WASHINGTON — A president’s first few weeks in office were once expected to be a “honeymoon,” a pleasant if brief period of bipartisanship and good feeling.
President Trump’s first four weeks have been a blitzkrieg, a furious assault on the federal agencies he was elected to manage.
Trump and his shock troops, led by Elon Musk, have barreled through the federal bureaucracy — abruptly freezing billions in already-allocated spending, urging thousands of civil servants to quit, and threatening to “delete” entire agencies.
Democrats in Congress, many of whom helped build those agencies, appeared paralyzed by surprise — not by Trump’s zeal to dismantle the bureaucracy, but by the speed and audacity of his tactics, many of which appeared illegal.
Before Trump’s inauguration, some had earnestly offered to work cooperatively with Musk to draw up a blueprint for gradual government reform.
Then others politely voted to confirm Trump’s Cabinet members as the honeymoon became a dystopian nightmare.
And some expressed what sounded like defeatism. “What leverage do we have?” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) asked. “They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.”
Not until last week, after angry hometown voters flooded their switchboards, did the party’s congressional leaders scramble to get in front of their base.
“They want us to beat Trump and stop this s—,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told the New York Times. “And that’s what we’re doing.”
Schumer began by belatedly ordering Senate Democrats to stop voting for Trump’s nominees — a mostly symbolic action, since the Republican majority still confirmed every last one who has come up for a vote.
In the House, Jeffries appointed a “rapid response task force” to counter the Trump juggernaut. In its first week of existence, the task force appointed another task force (on litigation) and urged representatives to hold town halls — responses that seemed neither rapid nor combative.
To be fair, Jeffries was right in a narrow sense: Democrats have little leverage — when it comes to legislation. A minority party can’t pass a bill, can’t stop a president from acting rashly, can’t even launch an investigation or hold an official hearing.
But that doesn’t mean Democrats have no leverage at all.
The most effective opposition to Trump’s onslaught has come from state attorneys general, who won court rulings halting the president’s freeze on most federal funding and blocking his attempt to abolish birthright citizenship.
Judges normally don’t allow members of Congress to sue the president. But Democrats in Congress can still try to rally public opinion.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) joined protests outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency she designed and Trump wants to abolish. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), in Silicon Valley, tackled Musk on X, telling the tech mogul he has no right to block funds that Congress has approved. (Musk replied, “Don’t be a d—.”)
Dozens of Democratic representatives, including Khanna, Laura Friedman of Glendale, Ted Lieu of Torrance and Linda T. Sánchez of Whittier, held telephone town meetings to channel constituents’ anger toward more effective advocacy.
“Calling congressional offices is easy,” Khanna told me last week. “What we need is more storytelling. … We need real working-class and middle-class folks to explain how these illegal actions are hurting their families — what it means when Trump cuts off funding for children’s cancer research or school lunches or Head Start.”
Those concrete examples of hardship are what could sway public opinion: “That’s what turned Trump during the mass deportations [during his first term] — the brutal stories about family separation. We need to tell those stories.”
“That’s more effective than politicians standing in front of a building,” he added.
He’s right about the Democrats’ opportunity amid the ruins. Polls have found that most Americans support Trump’s desire to cut federal spending — but most, except for Trump voters, still oppose cuts to health and education.
There’s also one area where congressional Democrats will soon have direct leverage: the coming battle over government spending.
The current stopgap measure funding federal operations runs through March 14. If Congress doesn’t act before then, a government shutdown could occur.
In recent years, the two parties have often worked out compromise deals to pass spending bills. But Musk’s rampage appears to have stiffened Democrats’ opposition.
“This is not the time for acquiescence,” Khanna said. “We will not give a single Democratic vote unless Trump guarantees with an ironclad contract that he will spend what Congress appropriates.”
Schumer said Senate Democrats will still seek bipartisan compromise — but that the price will be “undoing lots of the many things that [Trump and Musk] are doing.”
That would be a start, but still only a stopgap. The only way Congress can effectively stop Trump from dismantling the federal government is to retake control of the House of Representatives or the Senate in the 2026 midterm election. (The Senate appears beyond reach, but the GOP margin in the House is a razor-thin three seats.)
In effect, Khanna and other Democrats are hoping to start the 2026 midterm campaign early, by convincing swing voters to vote Democratic to provide a check on Trump and Musk.
That won’t be easy for a party that just lost a presidential election. In exit polls during November’s presidential election, for the first time in almost half a century, more voters identified themselves as Republicans than as Democrats.
Not surprisingly, Democratic politicians and activists have disagreed over the lessons of defeat and dwindling support from working-class Americans, including Latino and Black voters: Do they need a new message, or merely a different messenger? Should they move toward the center, or further to the left?
Such debates have roiled Democrats for decades — and they usually aren’t resolved until the party chooses its next presidential nominee, more than three years from now.
Last week, the Democrats’ leaders in Congress, prodded by their voters, belatedly recognized that they’re facing a more immediate crisis.
They already knew — or at least, they said they knew — that they were in a fight for the survival of democracy. Now they’ve finally begun to act like it.
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