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.
Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom has started a podcast to interview conservative influencers and throw trans athletes under the bus, Representative Elissa Slotkin’s official rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address was a paean to Ronald Reagan, and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has appeared on any news outlet that will have him speaking in a very loud voice about how mad he is. It can often seem that, when it comes to opposing Trump, Democrats have no idea what to say or how to say it.
This has not been the case, however, with the two most prominent leftists in the broader Democratic tent. Bernie Sanders has spent the first month and a half of Trump’s second presidency doing what you’d expect Bernie Sanders to do: raging against the corrosive influence of billionaires on politics. “I fear very much that under President Trump, we are not seeing a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ but rather a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class,” the 83-year-old warned his Senate colleagues last month. He has sounded the same alarm during his “Fighting Ogligarchy” tour, which has drawn thousands of attendees across the Midwest in recent weeks, including 2,600 people at a rally on Saturday in Altoona, Wisconsin, a town of only 10,000.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been even more combative towards the administration, boycotting Trump’s swearing-in ceremony and State of the Union address while feuding with everyone from border czar Tom Homan to White House adviser and virulent xenophobe Katie Miller. Ocasio-Cortez’s critiques, in which she has called Musk “a leech on the public” for threatening to overhaul Social Security and immediately condemned the detention of pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil, feel both precise and cathartic and regularly go viral. Ocasio-Cortez will join Sanders on the road soon while launching her own solo appearances in Republican-held districts.
There is solace to be found in these familiar spectacles, reassurance that, even with the government and civil society exploding around us, some Democrats can be counted on to fight back and fight back well. But it also raises a question that will define the next four years in American politics: Why are Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez so much better at this than their colleagues?
One answer is that they have credibility and devoted followings built over the years they’ve spent at odds not only with Republicans but more moderate factions within their own caucus. They are as disappointed with the Democrats as seemingly the rest of America is. Sanders is a grizzled relic of the kind of class politics that was swept aside by genteel liberals like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and his diagnosis that the party was undone in 2024 because it abandoned the working class lines up with analyses that have been offered up by gloating MAGA Republicans and disillusioned anti-woke liberals alike. Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, has proven deft at integrating herself with the Establishment, but remains a go-to scapegoat for the party whenever something goes wrong. When the centrist think tank Third Way urged Democrats to move “away from the dominance of small-dollar donors” in its post-2024 autopsy, it was hard not to interpret it as a shot at Ocasio-Cortez.
Broadly speaking, each has a track record of standing by principles and beliefs that make their protests against Trumpism both coherent and believable. This is one of the advantages of belonging to one wing of the party, as opposed to bearing responsibility for the coalition as a whole — the purview of congressional leaders like Schumer and Jeffries, and potential presidential aspirants like Murphy and Newsom. But it does put a glaring spotlight on the fact that mainstream Democrats have been so consumed by a desire to triangulate that they seem to have no idea what they believe in.
No wonder thousands of people in Republican districts are lining up to see Sanders while so many Democrats are begging his colleagues in their own districts to do something. Which has some intriguing implications for who will lead the Democrats going forward, since it is the moderates who own the conventional wisdom on what’s best for the party, but the leftists who have the energy and the conviction. The liberal pundit Matt Yglesias interpreted the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour as a ploy by Sanders to get the last laugh in the ongoing, never-ending fallout from the 2016 primary. “Is Bernie running in 2028?” Yglesias tweeted over the weekend. “Is he going to endorse someone?” Ocasio-Cortez retorted, “Believe it or not, some people’s everyday actions aren’t motivated by some long-term career ambition, but out of a genuine love for people and a desire to do right by them.”
While that may be true, Yglesias was right to identify a proxy battle for the party’s future. Mainstream Democrats intent on sidelining leftist insurgents seem to have not so much surrendered as fallen into self-defeating inertia, treating Trump’s popularity as such an article of faith that they have willingly sacrificed both their own popularity and the health of our society to avoid alienating his voters. It’s becoming harder, as Trump continues his rampage, to imagine spending the next four years taking cues from leaders whose principles are this difficult to ascertain.
