The Weekend Democrats Went to War, Against Each Other (2025)

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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Over the past few days, a routine debate over government funding has exploded into an angry showdown over the Democratic Party’s identity in the Trump era and whether its current leadership is right for the moment. Today, I speak with my colleagues, Congressional reporter Catie Edmondson and national political correspondent Shane Goldmacher, about the weekend that rocked the Democratic Party.

It’s Monday, March 17.

Hey there, Catie.

Hey, Michael.

You have many options of how to spend your Sunday. Appreciate you spending it with us.

Thanks for having me.

So, Catie, pretty much from the moment that Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second term, there has been this low-grade debate playing out inside the Democratic Party about how to counter him and what Democrats can do and should do about his really aggressive strategy of firing thousands of government workers, shutting down agencies, circumventing Congress in the process.

And the question has been, when would that internal debate really come to a head and become a public battle? And the answer, it seems, is right now because it all really just became a public brawl over the past few days. And that all seems to revolve around the actions of the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York.

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, look, I think there was behind the scenes for weeks now a lot of quiet agonizing over how to counter the Trump administration, and that sort of quiet, agonizing turned into very public anger this week.

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And it all burst out into the open this week when Senator Chuck Schumer made a judgment call, essentially, about the best way to combat the Trump administration right now. And immediately, that decision faced blowback from all corners of the Democratic Party.

Who said, basically, we think you made the wrong call.

That’s right. As of now, there is at least one major liberal activist group off of Capitol Hill, Indivisible, that has called for Senator Schumer to step down as the party’s leader in the Senate.

And perhaps most interesting, at least to me, was you saw some dissension from his counterpart over in the House.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York was pressed multiple times at a news conference on Capitol Hill on Friday as to whether he still had confidence in Schumer as the Senate Minority Leader.

And Congressman Jeffries’ response each time was the same, which was to say —

— next question.

Right, a remarkable moment where basically the number two Democrat in Congress won’t say whether he supports the number one Senate Democrat. That’s a huge, huge deal.

It was a stunning moment, and it was really remarkable to see this very public fissure.

Well, tell us how we got to this moment in such a short period of time where Democrats are truly, it seems, at each other’s throat about the best way to operate in this first phase of the Trump administration.

So it starts with a fairly typical procedure up here on the Hill, which is we’re staring down another government funding deadline. Lawmakers need to pass something to ensure the government doesn’t shut down.

Right, we’ve only covered this, you and I, Katie., I don’t know, 10 times in the last four years, something like that?

Yeah, exactly, although this time, the script sort of flips, because, normally, what you and I are talking about is how these funding decisions pit Republican against Republican. But what happened here is actually the opposite is that for once, House Republicans were able to unite around this spending bill that Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled.

And the reason they were able to unite around this is sort of for two reasons. One is because it was an entirely Republican-written bill. Democrats had no input into what this bill looked like at all. But two is because a lot of them were saying, look, it would be bad for President Trump if the government shut down. Let’s ensure that he can continue the great work his administration is doing.

And that is actually what happened. House Republicans were able to pass this stopgap spending bill with, really, minimal drama on their side, which is, I think, a fact that shocked a lot of Democrats. And in fact, all Democrats except one vote against it because they want to show that they are standing up to President Trump and that they’re taking a principled stand.

Right, and normally, it’s Democrats who end up being needed. They end up being summoned to rescue these spending bills to avoid a shutdown. You’re saying in this case, suddenly they’re just kind of left off to the sidelines.

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And that infuriates a lot of Democrats. They actually fundamentally hate this bill. They say that this is a piece of legislation that doesn’t have the sort of narrow spending instructions that Congress normally gives the executive branch. And so the argument is, essentially, this bill creates a lot of slush funds for the administration to be able to use however they want.

Got it. In other words, it empowers the Trump administration at a moment where Democrats would like to do anything they can to disempower it.

And at a moment where Democratic members of Congress already feel that the executive branch is running absolute roughshod over Congressional spending prerogatives, yes.

Got it. So naturally, the bill then moves over to the Senate, where Republicans are in control, but not so much control that they can just pass a spending bill necessarily on their own.

That’s right. In order to get a final vote on the spending bill, Republicans need to be able to break a filibuster, which means if the bill is allowed to proceed, it’s going to require Democratic support.

Right. And based on everything you’ve said so far, I have to think that Senate Democrats are thinking to themselves, well, we can’t support this either.

Well, that is the early indication.

In fact, Senator Schumer, early in the week, comes out and says —

This is not something Democratic senators can support. Let’s try to draft some sort of bipartisan bill that we can all get behind.

But clearly, that’s something Republicans don’t want to do.

Mm-hmm.

