Longtime Staffer Is Launching a Bid to Replace 88-Year-Old Eleanor Holmes Norton

A top staffer to Eleanor Holmes Norton, the U.S. House delegate for Washington, D.C., says he is launching a campaign for his former boss’s seat this week after the 88-year-old has spent months making contradictory statements about whether she plans to seek reelection.

“I don’t consider myself to be running against Congresswoman Norton,” Trent Holbrook, who recently left his job as Norton’s senior legislative counsel, said in a Tuesday interview with The Washington Post, adding that he plans to formally launch his bid Wednesday. “If Congresswoman Norton was running a campaign that I thought would win, you know, I wouldn’t be here. But that’s not where we’re at right now.”

Holmes Norton, who turns 89 years old this year and has represented the District since 1991, has repeatedly declared her plans to remain in office — though her staff have subsequently walked many of those statements back in the wake of the delegate’s declining health status. Since being reelected in November 2024, Norton hasn’t accepted any interview requests and her office has pushed back against concerns about her age and mental capacity.

Norton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Holbrook’s decision to run and whether the delegate has decided on a reelection campaign against him.

NOTUS reported in October that Norton’s campaign was nearly broke, with just over $3,000 raised between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2025. Her campaign disclosures indicate it had just under $6,500 in cash on hand as of Sept. 30 and is $90,000 in debt to the delegate, who personally loaned her reelection committee money earlier this year.

Late last year, Norton was the target of a thousand-dollar scam in which an internal police report described the nonvoting delegate as having the “early stages of dementia.”

Holbrook, who said his last day in Norton’s office was Monday, is joining an already crowded field to represent the District in Congress. D.C. Council members Brooke Pinto and Robert C. White Jr. in 2025 both launched campaigns for the seat.

He is also the third congressional aide to launch a run for their boss’s seat this cycle.

The late Rep. Gerry Connolly endorsed his chief of staff, James Walkinshaw, last summer in the weeks before his death, and Walkinshaw was ultimately elected to assume his boss’s role.

Rep. Chuy García found himself the subject of a disapproval resolution from fellow Democrats after orchestrating a controversial succession plan that cleared the way for his chief of staff to mount an unopposed primary bid to replace him.

Holbrook told the Post he never previously considered a political run, but said “we’re at such an important moment right now. I couldn’t not.”