On the frigid evening of President Trump’s inauguration last year, after the vindicated president swept back into power and immediately pardoned nearly all of the Jan. 6 rioters, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York, gathered his top lieutenants for a quiet dinner in Washington.
In a private back room at Osteria Morini, an Italian restaurant on the Anacostia River, Mr. Jeffries, the relatively untested Democratic leader, and his team strategized for hours about how to use their limited power in the minority to check a newly empowered president who now had control of both houses of Congress.
Mr. Jeffries, according to a person who attended the dinner, was preoccupied with a single imperative.
“We just have to win,” he said firmly. “If we don’t win in 2026, it’s over.”
On Tuesday, Democrats did just that, claiming the House majority and putting Mr. Jeffries, 56, on the precipice of making history as the first Black speaker of the House. He presided over historic victories for his party that exceeded even their own expectations. Now, his actions will determine how effective Democrats can be in checking Mr. Trump’s power, and help set the agenda for the 2028 presidential campaign.
Here are five things to know about Mr. Jeffries.
He was raised in Brooklyn.
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Mr. Jeffries grew up in a working-class home in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in the 1980s, when the now-gentrified neighborhood was a hotbed of Black activism but also overrun with crime and unrest associated with the crack cocaine epidemic.
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Source: The New York Times · Annie Karni
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