In the wake of his comments that seemingly called for riots against President Donald Trump that would shut down major cities to hold up his agenda, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) found himself being compared to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who infamously made similar remarks back in 2018.
As background, Rep. Waters went viral for much the same reasons as Rep. Jeffries when she, as part of a protest in 2018 over the then-Trump White House’s “zero-tolerance” policy on immigration, told her supporters in Los Angeles that they needed to “create a crowd” and “push back” on Trump’s policies.
During that incident, Waters yelled, “Let’s make sure we show up whenever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcomed anymore, anywhere.”
In a 2025 redux of that crazy call to potential violence, Rep. Jeffries, as we at the American Tribune have covered before, said, during a Brooklyn press conference on Friday, January 31, that Democrats need to get “in the streets” to fight against President Donald Trump and shut down his agenda in whatever ways they are able.
During that press conference, he said, “Right now, we’re going to keep focused on the need to look out for everyday New Yorkers and everyday Americans who are under assault by an extreme MAGA Republican agenda that is trying to cut taxes for billionaire donors and wealthy corporations and then stick New Yorkers and working class Americans across the country with the bill.”
Continuing, he got to his seeming call for violence against the Trump Administration “in the streets” of America’s major cities, saying, “That’s not acceptable. We are going to fight it legislatively. We’re going to going to fight it in the courts, and we’re going to fight it in the streets.”
Naturally, commenters online sounded off on Jeffries, with many noting the similarities between Maxine Waters’s seeming call to rioting and his similar call to action. One such poster on X, for example, wrote, “This needs to STOP! Democrats are trying to entice violence. There needs to be accountability! They did the same thing during Trump’s last presidency. Maxine Waters! Get them while there at restaurants! No more!”
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Similarly, another poster on X noted the same similarity between what Jeffries and Watters said while noting that his call to action could lead to serious violence and criminal incidents, saying, “Hakeem Jeffries is pulling a Maxine Waters. He’s going to get people hurt and/or arrested saying words like this! He’s calling for people to ‘fight in the streets’.”
Still another poster on X noted that there are multiple leftist groups, such as BLM and Antifa, that could act upon Jeffries’s call to action, much as they eventually heeded the similar call to rioting made by Maxine Waters, saying, “Following the same playbook from Maxine Waters and other Democrats that ultimately brought us the violent and societal destructive BLM and Antifa riots.”
Watch Jeffries here:
Featured image credit: By Chad Davis from Minneapolis, United States – Maxine Waters – Daunte Wright Protest – Brooklyn Center April 18 2021, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103867244