Welcome to Off Message Season 2. I'm your new host, Isaac Dover, Chief Washington correspondent here at Politico.

Our guest for this episode is Akeem Jeffries, who's a congressman from Brooklyn, and whom I've actually known for the better part of a decade back when he was first running for an assembly seat, and I was covering New York politics. He got himself to Congress in 2012, and he's been steadily on the move

since then. For this new Congress, he's been named one of the three heads of the Democratic

Policy and Communications Committee, which means that he's leading Democratic messaging as they

try to figure out what to do next. That is a big question for this party in an existential crisis

as they try to take on President Donald Trump

and get themselves back from the brink of near extinction.

But last weekend, Jeffries found himself scrambling to JFK Airport in New York,

working with the families of people who landed in the United States

only to find themselves detained as a result of Trump's immigration ban. Sitting in his office on the sixth floor of the Longworth

building here in Washington, we talked about that experience, how he thinks Democrats modulate

their response to Trump. He said the party needs to not follow Mitch McConnell's example when

he said his priority was to make Obama one-term president.

Though I did point out to Jeffries that his top priority seems to be getting Trump out of the White House himself.

And he also talked about whether Democrats made a mistake by not focusing on keeping Steve Bannon

out of the White House from the day he was announced and they erupted them and said they'd

never let it happen.

And then they moved on.

So here's Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. Enjoy.

You call President Trump's executive order, reading from your comments at the press conference on Sunday,

reckless, unconstitutional, unsavory, and un-American effort.

So why is it each of those?

...