After the election of President Trump, Homans relays, there was internal disagreement within the party on just how wide their members’ opposition to the new president should stretch. Ronald Klain, the former chief of staff to Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden, advocated blanket obstructionism termed the “Hundred-Day Fight Club”. Others, like party stalwart Rahm Emanuel, took a different tack. The disagreements played out during a gathering hosted by David Brock outside Miami the week of Trump’s inauguration.
Ever since, Democrats seem to have coalesced around Klain’s view—and quickly. The turnaround has been awkward, particularly for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Homans writes, anecdotally describing the New Yorker’s discomfort at a protest rally in Manhattan in late January:
Taking the microphone, Schumer led the crowd in an old standby of a chant — “A people united will never be divided!” — and, somewhat tentatively, raised his fist. A couple near where I was standing, next to the stage, started laughing. It was a strange thing to see: Schumer was at the barricades, but Schumer was not really a barricades kind of guy. “What we’re talking about here is life and death for so many people,” he intoned, and waved his arm in the direction of the Statue of Liberty, glinting in the distance over his shoulder. “What we’re talking about here is that beautiful lady in the harbor — and what America is all about.” Schumer’s presence at the rally suggested just how quickly, and definitively, the politics of the moment had been settled. In the week since the Women’s March, Trump’s executive orders had confirmed liberals’ worst fears of his intentions and the helplessness of congressional Democrats to stand in his way. And by the end of that week all four cabinet appointees under consideration — Mattis; Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly; Mike Pompeo, director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Nikki Haley, ambassador to the United Nations — sailed through their confirmation votes with no serious opposition. … “Chuck loves Trump! Chuck loves Trump!” the hecklers chanted. “Don’t vote for one of them!” a woman next to me yelled. After Schumer yielded the stage to Gillibrand — “She voted no!” another woman near me shouted approvingly — he started making his way through the crowd, right into what happened to be a particularly dense pocket of his detractors. “Put ’em up, everybody!” he said, grinning, offering his hands for high-fives. “Put ’em up for our immigrants!”
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