On a wet spring evening, about 30 miles north of Manhattan, New York Lawyer Common Letitia James marched onto the stage at Westchester Group School. Standing practically six toes tall and wearing a drapey black go well with (not not like a judicial gown), she smiled broadly. 4 of her comrades in authorized arms—Minnesota Lawyer Common Keith Ellison, California’s Rob Bonta, Illinois’s Kwame Raoul, and New Jersey’s Matt Platkin—adopted intently behind, as a multiracial crowd of a whole bunch rose and cheered raucously.
Since January, these AGs have challenged the Trump administration 30 instances (and counting). However James has stood out, not solely from the opposite AGs but in addition amongst prime Democrats within the Empire State. This crowd was right here for her.
New York Metropolis is residence to probably the most highly effective Democrats in Congress: Senate minority chief Chuck Schumer and Home minority chief Hakeem Jeffries. However the best and well-liked Democrat representing New York is the Brooklyn lady referred to as Tish—a former Authorized Assist 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, who received the June Democratic mayoral major, when different celebration leaders saved their distance.
However James’s greatest declare to fame is as a fierce fighter in opposition to 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 property so as to cut back property taxes and acquire favorable charges from banks and insurance coverage corporations. The case resulted in a $454 million advantageous, 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 strains of this combat usually are not solely defending a Structure and federal legal guidelines in opposition to a Supreme Chief and lawless autocrats,” says Consultant Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “They’re additionally exhibiting the nation what actual attorneys common do by performing for the individuals and the rule of regulation as an alternative of a right-wing political putsch.”
James and her accomplice 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 employees 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 Providers 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 trustworthy about the truth that it isn’t practically sufficient given Trump’s all-out assault on democracy. Congressional Republicans, James says, “have simply handed over their authority to the manager. 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 in addition 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, on condition that main instances stay pending within the Supreme Court docket. However they’re definitely 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 essential that she’s persevering with to face as much as Trump. Persons are actually heartened by that: ‘Oh, yeah, Tish, she’s doing it!’” Too many individuals are discouraged and not sure how one can combat again throughout this second Trump regime, O’Connor says. “However Tish breaks by plenty of the noise, and that’s essential.”
That potential to interrupt by the noise has earned James reward—and a hefty increase—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 assemble data on Trump’s assault on all the public sector, however James likened it to a “street present” that she and her AG colleagues have 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, instructed the group as he praised James and others for at the very least 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 academic 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 have been months within the making. As James instructed me, the AGs—usually working collectively underneath the umbrella of the Progressive State Leaders Committee—started assembly to debate preventing a second Trump administration earlier than the 2024 election.
“It was not the result that we anticipated, but it surely was one thing that we needed to put together for nonetheless,” James instructed 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 Undertaking 2025 based mostly on subject material,” she continued. “We checked out jurisdiction, we checked out standing, we checked out previous practices, we checked out who had been energetic in sure areas, and we determined to assign our staffs totally different duties based mostly on attainable instances. And we began getting ready complaints and briefs.” California Lawyer Common Rob Bonta, who sued Trump greater than 120 instances in his first time period, instructed 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 instructed 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 able to do issues that no person else is actually 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. “Once 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 cannot 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 method is to share the huge assets of the New York State Workplace of the Lawyer 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 2,200 individuals, 800 of them attorneys; California’s has 5,400 employees, 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 might dedicate three or 4 staffers on a problem, whereas I’d be capable 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 stand 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 change into arguably much more essential immediately than they have been throughout Trump’s first time period, once they boasted an 83 percent win fee in instances difficult the administration’s agenda. Since January, they’ve change into the principle actors holding the road in opposition to 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 ultimately upending it. Simply as essential, they’re taking the combat to Trump and the administration with a boldness that’s usually lacking on Capitol Hill.
As an example, James and her accomplice AGs have 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 Court docket 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 in opposition to 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 in opposition to 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 instructed me. “They’ve been one establishment that has held up in opposition to fascism, in opposition to 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 personal safety.”
Judges aren’t the one ones going through threats. since difficult Trump, James has acquired dying 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 expenses that he despatched textual content messages threatening James with “dying and bodily hurt” if she didn’t “stop motion” in opposition to Trump within the courts. “Pay attention, my safety people, they fear about me on a regular basis, however I nonetheless stroll the streets of Brooklyn,” she instructed me.
