Washington – Once it was expected that the first weeks of a president in office were a “honeymoon”, a pleasant and pleasant period of bipartisanship and good feeling.
President Trump's first four weeks have been a Blitzkrieg, a furious assault on federal agencies that was chosen to administer.
Trump and his shock troops, led by Elon Musk, have crossed the federal bureaucracy, abruptly frozenly freezing billions in expenses already crazy, urging thousands of public officials to quit smoking and threatening to “eliminate” the entire agencies.
The Democrats in Congress, many of whom helped build these agencies, seemed paralyzed by surprise, not by Trump's zeal to dismantle the bureaucracy, but for the speed and audacity of their tactics, many of which seemed illegal.
Before the inauguration of Trump, some had sincerely offered to work cooperatively with Musk to prepare a plan for the gradual reform of the Government.
Then, others voted politely to confirm Trump cabinet members when the honeymoon became a dystopian nightmare.
And some expressed what sounded like defeatism. “What leverage do we have?” Asked the minority leader of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries (DN.Y.). “They control the camera, the Senate and the Presidency. It is his government. “
It was not until last week, after the voters of the angry city flooded their rumbar boards, the leaders of the party congress rushed to put themselves in front of their base.
“They want us to defeat Trump and stop this S,” said Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (DN.Y.) to New York Times. “And that's what we are doing.”
Schumer began orderly ordering the Senate Democrats to stop voting for Trump's nominees, a mostly symbolic action, since the republican majority still confirmed the last one who has come to vote.
In the house, Jeffries appointed a “fast -response working group” to counteract the Trump monster. In its first week of existence, the task force designated another working group (in litigation) and urged the representatives to celebrate municipalities, responses that did not seem quick or combative.
To be fair, Jeffries were right in a narrow sense: Democrats have little leverage, when it comes to legislation. A minority party cannot approve a bill, cannot prevent a president from acting precisely, cannot even initiate an investigation or hold an official hearing.
But that does not mean that Democrats do not have leverage at all.
The most effective opposition to Trump's attack comes from state general prosecutors, who gained judicial decisions stopping the president's freezing in most federal funds and blocking his attempt to abolish the citizenship of birth law.
Judges normally do not allow the members of Congress to demand the president. But Democrats in Congress can still try to gather public opinion.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) Joined the protests outside the consumer financial protection office, an agency she designed and Trump wants to abolish. The representative RO Khanna (D-Fremont), in Silicon Valley, approached Musk in X, telling the technology of the technology that he has no right to block funds that Congress has approved. (Musk replied: “Don't be ad.”)
Dozens of Democratic representatives, including Khanna, Laura Friedman de Glendale, Ted Leaus de Torrance and Linda T. Sánchez de Whittier, celebrated city telephone meetings to channel the anger of the components towards the most effective defense.
“Calling Congress offices is easy,” Khanna told me last week. “What we need is more storytelling. … We need working class and middle class to explain how these illegal actions are harming their families, which means when Trump reduces funds for children's cancer research or school lunches or head. ”
Those concrete examples of difficulties are what could influence public opinion: “That is what made Trump during mass deportations [during his first term] – Brutal stories about family separation. We need to tell those stories. “
“That is more effective than politicians standing in front of a building,” he added.
He is right about the opportunity of the Democrats in the midst of the ruins. Surveys have discovered that most Americans support Trump's desire to reduce federal expenditure, but most, with the exception of Trump's voters, he still opposes the cuts to health and education.
There is also an area in which Democrats of Congress will soon have direct leverage: the next battle for government spending.
The current measure of financing from the Stopgap measure extends until March 14. If Congress does not act before that, a government closure could occur.
In recent years, the two parties have often resolved commitment agreements to approve spending invoices. But Musk's uproar seems to have hardened the opposition of the Democrats.
“This is not the moment of acquiescence,” Khanna said. “We will not give a single democratic vote unless Trump guarantees with an Ironclad contract that will spend what Congress appropriates.”
Schumer said Senate Democrats will still look for a bipartisan commitment, but that the price will be “to undo many of the many things that [Trump and Musk] They are doing. “
That would be a beginning, but still just a stopgap. The only way in which Congress can prevent Trump from dismantling the federal government is Republican party in the camera is three thin shaving seats).
Indeed, Khanna and other Democrats hope to start the mid -2026 period campaign early, convincing Swing voters to vote for democrats to give control over Trump and Musk.
That will not be easy for a party that has just lost a presidential election. In departure surveys during the November presidential elections, for the first time in almost half a century, more voters identified themselves as Republicans than Democrats.
It is not surprising that democratic politicians and activists do not disagree on the lessons of defeat and the decrease in the support of working -class Americans, including Latin and black voters: do they need a new message or simply a different messenger? Should they move towards the center or more to the left?
Such debates have discarded the Democrats for decades, and they are generally not resolved until the party chooses their next presidential candidate, in more than three years from now on.
Last week, the leaders of the Democrats in Congress, pushed by their voters, recognized that they face a more immediate crisis.
They already knew, or at least, they said they knew, that they were in a struggle for the survival of democracy. Now they have finally started acting like this.
