March 12, 2025

By Zak Cheney-Rice

Bernie Sanders in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Photo: Jim Vondruska/Reuters

Last month, as Elon Musk’s malevolent influence on Donald Trump’s second term was coming into focus, a friend DM’ed me a clip of Chuck Schumer leading a protest against Musk’s efforts to access sensitive Treasury Department data. “We will win! We will win!” croaked the Senate minority leader, the crowd clearly reluctant to join this confused approximation of what impassioned resistance might look like. My friend wrote, “We’re all gonna die.”

Being uninspired by the Democratic Party is a national pastime, but 2025 has ushered in new levels of loathing, with the party’s approval rating sinking to record lows. Schumer’s efforts have been so limp that a group of liberal governors in January begged him to grow a spine in opposing Trump’s agenda and cabinet nominees. Schumer’s counterpart in the House, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, has fared no better, alternating between sphinxlike nonresponses to revelations that Trump had essentially bought New York City mayor Eric Adams in a quid-pro-quo deal with the Justice Department and bizarrely menacing anti-GOP diatribes performed in sweats in empty rooms. Congressional Democrats were widely mocked for the little protest paddles they held up during Trump’s State of the Union, while Representative Al Green was kicked out for a disruption that was derided as pathetic and unconvincing.

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