Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) had no idea last July when she used ordinary parliamentary procedure during her questioning of embattled Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, that she would go massively viral and introduce “reclaiming my time” into the public discourse as a sort of battle-cry for the resistance. Lovingly referred to by fans and supporters as “Auntie Maxine,” the Los Angeles-based Congresswoman has since become a household name and an icon of the resistance.
Waters, who is seeking re-election in California’s 43rd congressional district this November and faces a primary hurdle on Tuesday, June 5th, spoke with Bros4America co-founder and political commentator Alex Mohajer and co-host Thomas McAbee about her clash with Mnuchin, almost a year later, during an interview for the Bros4America podcast.
(Read the Entire Interview Transcript of the Bros4America sit-down with Auntie Maxine Waters.)
“Tell you the truth, I was very surprised that it went viral,” Waters said during the interview. She has, after all, been in her fair share of dust-ups while a member of Congress (which we have fondly reported in the past).
“Because ‘reclaiming my time’ is a regular order of business in the Congress of the United States. It’s not original. It is said often by different people at different times when you’re trying to get back the time that you have been allotted to speak and someone else is kind of, uh, intruding or imposing on that time.”
“But then I began to understand,” Waters continued, “after talking with people, what it meant. It meant something different for everybody. I think that it struck a nerve because, here you had Mnuchin, our treasury secretary who had been the owner and CEO of a big bank. And here you had an African American woman sitting on this committee and not accepting his rudeness and not accepting business as usual and challenging him by using the rules.”
It’s no surprise. The Washington Post described the moment as “bigger than Maxine Waters” for capturing the frustrated sentiment of an entire nation.

The moment marks a long list of viral moments for the Congresswoman, who has been dubbed ‘Auntie Maxine’ by her adoring supporters, new and old alike, and praised as one of Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics and a hero of the resistance. She fearlessly calls for the president’s impeachment even as a timid Democratic Party leadership tiptoes around the issue, and has no qualms calling him a liar or dubbing his team “The Kremlin Klan” or a “bunch of scumbags.”
Her criticisms aren’t just rhetorical.
“It is an insult,” Waters said in our interview, speaking about the news that Donald Trump has publicly claimed that he holds the “absolute power” to pardon himself. It was one of the few moments that the Congresswoman referenced the president specifically in the interview, but with a clear distaste for the president and his circ...