Adam Schiff, Frequent Trump Target, on What Democrats Should Do Next

It had been a tough week for democracy when I got Senator Adam Schiff on the phone.

Donald Trump—who has spent the first three months of his presidency decimating the federal government and trampling over the separation of powers at the heart of the American system—was now flouting a unanimous Supreme Court decision directing officials to facilitate the return of a Maryland man who’d gotten swept up in the president’s immigration crackdown and deported to a hellish gulag in El Salvador, with the administration itself having acknowledged the error.

However, the California Democrat—who led Trump’s first impeachment trial, served on the House’s January 6 committee, and has been a frequent target of the president’s attacks—seemed optimistic. “We’re going to get through this,” he told me, “and we will get through it as a democracy.”

Which isn’t to say he’s not worried. If Trump has his way, the country could bear “little resemblance to the America that we’ve known for the last 250 years,” Schiff said. However, the senator said he’s been heartened to see in recent weeks that more lawmakers, institutions, and members of the public are fighting back. In a conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, Schiff said shoring up democracy will require some courage and “an all-the-above strategy.” “There is no appeasing someone,” he said, “who has authoritarian ambitions.”

Vanity Fair: I want to ask you about Senator Lisa Murkowski’s comments this week. She said “we are all afraid” of what Trump has been doing here in his second term and that she is “very anxious” about using her voice because “retaliation is real.” What’s your reaction to that?

Adam Schiff: I applaud her for speaking out, and I think she’s speaking for a lot of others who aren’t ready to be as public about their concerns. Certainly, many of us in the Democratic Party have had to experience not just the political attacks, but the degree to which it bleeds over into threats directed at our personal security. So many of us have had to take steps—whether it’s hiring private security or hardening our homes—that were unthinkable, really, in the pre-Trump era, but that are now a reality. Part of what Trump has done within the Republican Party is cultivate an ethic of fear and intimidation politically, that anyone who stands up to him will face a primary challenge. But I think the fear is now broader than that. And indeed, one of the most notable aspects of the Trump 2.0 administration is the climate of fear he’s been able to cultivate across the country. Fear at universities and fear at law firms and fear throughout our society, which I hear all the time—people worried about what they can say. It’s ironic for an administration that claims to be against censorship, how many people are being forced to self-censor now by their campaign of threats and intimidation.

As someone who has been repeatedly singled out by Trump—most recently for raising questions about potential market manipulation with these tariffs—and faced death threats because of it, and has been cited by Kash Patel as a “corrupt actor of the first order,” what do you say to colleagues like Murkowski who express misgivings about what he’s doing but are afraid, perhaps, to do more? And not only them, but, as you said, universities and law firms facing this choice of whether to stand up or concede?

I would say there’s no appeasing someone like Donald Trump or the enablers around him. We all have to push back. The best antidote to fear is to be courageous. I was proud to see Harvard decide they were going to fight this administration rather than capitulate, and I wish every other university would do the same. I’m proud to see a number of law firms now standing up to the extraordinary campaign of the Trump administration, even as others have capitulated. There is no appeasing someone who has authoritarian ambitions. They will not be appeased, and the response has to be a kind of courageous collective action. I think what Harvard has done will encourage other universities to find their voice. I think what Senator Murkowski is doing will cause other senators to find their voices. All of us have to defend our democracy, or we will see it slowly but surely disappear.

Trump is not getting very much of that pushback from Republicans. Meanwhile, the judicial branch has ruled against him at various points, but he has defied orders—including from the Supreme Court. As you and other Democrats and observers have said, we are in a constitutional crisis. But what is the recourse?

We have to use multiple strategies to hold our democracy together for the duration of this administration. Litigation has been one of the most effective strategies, and the lower courts in particular have stood strong. So we need to continue using litigation, and as members of Congress, we can support that litigation with amicus briefs. We can support it by helping identify whistleblowers who can provide the factual basis, the affidavits, to support litigation. We can use communication to publicize the abuse of power of the administration, to highlight the egregious excesses and call attention to them, and in so doing, from time to time, we can force them to retreat.

I’m using a whole lot of new tools to do that. One of the things I think we learned in the presidential election was that we were only speaking through a certain media, and we were largely absent in the digital realm. So many of us are really trying to change that. So I have begun doing a pretty much nightly video on YouTube and other platforms to highlight whatever action that the public needs to be aware of.

