Consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Via Politico:
Zephyr Teachout, the would-be next attorney general of New York, sits tight against the desk in the former doctor’s office she’s using for her campaign headquarters, her very pregnant belly barely visible above the desk’s metal top. She runs her hands through her hair like a law professor lecturing on a particularly thorny constitutional question. She lays out precisely how she could, if elected, use her office put Donald Trump in prison.
Teachout’s headquarters is in East Harlem, just a few miles northeast of Trump Tower, but a world away from its pink white-veined marble, mirrors and brass. Until earlier this year, this was a husband-and-wife urology and ophthalmology practice. Her press team operates out of an erstwhile exam room. Teachout takes the former urologist’s office for herself, empty except for her cellphone and laptop, and piece of poster paper sitting on the floor on which is written “SIGN THE CLIMATE PLEDGE.”
Teachout is a 46-year-old professor of law at Fordham University, where she teaches classes on antitrust and the Constitution. As a young lawyer from Vermont, Teachout joined the Howard Dean campaign as director of internet organizing; a magazine story from the time described her as “a slight, freckled lawyer” who “darts around the office in a pair of silver shoes with the balletic, boyish energy of Peter Pan.” The shoes are gone now, but the energy is unchanged, even with Teachout due to give birth to her first child in October.
If all goes according to plan, the baby will be born just after the primary and just before the general election, and will be just beginning to babble when Teachout takes office and turns the full force of the nation’s most prestigious and powerful state legal office against the president of the United States. “This is war time. This is a total crisis moment,” Teachout says. “It calls for Churchill. It calls for bringing out new ideas.”
The New York AG’s office is known for the firepower of its prosecutors and the ambition of its occupants. Robert Abrams saw himself as taking the place of federal regulators defanged in the Reagan era; Eliot Spitzer unearthed an obscure 70-year-old law to go after the financial wrongdoing of Wall Street billionaires. Eric Schneiderman compelled the president to fork over $25 million to settle Trump University fraud lawsuit.
Teachout is another type of force entirely, a professor with expertise on both corruption and the Constitution, whose skills seem uniquely tailored to this strange moment in American politics. She may never occupy the office—she’s tied for second in a four-person race, with close to half of likely voters undecided—but her anti-Trump battle plan has already shaped the contours of the race, with other occupants competing to out-anti-Trump one another, virtually guaranteeing the office will have a strong focus on the president. Nationally, it represents maybe the most extreme example of a specific new theory of Democratic politics: that the President of the United States represents a red-level threat alert to the republic, and that the first job of Democratic politicians, and especially Democratic prosecutors, is to stop him.