On a sunny afternoon in early February, two dozen Democratic representatives, clutching smartphones and talking points, converged on the Treasury Department’s public entrance in downtown Washington, DC.
For weeks, a strike force from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, loosely vetted and barely old enough to vote, had swarmed federal buildings with a mandate to dismantle the government’s core institutions and bend what was left to their whims. They had threatened career employees, shut down lifesaving programs, and demanded—and received—access to some of the government’s most sensitive systems. Democrats, many caught off guard by the totality of the takeover, had watched with a mix of apprehension and disbelief. The day before, a group of lawmakers attempting to visit the now-shuttered offices of the United States Agency for International Development had been denied entry. Now, with about 1,000 demonstrators assembling outside the Treasury for a rally organized by national progressive groups, Democrats hoped another in-person visit might wake up more of their colleagues to the reality of the constitutional crisis.
Standing outside the building’s marble colonnade, Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.) held up his camera to capture his colleagues’ show of force. They were heading into the building, he said, because “an unelected billionaire has access to the private information of our constituents, and we want answers.”
Instead, the Democrats were locked out by the Secret Service. On X, Musk responded with a yellow waving-hand emoji. Three days later, at the Department of Education, Frost and his colleagues showed up again. This time, he trained his phone on the armed agents on the other side of the blocked glass doors.
“This is what they’re doing,” he said. “Elon is allowed in, but not you.”
The direct action at the federal buildings was one of the first signs of life for a party that had spent the months after the election in a catatonic funk—a moment when the dismay at President Donald Trump’s destruction began to congeal into a visible and organized resistance. But the plan for the Treasury confrontation did not come from senior Democratic leadership. It was the work of the chamber’s youngest member—the 28-year-old Frost, a former anti-gun-violence organizer, Uber driver, and concert promoter from Orlando, who was two weeks into his second term in office.
“I had seen a comment someone sent to me saying, ‘Y’all should pull up to these buildings,’” he tells me a few weeks later. “I was like, ‘You’re freaking right!’”
Since Democrats lost the White House last November, the party has been a mess. Locked out of power, adrift in their messaging, and without a clear standard-bearer in the wings for the first time in a generation, Democrats have struggled for footing and relevance, while an entrenched gerontocracy stammers on meekly about eggs. Democratic communications seemed trapped in “an era where people make meaning of what’s happening in Washington via a daily news story,” says Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the progressive organizing group Indivisible, which helped organize the rally with the lawmakers outside the Treasury. “That’s not the news era that we are in…On TikTok, nobody is required to offer you the rebuttal paragraph.”
Frost, the party’s unofficial Gen Z ambassador, has emerged as a powerful voice from the backbench—leading protests, sparring with Musk on X, walking out of the State of the Union, pressuring his Senate colleagues to vote no on a Trump-backed budget, and pushing colleagues to speak more forcefully about what he calls the “billionaire right-wing neo-fascist takeover of our government.”
“There are some members of Congress who are really good inside the building but aren’t great mobilizers, and there are some that are great at mobilizing the public but don’t necessarily know how to move things internally,” says Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who has worked closely with Frost on gun violence initiatives. “Maxwell is both.”
In a legislature that increasingly feels like one big podcast studio, Frost slots, in some ways, into a familiar type. He thinks of lawmakers as “content creators” and draws on his experiences as an activist to attract eyeballs to his statements and stunts. You can find highlight videos of his comments at committee hearings on YouTube. But Frost is also grappling with a question endemic to a chamber where stars can burn out fast—how to get attention for his causes without just becoming an attention seeker. Because Frost is not there to burn the place down. He is there to make friends and cultivate real power. As he navigates life on the Hill, Frost is trying to figure out how to fight back in Trump’s Washington without being swallowed up by it, too.
When I drop by his office in late February, Frost is still buzzing about what transpired the day before, at a meeting of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Nominally an executive-branch watchdog, the committee often functions as a sort of quarantine ship for lawmakers who can’t play nice. Republican members include Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, and Florida’s Anna Paulina Luna, who recently proposed questioning members of the Warren Commission, all of whom are dead. During the previous Congress, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene displayed a blown-up nude of Hunter Biden at a hearing.
But Frost had just learned that there are some things you can’t do in Oversight. After he asserted that “the grifter-in-chief Trump and President Musk are openly using their public offices to enrich themselves to the tune of billions of dollars,” the Republican chair, James Comer of Kentucky, ruled that Frost had breached decorum by mounting a personal attack. Comer muted Frost’s mic and threatened to have him hauled out by the sergeant-at-arms. The following day, the phones in Frost’s office ring all morning with encouragement from constituents and supporters. When Frost hops on one call, a woman tells him, through tears, that she feels like she is “talking with [Barack] Obama.”