Trump himself usually vilifies James, calling her a “low IQ particular person.” The president has a behavior of demeaning ladies of shade 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 Might, 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. One in every of many paperwork said, incorrectly, that James would use the house as a major residence.
“They’re accusing me of participating in all sorts 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 mainly 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 said 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 expenses that James understated the variety of models in her Brooklyn residence, once more for mortgage benefits.
Trump revoked James’s safety clearance and likewise denied her different “federal privileges”—however she says she doesn’t even know what meaning: “I’m 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 in opposition to her to the fullest. James doesn’t wish to decrease the threats. “I’m extra afraid for my relations in Virginia,” she instructed me. “People have pushed by the home in these huge eight-wheel vans with Trump flags. On a few of these right-wing web sites, they submit their addresses and their footage. And these are ladies and youngsters, and completely personal residents.”
Liz Krueger laughs on the expenses in opposition to James, however not on the potential hazard to her. “Do I really assume the legal professional common of the state of New York signed paperwork saying ‘my major 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 take care of this yr 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 major win of the democratic socialist state Meeting member Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo has since introduced plans to run as an unbiased 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 residence—to analyze the sexual harassment accusations in opposition to 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 instructed reporters at a March 2021 press convention. “She’s excellent, she’s very competent, and that will likely be due course of after which we’ll have the info.”
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A lot of James’s supporters nervous 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 ability he nonetheless appears to exert over different highly effective individuals. Clearly, my fears have been unfounded.”
Finally, James launched a 165-page investigative report in August 2021 discovering that Cuomo had sexually harassed 11 ladies. (Within the years since, the variety of accusers has risen to 13.) Cuomo was furious, submitting an ethics complaint in opposition to James that has up to now gone nowhere, and working 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 means that I might handle the workplace, keep on prime of investigations and litigation, and on the identical time run for governor,” she instructed a reporter on the time. “I made a decision to withdraw and likewise 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 strains, for his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which options the biggest cuts to social-safety- web 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 received’t be enacted for years—are being imposed by Congress, not by presidential government orders, and it’s unclear whether or not there’s something that James and her group 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 instructed the Westchester crowd. “It is going to 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 large anti-Trump voting, will in the end do extra to dislodge the autocrat from energy than attorneys common can. On the day we realized concerning the shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses—Ellison was additionally on the alleged murderer’s hit listing—an estimated 5 million Individuals 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 in opposition to Trump. I requested her if she thinks the nation’s prime two Democratic leaders, Schumer and Jeffries, are doing sufficient to satisfy the second. James selected her phrases fastidiously: “I like them each,” she mentioned. “They’re shut associates 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 herald extra younger individuals. They should take their cues from AOC and from Jasmine Crockett and Maxwell Frost and Greg Cesar. They should be on the bottom. They should do issues which can be totally different. Republicans are simply outperforming us each time. We have now to cease believing or following the foundations. Break the foundations. Cease coloring contained in the strains.”
Although her most popular candidate within the New York mayoral major, Metropolis Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, didn’t win, James shortly embraced Mamdani after his victory. She went to his celebration on election evening and praised the youthful, multiracial motion that propelled his marketing campaign. “Tonight represents a powerful win,” James instructed the group.
By endorsing Mamdani whilst Schumer and Jeffries saved quiet, and by marching joyfully with him in June’s New York Pleasure parade, James solidified her standing with town’s progressive motion.
The unifying function she’s enjoying is stirring hypothesis that James, who’s 66, might but be a 2028 US Senate prospect or a 2030 gubernatorial contender. Individuals approached her to run for mayor this yr, James admits. However she wasn’t about to step away from the combat in opposition to Trump and Trumpism. “I used to be centered on defending our democracy, and I didn’t wish to get distracted,” she instructed me. “As soon as that job is finished…?” That was traditional Tish James: centered on the job at hand, able to sacrifice so as 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.
Correction: A earlier model of this text incorrectly said the variety of staffers on the New York Lawyer Common’s workplace. It additionally misidentified the umbrella group the Democratic attorneys common labored underneath.
On this second of disaster, we’d like a unified, progressive opposition to Donald Trump.
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