And we need to use mobilization. I think we are starting to see that really happening around the country, with those protests a week ago. And that election in Wisconsin was a real shot in the arm that Democrats needed. But there’s no single tool, no single legislative remedy, much as we wish there were. We’re gonna have to use an all-the-above strategy.

Do you think that messaging is breaking through? A constant onslaught is coming out of this administration every day—you know the line, “flood the zone with shit.”

I think they do break through. A shadow hearing we did [recently] got millions of views in one format or another. Much of what I’m doing on social media gets hundreds of thousands of views each time, if not in the millions. I did a video recently about Canada that now has over a million and a half views.

But we have to balance the need to push back against a great many discrete and unlawful acts with the need to have an overarching and driving message. And that overriding message, I think, has to be about the economy. But more than negative messaging about the harms he is doing with the reckless tariff policy and the tax cuts they want for billionaires, we also have to be offering a powerful and bold progressive agenda. And I think one of the other lessons we need to take away from the presidential election is that being associated with the status quo is political death. People are working harder than ever and still struggling to get by. If that’s the case, whatever party becomes associated with the status quo is going to be losing, and so it’s not enough for us to be attacking the administration over the damage they’re doing. We also need to be offering a powerful agenda of our own.

You mentioned the protests and the Wisconsin election—there have been some signs that the opposition is coming out of the shadows. How would you compare the public response to Trump 1.0 versus Trump 2.0?

Trump one, you had an immediate response. I think driven by a couple of things. Trump had lost the popular vote, and it was easy for people to recognize he didn’t represent a majority of Americans. And I think there was a sense, too, that people really didn’t fully appreciate the kind of ugly, divisive, lawless president he would be [when he was elected the first time]. But with his reelection, there was a profound demoralization because he won the popular vote and, this time, people knew who he was. They knew what he represented, and while they may not have known the speed with which the second administration would be tearing things down, it was a body blow to have to come to grips with the fact that he won the popular vote. So I think there was a period of reeling. I think that period is coming to an end, and now you’re starting to see the mobilization that took place immediately in the first Trump administration—driven by necessity, driven by the increasingly lawless and dictatorial actions of the administration. And I think maybe because this has taken longer to come to fruition, it may end up being more durable. It may end up being a more crosscutting movement of the American people to reject this authoritarian lurch.

It is pretty breathtaking how much Trump has been able to change in such a short time, and it is hard to imagine what things look like a year from now, let alone four. If he continues apace, and the Republican majority doesn’t check his power, and if he doesn’t face friction in the legislative branch, and if the courts can’t enforce their own orders and he’s just able to do whatever he wants like this, what do things look like here in the not-so-distant future?

Well, then we’ve become Hungary—or something worse. Maybe not a full-on dictatorship, but certainly not much of a democracy anymore. You know, the progression of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, where they can pluck someone off the street, put them on a plane outside the country in violation of a court order, do so without ever having a hearing or seeking to ask the court to modify the order, and then take the position that they have no obligation to try to get him back, even though the Supreme Court has ordered that they facilitate his return—the logical extension is that they can pluck anyone off the street. Indeed, the president was already talking about removing “homegrowns,” as he called them, meaning American citizens, to prisons outside the country. And the logic of the Justice Department’s current position is, as long as we do that before a court can intervene, there’s nothing the courts can do about it. If that’s where we end up, there isn’t much left of our democracy. If hooded figures can grab people off the street and deport them, we bear little resemblance to the America that we’ve known for the last 250 years.

Now, I have great confidence in the country and optimism about our future. We’re going to get through this, and we will get through it as a democracy. I say that because there are millions and millions of wonderful, patriotic, generous people in every state of the Union. There are times, I think, in our history when we forget the better angels of our nature. A lot of the economic anxiety people feel right now is driving a lot of the anger and division. A lot of how we get our information now—algorithms that curate what we see and don’t see, what we like and don’t like—deepen the divisions that brought us here.

But we’ve been through other difficult periods of division and turmoil. We’ve been through a civil war. We’ve been through a divisive Vietnam War and other polarizing times. And this, too, shall pass. But I do think what we do at this moment will determine how quickly it passes. We all have to do our part.

The analogy to the Civil War is a little disconcerting.

[Laughs] Well, I certainly don’t think we’re going to go back to that. But it is worth trying to put into perspective that we’re a country that’s gone through not only civil war but two world wars, a civil rights struggle that was characterized by violence being used against those advocating for civil rights, and Vietnam War protests that also resulted in violence. These are not unprecedented difficulties. We’ve had far worse, and we will find our way through this period as well.