And instead, what Democratic senators find themselves faced with is what many of them described to me as a really agonizing decision.

Mm, agonizing why?

So they’re faced with this dilemma, which path gives Trump the least amount of leverage? A lot of them, I think, viewed this as a moment to be able to use the little remaining power they have left in Congress in the minority to say, we’re going to shut the government down. We are not going to vote to allow Trump to continue the status quo. We are going to throw sand in the gears here. We will not lend our votes to support what you’re doing.

Right, just as the House had done, but without any real leverage.

That’s right. Now, the other option that senators are weighing is a lot of them are very concerned that if they do, in fact, vote to filibuster this bill, Democrats will be blamed for shutting the government down, which is something that we know voters hate. But there’s a deeper fear, which is that by shutting the government down, you actually empower the Trump administration even more.

How so?

Well, in a shutdown, the Trump administration, and specifically the Office of Management and Budget, which is run by a real conservative hardliner, gets to decide which federal workers are deemed essential and which are deemed nonessential. So there was a real fear by a number of Democratic senators that this could essentially lead to mass furloughs, could accelerate the mass layoffs we’ve been seeing of federal workers.

Mm, basically turbocharged DOGE.

Exactly. And there’s a second fear, which is if you shut the government down, how can you ever get it back open? And there’s a specific fear that under the Trump administration and with this Republican Congress, maybe they end up opening only the parts of government they like and letting the parts of government they don’t like remain permanently shut down.

In fact, Senate Democrats met three days in a row for these luncheons that dragged on, and you could actually hear sort of them debating, yelling, during these luncheons, because this was a truly difficult decision for so many of them. But it seems like the way that the room is leaning increasingly is that it is leaning toward a shutdown.

Right, and as organized as they are, they know that their leader, Chuck Schumer, has their back.

Well, Leader Schumer, in fact, on Thursday, at this luncheon, shocks many of his members when he stands up and makes the announcement that he is, in fact, reversing himself and has made the calculation that it is going to be better for Democrats to vote to support this legislation, to clear the way for this bill, that shutting down the government is a bad option for Democrats. For all of the reasons, Michael, that we talked about, it would actually empower the Trump administration.

And he also indicates that he has lined up enough support from other Democrats, of which he only needs a handful, to basically clear the way to make sure this bill can pass.

Right, this is a genuinely surprising moment. And this is when the anger that we have been referring to since the very beginning of this conversation really begins to explode.

This is the moment when a lot of Democratic heads explode.

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And there is just immediate fury.

If you remember, all House Democrats except one banded together, stayed united, to show that they were opposing this bill.

And then you have one high-profile House Democrat, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who goes on to CNN —

— and says essentially that Schumer is making a huge mistake.

And then you have Senate Democrats who essentially hear Schumer’s call and say, thank you very much, I will be voting against this bill, and post videos on social media saying that.

Basically saying in the most public way imaginable, I disagree with the Senate Democratic leader.

That’s right. And then you have the cherry on top, which is when Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader, comes back to Washington and gives that press conference in which he refuses to say whether or not he has confidence in Schumer’s leadership. By Friday evening, when Schumer actually has to take this vote out on the floor to allow this spending bill to pass, that, in fact, only nine other members of the Democratic caucus vote to join him.

Mm-hmm.

And so you have a very stark split screen in which a majority of his caucus actually votes to block the spending bill, votes against his decision.

Right, and when you put that together with the House, what you basically see is the majority of congressional Democrats, the vast majority of them, not doing what Chuck Schumer did, in fact, doing the opposite.

That’s right. And look, I do want to say in the Senate, just based off of some of the private conversations I was having with Democrats, I do think there were a number of them who — the old adage is vote no, hope yes, hoping that there would not be a shutdown, but knew that their constituents, their voters, wanted to see them putting up a good fight against Trump.

But I think the bottom line is, elsewhere in the Democratic Party, off of the Hill, over in the House, you see some real rage directed here at Senator Schumer. I can’t tell you how many Democratic lawmakers I’ve spoken to who have said that since the vote, they have had calls from their constituents saying, what are you doing? If this is how Trump’s government is going to run, we’d really rather you shut it down.

Hmm, all of which suggests that the Democratic base, and a fair number of Democratic lawmakers who voted against this, they wanted their party to take a stand here and are quite upset that at the last minute, at the direction of Senator Schumer, the party did not.

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, look, I think this is going to be the defining question for the Democratic Party in the next weeks and months to come. I don’t know how it plays out. But what I do know is that there is a very visceral, real level of anger from the Democratic base right now.

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It’s actually, I think, more akin to some of the moments we’ve seen in the past from the Republican grassroots.