“We keep getting caught fighting,” Frost says from behind his standing desk, as he tucks into a croissant sandwich from Dunkin’. “I think that’s a good motto for everybody: ‘Get caught fighting.’”
Frost had originally planned to give a floor speech that afternoon protesting Trump’s massive cuts at the IRS, but he changed course after the Oversight dustup. Now he is reviewing a new set of remarks, condemning his colleagues for censoring dissent while voting to slash Medicaid. He has been preparing for this kind of pugilism for years. “When I was in high school and stuff, I would watch these compilation videos of members of Congress going at it,” Frost says. “And the two that I watched the most were Anthony Weiner and Alan Grayson, who I ran against—who now hates me.”
His communications director, Samantha Ramirez, steps in to relay concerns that Frost might get his words taken down, like they had been the day before, if he included a reference to “House Republicans.”
“Why?” Frost asks.
“They said that’s engaging personalities.”
“No, it’s—Hey, Yuri. Is Yuri there? Is it?” Frost calls out to Yuri Beckelman, his chief of staff. “I thought personalities meant, like, a person. Like if I call out a person.”
Ramirez reads the prepared line again: “The line is, ‘House Republicans want to clutch their pearls when you call out their grift and push back against that.’”
“You could have your words taken down over that,” Beckelman says.
“But if you say, ‘Republicans,’ your words won’t be taken down,” Ramirez says.
“Let me change it,” Frost says between bites, “because I don’t want to say ‘clutch their pearls,’ too. It’s just not in my normal vocab.”
Frost’s office offers a crash course on his biography. There’s a photo of a Bernie Sanders rally (Frost worked on his 2020 advance team), and also a figurine from the card game Yu-Gi-Oh!, a gift from “one of the top Yu-Gi-Oh! players in the country.” A group of twentysomethings who drop by the reception area later to “see what the Gen Z vibes were” marvel at the record swap, where staffers and guests can take an LP or leave one. Everyone he meets with leaves with a newly minted quarter featuring the late salsa singer Celia Cruz. “I’m Afro-Latino,” he says, explaining the souvenir’s added significance.
Frost, who was adopted at birth, was raised outside Orlando by a musician father and a mother who taught special education. His political awakening came in 2012, when he was 15, after news of the Sandy Hook massacre flashed over the TV screens at a chain restaurant. Afterward, he connected on Facebook with the daughter of a teacher who had been killed and traveled to Washington, DC, for a vigil. Sitting across from the older brother of another Sandy Hook victim on the edge of a hotel swimming pool, he had what he described as his “call to action.”
“I’d never experienced that type of grief in my life,” he tells me.
When he returned home, Frost started organizing. He is one of the first members of Congress who grew up completely steeped in social media, and most of his posts are still up from when he was a teenager. You can watch his outlook evolve, from griping about school (“I. Hate. AP World History Homework.”) to hosting fundraisers and meetups. After a gunman killed 17 students and school staff members in Parkland, Florida, Frost livestreamed a die-in at the state Capitol over a proposal to arm teachers, standing grim-faced in a jean jacket as he panned his camera to show the scenes behind him.
“When are you announcing your run for Congress?” someone asked in the comments.
Frost replied with a laughing/crying emoji. “One day….One day….”
Congress’ most precocious members often come from inside the system. Before Paul Ryan won his House seat at 28, he had already worked for Jack Kemp. Elise Stefanik, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time of her 2014 race, had previously worked in the White House. Frost did not work on the Hill. He has still not graduated college. His path to Congress was shaped instead by his work as an organizer.
He worked on the ground for Sanders and Hillary Clinton. He organized for a city council candidate in Brooklyn and a state legislative candidate in Sarasota. In 2019, Frost led an ACLU program in South Carolina that trained volunteers to ask presidential candidates questions about social justice issues—a practice known in campaign circles as “bird-dogging.” After an event in Columbia, a 77-year-old woman named Nina Grey made news by asking Joe Biden whether he supported repealing the Hyde Amendment, which blocked federal funding for abortions. Frost was the one holding the camera.
The key to the exercise was persistence. “We’ve changed candidates’ positions,” Frost later told The State, “simply because we asked them the same question over and over again.”
During the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, Frost’s activism became more confrontational as a leader of The People 407, a loosely organized coalition that took its name from the Orlando area code. Frost was jailed after one protest, and was pepper-sprayed at another, but he was also trying to prevent the sort of riots that unfolded elsewhere.
“I was always very anxious about outside agitators coming in and trying to make us look bad. I was always very worried about the destruction of property,” he says. “Not to sound like a right-winger, but as someone in the protests, it was always something that was top of mind for me, because we live in a Stand Your Ground state.”
When Frost ran for Congress a year later, after a stint working for the anti-gun-violence group March for Our Lives, his politics were enmeshed with personal experience. Many members of Congress are millionaires. But Frost, who quit his organizing job to run for office, ended up going broke. When Florida’s pandemic-era rent freeze ended, he was left temporarily homeless, sleeping on friends’ couches and, on a few occasions, in his car. He thought about working at Olive Garden, but worried about the lack of flexibility.
“And then I got this great idea. I was like, ‘Oh, I can Uber,’” he says. At first, Frost would drive in the evening after he finished his campaign work. But then he discovered “quests”—a way in which drivers can unlock a huge bonus if they hit a certain target.
“You could make, like, $850 on top of what you made. So there’s some crazy quests, but 60 rides in a weekend is insane. Like, you’re doing nothing else but driving.”
The campaigning may have taken a hit, but an Uber-driving 25-year-old was a good story for a candidate taking on a sitting state senator and Grayson, a former congressman. Gun violence remained front and center. Frost positioned himself as a voice for what he calls “the mass-shooting generation.” Today, when he meets with visitors, he shows off the office’s centerpiece, a 6-foot-long painting hanging above his couch emblazoned with the words “Time to save lives! So get on board or get out of our way!”
The work, by a Venezuelan immigrant named Manuel Oliver, was a tribute to the artist’s son, Joaquin, who was killed in Parkland. Joaquin’s portrait graces the left side of the canvas; Frost is on the right. When Oliver showed off the completed painting at a campaign event in 2022, the congressman says he cried.
“I told him, if I win, I’ll put it in my office,” he says. “So I won—and it’s in my office.”
Being online, Frost believes, is an essential tool for legislating. But he’s surrounded by reminders of what happens when posting becomes the purpose, not the process, of politics. A day on the Hill with Frost can feel like an X timeline from hell. As Frost waits to cross the street to the Capitol for his speech, a man walks up with a handheld video camera asking him to define “what a woman is.” A minute later, Frost is approached again, by a lanky young man with a smartphone, asking if he’d apologize for his “anti–Trump and Musk comments.” Everywhere we turn, someone is trying to create a moment—or leverage someone else’s for their own benefit. At a subcommittee hearing that day, Frost grows frustrated as a witness—a conservative influencer with an AI-powered app that spits out fossil fuel industry talking points—keeps promoting his book.
“I guess he’s allowed to say what he wants as a witness, but like, what the fuck?” Frost says afterward. “He mentioned his website like six times or something. Just a complete grifter!”
“Some representatives, it’s like ‘I don’t have time for social media stuff.’ It’s part of your job now! … We’re all kind of content creators, right?”
Frost can rattle off the names of committee members he won’t deal with. “I’m not gonna talk with Lauren Boebert,” he says. “Marjorie Taylor Greene? Absolutely not.” Nancy Mace? “I’m not going to dignify that.” At the hearing, the Haitian-bashing Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins sits down next to Frost; Frost just looks straight ahead. “I’m not gonna do any pleasantries with that guy,” he says.
Frost says he got advice for how to handle himself on the committee from fellow Reps. Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another young insurgent who had proved her mettle on the Hill—and her value to the party’s mainstream—by methodically grilling witnesses. “She’s got a lot of tips on not thinking of question lines as individual things, but how they run into one another,” he says. (“Alex,” Frost says, also advised him to open an account at the Congressional Federal Credit Union.)
Helping the party break through in the sort of spaces Democrats are increasingly shut out of is part of Frost’s official remit. This year, he even has a fancy new title, as co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. After delivering his speech that afternoon—where he was indeed called out for “engaging in personalities” but got off with a warning—Frost has a meeting with an influencer who posts about immigration.
They chitchat about Musk, but it’s a business meeting. Frost laments that the stuff that often gets the most traction is “crazy stuff”—like, say, almost getting kicked out of a committee hearing—“but I feel like me saying a ‘know your rights’ thing to the camera might not do as well.” The influencer suggests leading with a bit of attention-grabbing news, before offering some more practical advice. Frost, leaning forward in his chair, listens attentively and nods along, like a point guard watching someone draw up a play.
