Democratic Party Leaders Are Asleep at the Wheel

For years, prominent Democrats warned us against Elon Musk and the latent authoritarianism of Donald Trump. But now that these two billionaires have created a constitutional crisis as they thumb their noses at democracy and lay waste to the government, the leadership of the supposed opposition party is flailing.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries pathetically unveiled a new nickname for Trump this week: “Captain Chaos.” People across the political spectrum cringed. As one conservative New York City councilwoman asked, “Why do they insist on making him sound cool?” The moment, to many, evoked Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated moniker “Dangerous Donald.”

Like his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer, Jeffries seems entirely unequal to this moment. He has also started a — wait for it — “task force” on Trump and Musk’s destructive and illegal assaults on the federal government and its employees. In defense of this project, it does involve Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, one of the few House Democrats who does seem to be fighting tirelessly to expose and prevent the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destruction. But the term “task force” almost seems deliberately chosen to sound pathetic and useless.

Earlier this month, Jeffries whined, “What leverage do we have?” Even respectable voices in the mainstream media are losing patience with him: a Bloomberg opinion headline Friday read, “Hakeem Jeffries needs to get it together.”

“It’s their government,” Jeffries has said of the Republicans. No, Hakeem, it is our government. The government belongs to the people, not to the unelected Elon Musk. Trump was elected president, but that does not make him “king,” as he proclaimed himself the other day on Truth Social when announcing the end of New York City’s hard-fought congestion pricing policy.

This Democratic weakness is particularly catastrophic given that people are ready to support opposition to Trump.

Let’s look at his “ratings,” a metric that the former reality star is particularly obsessed with. Throughout this month, according to a range of opinion polls, voters have disapproved of Trump in proportions ranging from 42 percent to a whopping (and historic) 54 percent.

Democratic voters extend that dissatisfaction to their own party. According to a recent CNN poll, a large majority, 73 percent, of Democratic-leaning voters feel that Democrats in Congress are doing too little to oppose Trump. And the approval rating of Congress itself is at an all-time low, suggesting that voters would also like to see some opposition from Trump’s own party too.

The Democratic leaders’ inaction is particularly bewildering in the context of a growing opposition movement.

All over the country, federal workers organized by the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), a new group that has been preparing for months for this onslaught, Jenny Brown has reported for Labor Notes, have been protesting Trump and Musk’s massive and in many cases illegal firings. Musk has begun the process of firing 200,000 federal workers, and an estimated 20,000 have already been dismissed. The government functions affected include food safety, environmental enforcement, veterans affairs, consumer financial protection, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and much more.

On Wednesday, such workers took part in a nationwide day of action, gathering in over thirty cities for “Save Our Services” rallies, including in Boise, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. Hundreds rallied in front of the Department of Health and Human Services, objecting to recent firings and their impacts on such necessary public goods as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease research. Federal workers have also been targeting Tesla showrooms, from Red Hook, Brooklyn to San Francisco, to highlight the unelected and especially unpopular critical role of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, in the rampage.

The federal workers’ resistance is growing and is supported by citizenry outside the government workforce, organized by groups like Indivisible, who don’t want to see billionaire Musk eviscerating the numerous vital services that the government provides, as well as more conservative people who are showing up in American Revolution costumes. All over the country, on Presidents’ Day, “No Kings” protests were unified in opposition to the Trump-Musk power grab.

Rather than taking these protests as a sign of the growing grassroots opposition to Trump and a mandate to do everything they can to stand up to him, Jeffries and others in the Democratic leadership have simply been annoyed by the resistance, according to an Axios article describing them as “pissed” and “very frustrated” with the activists.

Not all Democratic leaders have been asleep at the wheel. Although New York governor Kathy Hochul has refused to remove compromised New York City mayor Eric Adams from office, she has been standing up for the city’s independence in resisting Trump’s efforts to dismantle congestion pricing. Senator Chris Van Hollen and others have been showing up to the protests.

But the Democratic Party leadership in Washington appears hellbent on proving that they’re the only federal workers who really don’t deserve their jobs.