Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) wasn’t planning to run for Congress after his stint as the lead counsel on President Trump’s first impeachment.
If anything, spending months as a staffer had discouraged him from seeking office, even as he felt assured the public would weigh details unearthed during Trump’s impeachment trial as they decided whether to return him to the White House.
“I had hoped that Joe Biden would win and that Donald Trump would ride his golf cart into the sunset,” Goldman said.
Instead, Trump denied his 2020 election defeat and a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol — events that inspired Goldman’s run for office in 2022.
“I’m somebody who lives by the Teddy Roosevelt quote that it is better to be the man in the arena than the person outside, criticizing the man in the arena,” he said.
With Trump back in the White House for a second term, Goldman is now going deeper into the arena.
In a little more than a month in office, Trump has fired 18 inspectors general, threatened to defy a court order, overseen the gutting of agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development, fired scores of federal workers and vowed to take over various other countries.
The House Judiciary Committee is sure to be the epicenter of activity in hashing out partisan battles over the wisdom and legality of Trump’s actions. And it’s one Democratic leadership has stocked with new faces.
Goldman is one of a trio of first-term lawmakers who followed Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to the Judiciary panel as he took over as ranking member this year.
Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) were also seen as effective voices for Democrats as they confronted the GOP investigation into the Biden family.
Moskowitz frequently used humor to needle Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and GOP witnesses, while Crockett gained prominence for her unique blend of well-placed one-liners and well-timed clashes with some of Congress’s most notable conservatives.
Goldman’s niche in that group was different: He was the lawyerly one.
It wasn’t that the others don’t have law degrees — they do — but Goldman’s approach, by his own admission, mirrors the way the former prosecutor would dive into cross-examination when he worked in the Southern District of New York.
“I may be Pollyanna-ish, but I do believe that the American people ultimately can see through misinformation, and if provided with credible facts and evidence, can understand what the truth is. And I view that to be my role on the committee is to use my experience in cross-examination to question Republican witnesses and to expose them when they don’t tell the truth,” he said.
“And that is certainly what I intend to do on the Judiciary Committee.”
That task appears more daunting than ever.
Democrats pushed to make the 2024 race a referendum on what they said was the risk Trump posed to democracy, highlighting both his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power in 2021 and their concerns he might blow past guardrails imposing limits on presidential power if elected a second time.
But many voters either downplayed those warnings or rejected them outright.
To Goldman, the challenge is to find a way to make that resonate with the same people that cast aside those concerns just months ago.
“We did not do a good enough job in connecting that to people’s everyday lives. And I think there were a lot of voters who said, ‘Yes, that is a concern, but it’s simply just not a concern I can afford to focus on right now. And I have to figure out how I’m going to pay for groceries, rent, and health care this month. I can’t bother focusing on the possibility that a corrupt president usurps power for his own benefit,’” he said.
The heir to the Levi Strauss fortune pointed to Trump’s directive to freeze all federal grants and other government spending — risking upending funding for things like health care services, child care, and food stamps.
“Our task is to connect the lawlessness to everyday lives,” he said.
It’s one that is quite literally keeping him up at night.
Asked about the mental toll it takes to be in the arena at a time when Democrats deem the president to be a threat to America’s democratic traditions, Goldman paused before acknowledging it’s had an impact.
“The hardest part is being present for my family and my kids when I’m with them, because it is all consuming to be thinking about and strategizing about everything that is going on. And I feel a tremendous responsibility to stand up for everyday Americans against what is an administration that wants to use the government to benefit the wealthy,” said Goldman, a father of five.
“The way that I often deal with a lot of the emotional aspect of this is to channel that into action. But that is all consuming. And I am not sleeping that well. I’m waking up in the night thinking about different angles to expose the lawlessness, different things that we can do in the minority where we have very little power to push back and to stop what I think is incredibly dangerous for our entire country.”
Though largely optimistic about his ability to do so, Goldman wavered at some points.
Americans remain as divided as ever, including in how they get their information and who they trust.
The fractured media landscape means a growing number of Americans are turning to social media, where misinformation abounds, and a growing right-wing media market has drawn viewers from other sources.
“I worry that we’re in a post-factual world,” he said.
“And part of what I am intent on doing is continuing to bring up the facts with the hope that they will matter.”
That leaves Goldman hammering Trump on the president’s promises to lower prices while looking down the road at confrontations yet to be had.
“The reality is that I — over the last five years, starting with impeachment — I probably know Donald Trump as well as anyone on the Democratic side,” he said.
“Part of being a prosecutor and being a trial lawyer is learning how to think several steps ahead. And by now I really understand how Donald Trump operates. I understand his MO, and I use a lot of that experience of thinking several steps ahead to be more strategic about how we’re going to fight him and not necessarily chasing every outrage, every outrageous thing he says.”
But for someone who has seen so much of his time in Congress defined by impeachment — either as impeachment counsel or combating the GOP probe into Biden — Goldman does not see impeachment as inevitable.
“I think Donald Trump has already broken the law, and I do think it’s inevitable that he will — and is — trying to usurp all of the power of the federal government for his own personal revenge and retribution and his own personal interests. And invariably, there will be numerous abuses of power that make the Ukraine conduct seem quaint,” Goldman said.
“The question that we will have to decide on is: What is the best strategy to use to hold him accountable? And it’s not clear to me, right now, that impeachment is the best strategy.”
Trump has already survived two impeachments — efforts ultimately quashed by Senate Republicans and rejected by an electorate that just put him back in power.
And while Trump was convicted on 34 counts in his New York hush money case, his federal cases unraveled in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision determining former presidents still retain broad immunity, raising questions about the extent the courts will rebuff unlawful actions taken by Trump or his administration.
To Goldman, that means Republicans will have to play a key role in holding Trump accountable.
“Donald Trump is effectively trying to co-opt all of Congress’s power … and we will certainly aggressively do everything we can to push back on his excessive power grab,” Goldman said of Democrats.
“But ultimately, if Congress is going to have any power or any authority, the Republican members of Congress are going to have to stand up for the institution and for the Constitution, which means they are going to have to stand up to Donald Trump,” he added.
“I am not optimistic that the Republicans who have so consistently bent the knee to Donald Trump will do that, but that is really the primary way — the only way — for Congress to properly execute its role.”
