What Did You Do in the Anti-Trump War, Daddy and Mama?

The outrage at Schumer personifies a much larger sense of anger and frustration.

I’ve never been much of a Chuck Schumer fan. Like all of New York’s Democratic senators since the financial deregulation of the 1970s and ’80s and the extirpation of Rockefeller Republicanism, Schumer has cultivated Wall Street as a major source of campaign contributions. In return, he’s successfully worked to secure such Wall Street absurdities as the tax exemption for carried interest, a loophole only a mega-financier could love. Most of the time, he personifies, and helps define, a generally liberal Democratic mainstream, but there are occasional glaring exceptions when some financial-sector income streams are up for Senate consideration.

I’m not surprised by the outrage that the Democratic base has shown toward Schumer for voting to extend government funding until September. His decision, as best I can discern, was tactical: a belief that the Trump/Musk axe would destroy even more essential services if it was left to the president’s discretion to decide which agencies to keep open than that axe is already destroying. But I suspect the intensity and breadth of that outrage came because Schumer put an identifiable human face on the failure of the entire American left and center-left to come up with a way to stop Trump’s war on America.

In Chuck’s fall, that is, sinned we all.

What’s strikingly clear is that, so far, the only source of resistance to Trump that has managed to stop, however temporarily, some aspects of Trump’s war has been the courts. Democratic governors and state legislatures can enact counter-policies to Trump’s, but in many cases, federal laws preempt the states’, and in other cases, federal funding is something the states rely upon.

Which means that there are precious few avenues through which the immense mass of non-MAGA Americans can effectively respond to the daily stream of outrages that Trump and Musk spew forth. To be sure, individual organizations are increasingly turning out some of their members to protest specific policies: federal employee unions, pro-immigrant groups, environmental organizations, scientists, health researchers, women’s and civil rights advocates, and so on. Few if any of these protests have rated front-page or prime-time coverage, nor reached a level where they constitute the kind of mass statement that the great civil rights or anti-war rallies once produced.

It’s time that they did. It’s time that they must.

Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect