that gained’t be enacted for years—are being imposed by Congress, not by means of presidential government orders, and it’s unclear whether or not there’s something that James and her crew of AGs can do to cease them, not to mention the mass deportations that the laws supercharges.
“American democracy is not going to be saved in a courtroom of regulation,” Keith Ellison advised the Westchester crowd. “It will likely be in a courtroom of American opinion. We want you to maintain coming to conferences like this. Go to these [upcoming] rallies.”
Ellison is aware of that mass protest, and big anti-Trump voting, will in the end do extra to dislodge the autocrat from energy than attorneys common can. On the day we discovered in regards to the shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses—Ellison was additionally on the alleged murderer’s hit record—an estimated 5 million People turned out for the No Kings rallies nonetheless.
James shares the view that protests are going to be an important a part of pushing again towards Trump. I requested her if she thinks the nation’s prime two Democratic leaders, Schumer and Jeffries, are doing sufficient to fulfill the second. James selected her phrases rigorously: “I like them each,” she mentioned. “They’re shut pals of mine, however they’re not into performative politics. They’re very cerebral. And so they’re very deliberate. They all the time have been, they all the time will likely be.”
James believes that the Democratic management “wants to usher in extra younger individuals. They should take their cues from AOC and from Jasmine Crockett and Maxwell Frost and Greg Cesar. They have to be on the bottom. They should do issues which can be totally different. Republicans are simply outperforming us each time. Now we have to cease believing or following the foundations. Break the foundations. Cease coloring contained in the traces.”
Although her most popular candidate within the New York mayoral main, Metropolis Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, didn’t win, James shortly embraced Mamdani after his victory. She went to his celebration on election night time and praised the youthful, multiracial motion that propelled his marketing campaign. “Tonight represents a powerful win,” James advised the group.
By endorsing Mamdani at the same time as Schumer and Jeffries stored quiet, and by marching joyfully with him in June’s New York Satisfaction parade, James solidified her standing with the town’s progressive motion.
The unifying function she’s enjoying is stirring hypothesis that James, who’s 66, may but be a 2028 US Senate prospect or a 2030 gubernatorial contender. Folks approached her to run for mayor this 12 months, James admits. However she wasn’t about to step away from the struggle towards Trump and Trumpism. “I used to be targeted on defending our democracy, and I didn’t wish to get distracted,” she advised me. “As soon as that job is finished…?” That was basic Tish James: targeted on the job at hand, able to sacrifice to be able to full her duties, and sure that, as soon as she has prevailed, there will likely be extra alternatives for New York’s badass legal professional common.
On this second of disaster, we want a unified, progressive opposition to Donald Trump.
We’re beginning to see one take form within the streets and at poll packing containers throughout the nation: from New York Metropolis mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s marketing campaign targeted on affordability, to communities defending their neighbors from ICE, to the senators opposing arms shipments to Israel.
The Democratic Social gathering has an pressing option to make: Will it embrace a politics that’s principled and standard, or will it proceed to insist on shedding elections with the out-of-touch elites and consultants that acquired us right here?
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President, The Nation
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