“Some representatives, it’s like, ‘I don’t have time for social media stuff,’” Frost tells her, explaining his interest. “It’s part of your job now! I mean, if you just wanted to write bills, you should probably apply for a staff position at, like, leg. counsel,” he says, referring to the nonpartisan office that helps members draft legislation. “Our job is much more than that. That’s a big part of it, but a big part of it’s communicating. We’re all kind of content creators, right?”
When you listen to Frost rail against the ruling party, you can get the impression that he never stopped being a protester. He talks about the need for Democrats to act as an “opposition party” rather than just a minority one—right on down to shadow Cabinet secretaries like they have in the United Kingdom. (“It’s kind of a state of mind,” he says. “I mean, the name ‘minority’ already seems defeatist. We’re not in the minority. The things we want are actually in the majority.”)
But even as Frost tests “the things we can get away with,” as he puts it, he’s still trying to carve out a place for himself as a serious legislator. In 2023, he and Murphy convinced the White House to open a national Office of Gun Violence Prevention, modeled on legislation they’d drafted—a victory Murphy attributes, in part, to Frost’s ability to drum up support in public while lobbying behind the scenes.
On his way to a caucus meeting, Frost buttonholes a more senior House Democrat to plot strategy for a bill he is planning to reintroduce that would protect the voting rights of overseas service members. The effort had been backed by the American Legion and a handful of Republicans, but went nowhere. Now Frost is looking for a Trump ally who might be able to nudge things forward this time. In the previous Congress, Frost had formed an unlikely partnership with Florida Republican Rep. Cory Mills.
“I was gonna ask Cory, but I don’t really want to talk to him,” Frost confides to his colleague. (DC police had recently tried and failed to get an arrest warrant for Mills for domestic violence, allegations the congressman denied.) “I’m gonna find another Trump acolyte to ask. What do you think? Who should I ask?”
The irony of Frost’s status as the Democrats’ youth-whisperer is that he’s now the sort of person that the next generation of Maxwell Frosts protests. During his first campaign, Frost walked back his support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement—a shift that helped him avoid a possibly crushing ad blitz from pro-Israel groups. Last spring, pro-Palestine demonstrators crashed a festival in his district that Frost organized and AOC headlined, accusing the two lawmakers of “performative” support.
Frost was quick to call for a ceasefire and voted against sending weapons to aid Israel. But he also supported a House resolution that equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, explaining at the time that he disagreed with the assertion and feared for the implications for free speech, but wanted to send a message of solidarity against anti-Jewish hate. “I think people on both sides of this issue, maybe at one point or another, have been upset with me, but I’m proud about the position I have—which I think is the position most people in this country have, by the way,” he says.
There is an inherent tension in Frost’s role, as he tries to channel the energy of young voters, while at the same time working within the system many of them want to tear down. As an anti-gun-violence organizer, he’d exalted the power of young voices to advance progressive causes. But as Frost traveled the country stumping for Kamala Harris, he told me, he realized the ground was shifting. Through podcasts, YouTube shows, and organizations like Turning Point USA, conservatives had created a new cultural entry point for Republican politics that appealed to people who didn’t necessarily identify as political. Frost, who goes to amateur wrestling matches in his free time, feels like Democrats have abandoned vast swaths of culture to the other side.
“We’ve got to communicate to voters who don’t consume news as a hobby,” he says.
At the scale of national politics, these are problems that will take more than just one Gen Z congressman to figure out. But up close, you can see what Frost is going for and how his inside-out organizing approach might work. That evening, at the end of a long day of votes and meetings, he sits down with a group of advocates for homeless youth from Florida who worry that they’ll lose their federal funding under the new administration’s radical downsizing. The vibe is serious but loose. They had worked with his office before, and Frost had even participated in a hand count of the homeless population with one of the attendees.
“We do so many meetings in a day, the days are so packed, and when I’m at my apartment with some Taco Bell, relaxing—”
The visitors start to laugh. “You’re so relatable!” someone says.
“The meetings I think about, aren’t like, aren’t the ones where there’s a bunch of numbers being spewed, it was the stories.”
He suggests they find a way to tell a story together: What if they do a version of the meeting they just had, but for the public? They could walk through the problem of serially undercounting youth homelessness and the funding shortages advocates face—all while broadcasting homeless services to people in need.
“Maybe there’ll be young people who watch it and see them because I post on social media,” he says. “So part of it can be talking about what we already have, and then we can also, of course, talk about what we’re fighting for.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.