Mm-hmm.

And so I think that’s in part why this is such a startling moment for Democratic officials. I mean, they’re not used to this from their voters, particularly on this issue. And I think they’re still trying to figure out exactly how to deal with it.

Well, Catie, thank you very much.

Thanks, Michael.

After the break, Shane Goldmacher on how this surge of anger from Democratic voters and lawmakers could change the Democratic Party. We’ll be right back.

Shane, happy Sunday.

Happy Sunday to you.

Shane, you’ve been watching everything that Catie Edmondson just described, especially the anger from Democratic voters with their leaders, which, as Katie just put it, is something we tend to associate much more with Republicans than Democratic voters. And you have a provocative thought about that and what it could potentially represent.

Yeah, it’s actually a question that I was down in Washington, DC, this week asking Democratic lawmakers and Democratic officials even before this shutdown fight exploded. And the question I was asking is whether the Democratic Party is facing its own Tea Party moment.

Well, just explain that, its own Tea Party movement.

For years and years, it’s been the Republican voters who have been angry. And they’ve been angry at their own party, and they’ve been angry at the Democratic Party. And for the first time in many years, Democrats are describing that same kind of anger. They’re saying that at their town halls, even in deep blue districts, voters are coming up upset and angry and wanting more — more fight, more action, more something. And the parallel is really the first year of Barack Obama’s first term.

Right, when the Tea Party actually emerged. Yeah, just take us back there because I think for this provocative question to really make sense, we’re going to need to be reminded of that history.

So Barack Obama wins.

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And the Democrats have then, just as the Republicans do now, complete control of the federal government —

— both chambers of commerce, and the White House. And the Republican voters were almost immediately angry.

They’re angry at having lost.

They’re angry at the scale of the defeat.

And then they’re angry at the Obama agenda.

Obama gets this massive stimulus package passed.

And they’re angry at how much of the agenda he’s enacting and how much Republicans are failing to stop it.

Right, to many Republicans, their leadership, especially in Congress, is feeling ineffectual, not up to the task of opposing this powerful president from the opposing party.

So you start to see this anger at public forums.

Republicans shouting down Democratic lawmakers about their agenda.

And real activism. And you see this anger and activism expressed in Republican primaries all across the country.

Mm-hmm.

— where outsider, younger, and angrier candidates are suddenly winning.

They’re beating the old guard of the Republican Party in ways that the party just didn’t expect. And this anger was changing the Republican Party from within. And one of the people elected in this changing of the guard of the Republican Party was Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. And if there’s one moment that crystallizes the Tea Party’s strategy during those years, it’s what Ted Cruz did in the fall of 2013.

Why?

Because this is when he pushed his Republican colleagues to shut down the federal government as a last ditch effort to stop Obamacare.

And it was clear at the time that Ted Cruz had no path to victory here, that Barack Obama was not going to sign a measure to unwind his signature achievement. But the tactic, it was to fight, it was to fight, and it was to mobilize that anger and say, I am out here with you. I am willing to have this fight, even if we can’t win.

And suddenly, you see Democrats in the same place. This last week, they were talking about using the exact same tool, shutting down the federal government without, necessarily, an end game, that the fight itself was worth having because if you didn’t have the fight, you weren’t actually speaking to where Democratic voters are.

Right, and so this explains why your provocative question isn’t necessarily that provocative. You’re seeing evidence, you’re saying, that the Democratic Party’s mindset, especially among a group of voters, has changed. And suddenly, they’re asking the question, should we be a party where fighting is the point, even if it means potentially shutting down the government in order to fight President Trump?

It’s anything to avoid the current status quo. And to be clear, this energy and this dynamic was there before this shutdown fight. And this split inside the Democratic Party, it sort of begins generationally. It’s the younger generation of Democratic officials who are expressing the greatest level of frustration. In the House of Representatives, there’s a private text messaging chain among Democrats who’ve served for five terms or fewer. That means they’ve only served in the post-Trump era. The only Republican Party that they have seen is the changed post-Tea Party Republican Party.

Right, the “fight, fight” Republican Party.

And they want to change the Democratic Party from within. And they’re looking to push out and defeat older Democrats in primaries, potentially, in open seats, and even on Capitol Hill. This actually began before Trump was sworn in. These obscure races to be the top Democrat on various policy committees — there were three more senior Democrats at the end of last year who were all ousted by younger lawmakers who said, we need a new face, a more engaged fighter. And they won.

Right.

And Trump’s arrival only accelerated that energy on Capitol Hill and on the campaign trail, where I’m already hearing about Congressional primary challenges on a generational basis in multiple states across the country.

