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WASHINGTON — Maxine Waters has been in public office for 40 years, but she is now the unlikely, unchallenged new face of the Democratic Party and the “resistance” to President Donald Trump.

Waters, 78, a Los Angeles member of Congress, was until recently in the news mostly for a messy ethics investigation. Now she’s an icon, and a meme. A single image of the woman now known on the internet as “Auntie Maxine” — righteous, furious, uncowed — and a bit of text seems to capture the moment of Democratic desperation, anger, and sheer exasperation. And Waters, more than perhaps any other Democrat, was made for the social media moment. “We needed someone right now to shine the light of truth in a way that wakes us all up,” said Brittany Packnett, a cofounder of Campaign Zero and one of the leading national voices in the current struggle for racial justice. “Congresswoman Waters is that light. She's shaking it up and telling the truth, and we all owe her for it. She's the Auntie Boss: As real as your Auntie and as powerful as only a black woman could be.”

Waters' intensity, her vehemence, and her determination to communicate to her enemies that she really does not care have defined her since she was first elected to the California State Assembly in 1977. She’s been an unabashed champion of federal spending on jobs, a critic of the Iraq War and other conflicts, a Los Angeles political insider, a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, and a champion of the left of the national Democratic Party.

If there’s a quote that’s defined her, it’s a comment from 1989: “I have a right to my anger.” But it would have been easy to think that, at 78, she was a politician of an early generation, entering the twilight of her career with a mixed legacy. The decade did not begin so auspiciously for Waters. The Los Angeles Times had long suggested that her family benefited from her “clout.” She was a target of conservative outlets eventually including Breitbart News, and was ranked among the “most corrupt” members of Congress by both the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the conservative Judicial Watch. And she fell under a formal ethics investigation when, at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, she set up a meeting between the Treasury Department officials and the National Bankers Association (NBA), which represents minority-owned banks. The issue: A majority of the attendees were representatives of OneUnited, a bank in which her husband held stock and was a formerly a board member. OneUnited was the only bank that requested assistance, and eventually received $12 million in bailout funds. Waters vigorously protested her innocence, but the ethics investigation dragged on for years, a notorious Washington mess that Politico described as a “chronicle of mistakes, partisan and intraparty squabbles, allegations of racism, bitter personal rivalries and failed attempts to bring the investigation to a close months and even years before it ended.” It ended in 2012 after more than half of the committee’s members recused themselves. Waters was cleared, and her top aide received a formal reprimand, the mildest punishment possible. That resolution opened the door for Waters to serve as the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. But her views on financial regulation are not what's endearing her to a generation of social media–driven fans. Instead, it’s the rhetorical style that has always defined her, and that made her a particular object of conservative dislike, as in Human Events’ compilation of the “Top 10 Outrageous Maxine Waters Quotes.” That style is remarkably well-suited to the media of 2017: the short, blunt video; the compact, blunt tweet; the simple image of an outraged black woman on the floor of Congress. Waters’ former press secretary Jermaine House started to notice his boss’s image changing in January 2015, when President Obama noted during the State of the Union that he had “no more campaigns to run." Republicans began clapping. “I know,” Obama said, not missing a beat, “because I won both of ‘em.” Democrats went wild, but one of them stood out and caught her party’s attention: Rep. Maxine Waters of California, raising her hands in adulation and standing up for a president who punched back. “There was a lot of attention when that happened,” House told BuzzFeed News. “But it was nothing like it is now.” Since then Waters has been going increasingly viral, sometimes literally. Her Twitter following last week ballooned to more than 260,000 after she tweeted: “I am a strong black woman. I cannot be intimidated, and I'm not going anywhere. #BlackWomenAtWork” (68,000 retweets, 192,000 likes). There's a phrase to describe her probing, disbelieving gaze above her eyeglasses: “Looking Maxinely.” Someone made a drawing of her in a superhero costume with an ‘M’ on her chest. Improbably, Waters — someone who’s been in Washington for more than 25 years — is the face of the opposition against a president she says she does not respect.