Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s phone buzzed Tuesday morning while she sat in the Hart Senate Office Building, participating in her bipartisan Bible study group.

She ignored it. But when a member of her senior staff rang her again, and then again, the junior senator from New York finally stepped out into the hallway, bracing herself for a potential crisis.


Instead, one of the staff members on the line alerted Gillibrand to a political gift — a tweet from President Donald Trump, which was read to her over the phone:

“Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!”

Less than 24 hours earlier, Gillibrand had joined four male senators in calling on Trump to resign because of multiple allegations of assault and sexual misconduct. (Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono on Tuesday became the second female senator to join the call.) Trump has repeatedly denied those allegations. But it was Gillibrand alone who managed to bait him into a response.

“What do you want to say?” two of Gillibrand’s senior staff members asked her, as she paced in the hallway. Her response, according to an aide, was immediate and visceral: “He’s trying to silence me.”

After crafting a tweet to that effect — “You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak out about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office” — Gillibrand returned to Bible study, filling in her colleagues about the cause of the disruption, according to an attendee.

One of the members of the Bible study group, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford, later defended his prayer partner. “Our leaders should focus on the issues, not personal attacks,” Lankford said in a statement to POLITICO.

Gillibrand’s aides, meanwhile, clarified to reporters that she had met with Trump just once, in 2010, during a period in which he gave money to many Democratic elected officials. Ivanka Trump, they noted, had also been present at the meeting.

The confrontation with Trump elevated a fight against sexual harassment that Gillibrand has been waging for years — and distinguished her from the pack of potential 2020 challengers all vying to play the role of Trump slayer.

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In recent weeks, Gillibrand has made it clear she is outraged by the charges of sexual harassment being lodged against powerful men in media, politics, entertainment and other industries — and doesn’t want to litigate the gradations between unwanted touches and full-blown sexual assault. “Let’s say the line is here, and it’s all bad,” Gillibrand said last week, during POLITICO’s Women Rule conference.

Her no-tolerance policy drew cheers from the majority-female audience. But on Tuesday, some Democrats worried her rush to the front lines of the #MeToo movement — she was one of the first senators to call for Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken to resign last week, and earlier this month said President Bill Clinton should have resigned over his affair with Monica Lewinsky — carries with it some potential risk in a moment where the rules of the game are being figured out in real time.

“There should be rigorous pursuit of these kinds of charges, but right now there are no rules,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama. “She’s been a leader on the issue [of sexual assault]. But the danger for her is looking so craven and opportunistic it actually hurts her.”

Another top Democratic operative worried Gillibrand risked putting the conviction before the trial. “If you cared about the Democrats and 2018,” said the operative, “you would be calling for hearings [for Trump]. When you call for resignation, you’re jumping the gun.”

The operative added: “I’d rather have congressional candidates being asked, ‘Do you support hearings?’ Calling for resignation is not really what’s best for the party, but it’s good for her.”

(Last month, in a radio interview in Albany, Gillibrand also called for a government oversight investigation of the harassment claims against Trump.)

On Tuesday, Democrats who had left Gillibrand in the wilderness after her comments on Clinton rushed to her defense. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts accused Trump of trying to “slut-shame” Gillibrand by insinuating she might have traded sexual favors for campaign cash. But White House officials defended the president’s tweet, arguing that the intention was not to launch a sexist broadside but to underscore that Gillibrand was a “swamp” politician who relied on wealthy donors like Trump to get where she is today.

White House aides went on the defensive Tuesday, sifting through vintage Trump tweets, looking for similar attacks on male politicians like New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, to prove that Trump’s attack of Gillibrand was not sexist.

“He’s talking about the way our system functions as it is,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at Tuesday’s press briefing. “Politicians repeatedly beg for money ... there’s no way it’s sexist at all.” Calling Gillibrand a “wholly owned subsidiary” of her campaign donors, Sanders added: “This president is someone who can’t be bought.”

The White House did not argue, however, that Trump was attempting to delegitimize a potential political challenger.

“His legitimacy as president is widely questioned, and his reaction is to question the legitimacy of someone else,” said Stu Loeser, a Democratic operative and a former aide to New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer. “His implication is that Gillibrand is only where she is because of people like him, which undermines her legitimacy.”

It’s a similar strategy to the one Trump has employed against another potential female 2020 challenger: Warren. By calling her “Pocahontas,” Trump has attempted to remind voters that as a professor at Harvard Law School, Warren had identified herself as a minority with Native American heritage. Trump’s implication is that Warren furthered her own career with a false affirmative-action claim — a question of legitimacy.

Trump’s effort to delegitimize Gillibrand on Tuesday, however, only boosted her profile. A pre-scheduled news conference on tractor-trailer truck safety suddenly became must-see TV. Gillibrand called Trump’s tweet a “sexist smear.”

For Gillibrand, who for years has made issues of sexual assault in the military and sexism in Congress central to her political platform, Trump’s tweet was widely seen as a fundraising boon.

“I’m going to keep speaking out with the millions of women who are raising their voices,” Gillibrand wrote in a fundraising email her staff blasted out Tuesday afternoon. “We won’t be silenced by a tweet.”

The comedian Samantha Bee tweeted: “May this tweet be @SenGillibrand’s superhero origin story and ignite her 2020 campaign to replace your sexist ass.”

Testimonials defending Gillibrand flooded in from feminist icons like Gloria Steinem, local politicians like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, celebrities like actress Connie Britton — Gillibrand’s college roommate — and colleagues like Warren. (Hillary Clinton did not weigh in.)

But Axelrod added that it remains to be seen who emerges as the overall political winner from the #MeToo movement. “The important thing is that there is an established set of rules,” he said. “It may be that the person who emerges here may be the one who says, let’s be rigorous and let’s be consistent, about how we approach these things.”

