Rep. Lateefah Simon Rebukes Trump in Fiery Speech, Calls for Bold Progressive Action

About halfway through President Donald Trump’s contentious address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Lateefah Simon decided she’d heard enough.

“I did decide to attend because my job as a new member of Congress is to deeply understand the institution,” the freshman Democratic representative from Oakland told KQED. “But you know, I was in there for about 45 minutes and there was only so much hatred that I could hear.”

Trump’s speech was a stew of lies and vitriol, a slap in the face to America’s working class, said Simon, who was among a group of progressive lawmakers who walked out of the chamber in protest.

“The making fun of African countries … and transgender people, the assertion that the administration is not going to gut Social Security when they basically said that they were,” she said. “And at a certain point, you know, we can only be hoodwinked so much.”

Less than two months after filling the seat held for decades by progressive stalwart Barbara Lee, Simon, a former BART board director, has already become a rising star on the left. On Tuesday, she delivered a rebuke on behalf of the Working Family Party, a progressive group that seeks to elect candidates who will move the Democratic Party farther to the left.

In her pre-recorded address, broadcast while Trump was still speaking and before the official Democratic Party’s response, Simon argued that the power struggle in Washington wasn’t about blue state versus red but rather “a fight of regular folk against the ultra-wealthy.”

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk and others have never had to put groceries back at the grocery store,” she said. “They’ve never had to struggle to put food on the table or save up literally to make rent every month.”

In the speech, Simon leaned heavily into her own personal struggles, detailing her experience as a legally blind Black person who became a teenage mom living off food stamps. She later lost her husband, journalist and youth advocate Kevin Weston, to cancer. She said the challenges have helped her understand the crucial role safety net programs play in keeping working-class people from falling through “what we know are huge cracks in society” — the very safeguard Republicans are trying to destroy.

“They’ve gotten rich off of cutting corners and cheating workers and squeezing our communities for their own tax breaks,” she said. “Now they’re pulling the same scam on a higher level, on a bigger level. They are cheating Americans out of a functioning government and injecting real chaos in everyday people’s lives.”

That turmoil, Simon told KQED, is hitting her East Bay district particularly hard, where she said more than 40% of residents are on Medicaid or Medicare, and hundreds of thousands of people receive health care from clinics that depend on federal funding.

“We’re talking about the health and safety net of our folks, not just in my district, but around the country,” said Simon, while also noting the administration’s push to cut funding for groundbreaking medical research at UC Berkeley and other local universities.

But the purpose of delivering the “prebuttal” on Tuesday “wasn’t just about telling folks what’s wrong,” she added.

“What I did do in that prebuttal was give a vision that I think that we can all come around on,” she said. “We need health care when we need it. Our schools should be great schools. We need to have clean air and clean water. That’s not radical thinking.”

Simon’s rise comes amid plenty of Democratic handwringing and finger-pointing following last year’s punishing election as the party scrambles to get back on its feet and oppose the Trump agenda, said Corey Cook, a politics professor at St. Mary’s College of California.

And as the representative of a very liberal district, Simon is well suited to be a strong voice of that resistance, he added.

“I’m interested to see how her career evolves over time,” Cook said. “How does she build her own voice representing a progressive district at a time when clearly Democrats are just struggling to figure out how to adapt to this administration?”

Simon said she sees herself in the “lineage” of generations of Black lawmakers who have protested outside the Capitol and on the floor of Congress in their fight for justice. She praised Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) for disrupting Trump’s speech on Tuesday, which led to the 77-year-old congressman being removed from the chamber.

“I was so proud of Rep. Green because he chanted down the lies of a president who is trying to take Medicaid and Medicare from our sick, from our disabled and from our elderly,” she said. “I was so proud that he called a spade a spade.”

Simon added that she is open to working with Republicans on meaningful legislation, but said that doing so may prove challenging.

“I plan to do as much as I can with my colleagues across the aisle. But there’s also an emerging group of folks who are very outright with their racism and their misogyny and their unwillingness to work with their Democratic colleagues,” she said, referring to MAGA loyalists in Congress. “It is shocking. I have not ever in my life seen this kind of hate.”

“I do find it hard to work with folks who don’t see me as human,” she added. “That said, my job is my job, and I’m gonna keep moving.”