Standing on the Senate floor, Adam Schiff turned to Republicans and delivered a warning about their allegiance to President Donald Trump.
“He will not change, and you know it,” the California Democrat said, rattling off a list of Trump’s unprecedented, controversial actions, before again turning toward the Senate GOP. “He has not changed. He will not change. He has made that clear himself.”
That was six years ago Tuesday, when Schiff was still in the House, leading the first Trump impeachment trial. On Thursday, six years to the day that the Senate acquitted Trump on charges of withholding arms funds from Ukraine, Schiff said the government is an even more dire place.
“He wasn’t going to change, and he hasn’t. The only thing that has changed is the Supreme Court has now given him immunity to engage in criminal acts and a Republican Congress that, even then was deferential to him, has now become his almost complete enabler,” Schiff said during a 30-minute interview in his Senate office on Thursday.
In many ways, Schiff, 65, perfectly represents the bifurcated nature of being a Democrat in the age of Trump.
As one of his party’s best known figures, Schiff spends a great deal of time and energy sounding the alarm about presidential rhetoric and actions that he believes are a danger to democracy. As an elected official, Schiff also is focused on delivering for constituents, and must complete the same routine work senators have been doing for centuries. All elected Democrats are in the same boat: They are simultaneously attempting to tell Americans that something is off with their government, and trying to keep conducting business as normal.
Schiff described the strange duality of his role as “doing everything possible to deliver for Californians, and at the same time do everything possible to protect Californians from the wrath of this administration.”
The senator has gone from representing fewer than 800,000 mostly liberal Angelenos to now representing more than 40 million constituents. California is such a big state that only Texas and Florida provided more votes for Trump, narrowly, than the 6.1 million Californians who supported him in 2024.
In his new role, Schiff has to work with administration officials and other Republicans on key projects, such as saving a couple rural hospitals and fighting to keep open Department of Agriculture offices in remote parts of the state.
He sought out an assignment on the Senate Agriculture Committee, becoming the first Californian on that panel since the 1980s. It’s forced him to learn about specialty crops (like California’s fruits and vegetables) versus row crops (soybeans in the Midwest). He now travels up and down the state to farm bureau meetings, often poking fun at being a newcomer to their industry.
“In my former urban-suburban district, the only agriculture we had was of the illegal variety,” he recalled telling one group.
He felt some measure of victory when one Trump-supporting farmer paid him a compliment: “I don’t know why the president calls you ‘watermelon head’, you have a perfectly normal-sized head.”
When it comes to national issues, Schiff, with 24 years served in the House, has become the unofficial senior partner for a half-dozen freshman Senate Democrats who are the leading edge of generational change inside their caucus. Some won their races positioning themselves toward the political center, but these new Democrats are pushing for more aggressive approaches to confronting the administration than their more tradition bound colleagues.
They aren’t just thinking about legislative strategy or what to say on the Senate floor. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) has traveled to political battlegrounds touting his message about how to win Hispanic voters in states that Trump won. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) joined five other Democrats in a video reminding military members that they don’t have to obey illegal orders, prompting a federal investigation.
And Schiff has had his own a direct confrontation with Trump this term. In mid-July, Trump told reporters that Schiff was a “low life” and raised questions about possible mortgage fraud on his home in Maryland, an accusation that prompted a review by the state’s U.S. attorney’s office. Schiff has denied any wrongdoing and opened a legal-defense fund while retaining Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for Manhattan during the Obama administration.
By late November, investigators had begun questioning witnesses about the tactics of Trump officialsadvocating for the Schiff investigation, an unusual turn of events. One of those officials, Ed Martin, was stripped of most of his duties at the Justice Department in recent days.
As part of his efforts to serve as a check on the Trump administration, Schiff is in early talks with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) to create an ad hoc group to oversee “our most important responsibility”: ensuring the November midterm elections are held in a fair manner. Schiff served in a similar group with three House Democrats ahead of the 2020 elections, creating war-game-like scenarios.
“We came up with about a thousand things that could go wrong, except the one that did. None of us anticipated a mass, violent attack on the Capitol,” Schiff said.
Going forward, Schiff said, Democrats can’t plan to rely on the courts and or parliamentary procedure in Congress to achieve their goals. The only real path to success can come through clearly winning elections, he said. “The most important thing for us to do is on the political side, and that is to make sure that we have the largest margins of victory possible.”
While other freshman Democrats, such as Gallego and Slotkin, have been mentioned for potential national office, Schiff appears to be settling into the Senate. And with his state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a potential front-runner for the 2028 nomination, Schiff could find it difficult to attempt a presidential run until next decade, when he would be well into his 70s. That could be a difficult proposition for a party that has buyer’s remorse over its last septuagenarian presidential figure.
Instead, his long-term legacy might be defined by how Trump is remembered.
In his 2020 closing argument, Schiff began with a metaphor — “it is midnight in Washington” — that he repeated in the 25-minute speech. He now believes he got that wrong.
In the six years since, Trump refused to accept he lost the 2020 election and spurred on the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack; he was indicted four times in state and local courts; the Supreme Court ruled against most of those indictments; Trump was shot at in the 2024 campaign and went on to win every swing state; he pardoned those convicted of crimes for the Capitol attack on his first day in office.
Trump’s first year back in power was, well, eventful — and he still has nearly three full years left in office.
“If I was going to go back in time to give that speech, I probably would have said, it’s about a quarter past nine. There was a lot more time to pass before we get to the darkest hour of the day,” he said.
Schiff is hopeful, however. He said Thursday that Americans voted Trump back into power “because they were struggling. They were working harder than ever. And they could barely get by. And the Democratic Party had come to be viewed as the party of a status quo. They found the status quo was deeply unsatisfactory.”
Now that Trump is the status quo, Schiff believes that the 2026 midterms will be a different story.
“It will be a profound swing of the pendulum. And I think the voters will do what the members of Congress will not, and that is they will put a constraint on the president,” he said.
The post Adam Schiff is a leader of Democrats’ opposition to Trump. He also has to govern. appeared first on Washington Post.
