Arguably the most memorable moment of Katie Porter’s young congressional career came courtesy of a poster. It was March, and Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan had just assured the freshman congresswoman from California, sitting before him with the rest of the House Financial Services Committee, that his bank was focused on rebuilding trust with customers after spending years defrauding them. “I’m fully committed to taking the necessary steps to restore our customers’ trust,” he had said in a quote Porter read aloud to the committee. “We’ve already made progress in restoring customers’ trust, and we’ve remained committed to being transparent with investors,” he’d said, in another moment Porter highlighted.

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An on-the-record contradiction like that is a black mark during a congressional hearing; having it hammered home with a whiteboard display is downright humiliating. He didn’t know why Wells Fargo’s lawyers would say that , Sloan said, stammering. But it was clear that either the bank’s lawyers had been lying to the federal judge or its CEO had lied to Porter. She continued: “It’s convenient for your lawyers to deflect blame in court and say that your rebranding campaign can be ignored as hyperbolic marketing, but when you come to Congress you want us to take you at your word, and I think that disconnect is why the American public is having trouble trusting Wells Fargo.”

“Then why, Mr. Sloan, if you don’t mind my asking,” she began, reaching under the table for the prop, “are your lawyers in federal court arguing that those exact statements that I read are, quote, ‘paradigmatic examples of non-actionable corporate puffery, on which no reasonable investor could rely’?” There was no backing away: An enlarged image of the actual court document was in Porter’s hand, with the quote in a box dead center.

In the past year, the former law professor has cemented a reputation as one of the most formidable questioners in Congress, making heads of federal agencies and financial firms squirm in clips that rack up hundreds of thousands of views. As a gridlocked Senate precludes much near-term hope for legislative advancements, Porter has become a surprising hero to progressives and economic populists, a legislator who uses her platform as effectively as anyone in Congress. And she views these viral moments as a way to trigger change. First, you get mad at the men who control the financial system. Then you humiliate them in public. Lastly, and most importantly, you force them to make concessions.

Porter is not an obvious contender for viral stardom. She comes across as neither a politician nor a natural performer. She comes off as nice: a Midwestern-native mom with three school-age kids and a short curly coif, hardly our culture’s avatar for a high-profile antagonist of Big Finance. She’s cheerful, witty, and disarming. But she’s also a renowned legal scholar who’s spent her career studying and teaching commercial law and bankruptcy, and she has a knack for parsing tedious concepts, a trait she has in common with her mentor Elizabeth Warren. She also knows how to get people to pay attention to systemic economic inequality: give them a villain. (Not that she calls them that. When I visited her DC office in July, she and her staff preferred wholesome insults like “ding-dong” and “yahoo.”)

If Sloan is the only witness that Porter managed to help embarrass out of a job, several others have found themselves unwitting dunces caught in her tough-but-clear line of questioning. She used a whiteboard to walk the tongue-tied JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon through an Irvine, California, bank teller’s monthly budget, asking how exactly that worker should cover a $567 shortfall after covering basic living expenses with a paltry Chase paycheck. Kathy Kraninger, Donald Trump’s appointee for director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was unable to answer Porter’s rudimentary questions about annual percentage rates on payday loans. HUD Secretary Ben Carson thought that a question about foreclosures and blight centered on real estate–owned property, or REOs, was about Oreo cookies. (Porter’s office received a gift delivery of Oreos from fellow Hill staffers after that one.) The exchanges are reliably funny and engaging, and have been covered in outlets like the Washington Post, HuffPost, CNN, and elsewhere; headlines describe Porter as putting “Wall Street in the hot seat,” posing “the newest threat to Wall Street,” and “stirring up trouble for Trump.” Finance execs tapped to testify before Congress are reportedly preparing more carefully than usual with their lawyers on how to handle Porter’s questions. “Good!” Porter told me, recalling that. “I want you to be doing that!”

Plenty of stars had to align to get someone like Porter in front of these witnesses. She was a long-shot congressional candidate to begin with: Her district in Southern California’s conservative stronghold of Orange County had never before sent a Democrat to Washington, and while plenty of educated suburban pockets flipped from red to blue in the 2018 midterms, many of those districts—including some surrounding Porter’s—elected moderates. Porter, on the other hand, beat her Democratic Party–endorsed rival and fellow UC Irvine law professor David Min with a progressive platform, running as a mother and consumer advocate calling for things like Medicare for All. (The primary was so contentious that some people close to the race alleged that Min’s camp launched a whisper campaign to use Porter’s divorce from an allegedly abusive ex against her, with one donor even calling her “restraining order Porter” on Twitter.) While the Republican incumbent, Mimi Walters, had a lead on election night, mail-ins and absentee ballots gradually tilted the count toward Porter, who snared 52 percent of the vote.