In Houston, DNC chair candidates talk fighting Trump, turning Texas blue

Some candidates vying to lead the Democratic National Committee appeared at the Regional DNC Future Forum in Houston on January 28, 2017. Clockwise from top right: Tom Perez, Jaime Harrison, Jehmu Greene, Keith Ellison, Pete Buttigieg, Peter Peckarsky, Ray Buckley, Sally Boynton Brown and Vincent Tolliver.

HOUSTON — Nearly a dozen candidates for Democratic National Committee chair descended here Saturday with an eye on boosting Texas' role in their party's national mission and an even sharper focus on battling President Donald Trump on all fronts.

Addressing DNC members and other party activists, the field of 10 candidates — seven of them considered serious — trained almost all their fire on Trump, assailing him as a threat to democracy who deserves little, if any, Democratic cooperation.

"Sign me up for the resistance," said Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. "What we have seen in the last seven days — I think we might be under-reacting. He's took a jackhammer to the foundations of American moral authority — and on the seventh day, he did not rest."

For Democrats, the latest affront came a day earlier, when Trump signed an executive order halting, for now, a U.S. refugee program and indefinitely suspending Syrian refugee admission. Buttigieg noted that as the candidates were speaking, "people who have looked to America as a beacon are trapped in a Tom Hanks movie at JFK airport," while former Labor Secretary Tom Perez called the move an attack on a program that already works.

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