Fascinating. But, of course, if we’re going to stick with the Tea Party model here of internal insurgency that we might start to see on the Democratic side, I want to reflect on the fact that the Tea Party’s overall message was profoundly antigovernment, right? It was, the government is too big. The government is too invasive.

And that’s not the Democratic Party’s brand. The Democratic Party’s brand is generally quite supportive of the government and of its workers. That’s partly why some Democrats were so alarmed by the idea of pushing the government into a shutdown over the past few days. That’s hard for a lot of Democrats to swallow. So how do these Democrats, who perhaps view the Tea Party as a model for change, reconcile that?

I think this younger generation of Democrats share something else in common, which is that they are experiencing a dimming of the American dream, that it is harder to buy a house, that it is harder to pay for child care, that they no longer believe that they or their children are going to have better futures than their parents. And they approach this with an urgency and a need to have a kind of agenda that is more proactive to solve those problems.

They want to see the Democratic Party not just fight harder, but propose bigger solutions that meet the kind of frustrations that voters have. The same anger at the system that helped bring about Donald Trump, they want to be able to tap into that anger and say, we’re not just for the status quo. We’re not just defending institutions. We want to rebuild them, and we have a very specific plan and vision to do it.

And frankly, they haven’t unified behind one yet. We’re talking about this as a hypothetical. But there is the germs of, we need bigger and bolder ideas. And it really is a genuine, open question inside the Democratic Party of which ideological wing will end up winning out to define what the party actually stands for.

So this is still pretty inchoate vision of a Democratic insurgency so far is, fight, fight, but not just fight for its own sake. Fight with an alternative Democratic agenda than what the existing Democratic leadership offers, and, I’m guessing, many of them believe the absence of which doomed President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the last election in which they were seen, the whole party was seen, as protectors of the status quo.

Yeah, the idea is, OK, Elon Musk and Donald Trump want to dismantle the Department of Education. So the Democratic Party doesn’t just want to defend the Department of Education. They need a proactive plan for what the Department of Education will actually do for you, for your children. They want a plan that says, we’re not just defending the Department of Education to exist because we’re for the bureaucracy, but a plan for how to make that bureaucracy actually work for people.

And in fact, after I wrote a story about this generational divide in the Democratic Party this week, the most common email I got from people was older readers saying, hey, wait a second, I’m pissed off too. And of course, there are old Democrats who have the same energy, and there are young Democrats who are more cautious. But in general, it’s this newer group of Democrats who would begin changing the party.

Shane, the reality is that the next Congressional primaries for Democrats that will reveal whether or not something like a Tea Party insurgency is happening within the party, they’re not for another year. And a lot can happen between now and then. And therefore, just to be transparent, it’s impossible for us to know whether we’re at the beginning of something really big happening in this party, just as it would have been really hard to predict that Obama’s election in 2008 and what he did in 2009, 2010, was going to lead to the birth of the Tea Party.

Absolutely. But what we do see here is the possibility of an inflection point. This spending fight is likely to be long forgotten in a sea of future spending fights and big changes that Donald Trump is making. But for Democrats who are already running or considering running in 2026, this does have the feeling of a potential moment where the party was galvanized to say, hey, the way the old guard of the party has been doing this, we don’t want that anymore.

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Yes, Chuck Schumer might have been painted into a losing corner, but we wanted the fight anyway.

Mm.

Chuck Schumer might have made a decision that was strategic, that was protecting his party for worse outcomes in the short-term or even the medium-term. But that action could have long-term consequences for the way the Democratic Party behaves far into the future.

Well, Shane, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you.

On Sunday, a new poll found that an overwhelming majority of Democrats want their party to fight President Trump. By a 2 to 1 margin, registered Democrats told NBC News that they want Democrats in Congress to stick with their positions, even if that creates gridlock in Washington, rather than make compromises with Trump.

We’ll be right back.

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Here’s what else you need to know today. The Trump administration has deported dozens of alleged Venezuelan gang members without a hearing, potentially in violation of an order over the weekend from a US federal judge. Trump sent the suspected gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the US to summarily expel people from countries at war with the US. But the US is not at war with Venezuela.

And on Saturday night, a federal judge ruled that the deportations were illegal and that any planes taking the suspects to El Salvador must be turned around and returned to the US. Yet it does not appear that any of the flights were in fact stopped.

And Trump has signed an executive order dismantling the agency that oversees Voice of America, which for decades has transmitted news into mostly authoritarian countries with no independent news media. Soon after, hundreds of journalists for Voice of America were put on leave, and many radio frequencies that carry its programming overseas began playing music instead of news.

Today’s episode was produced by Mooj Zadie and Nina Feldman, with help from Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Lexie Diao, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Niemisto, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.