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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will both attend the New York State breakfast.

Schumer tries to guide Dems out of the wilderness

The last few months have been rough for Democrats. Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris. Republicans took control of the Senate and held onto the House, giving them total control of Washington. And it was a group of Democrats who cast the deciding votes that gave Trump an early legislative win on immigration.

In just 10 days in office, Trump is pumping out executive orders and statements at breakneck speed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer finds himself under pressure from his own senators and outside Capitol Hill — including Democratic governors — to combat Trump at every turn. He’s being hit for not using every legislative procedure to slow down Trump’s nominees.

Schumer must balance these demands from the anti-Trump left — where a lot of donations and volunteers come from — with his need to support moderates and a tough 2026 Senate map.

But Trump’s federal aid freeze this week, which backfired badly, may have given Democrats a blueprint for countering Republicans moving forward.

“We started Jan. 20 really down in the dumps,” Schumer told us in an interview. “Our constituency has really been given a lift by our example… We knew that [Trump] had really screwed up. And we just pounced.”

Vote on Vought: Schumer prefers zeroing in on a handful of problematic nominees rather than blanket opposition to all of them. Schumer’s strategy is to focus on Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for OMB director and a key architect of Project 2025. Democrats boycotted Vought’s Budget Committee vote Thursday and held a press conference instead.

“We’re not going to vote no on [all of them] — some people get up there and say, ‘vote no on everybody!’ No,” Schumer said. “This fight is over the executive orders — this is at the heart of what they want to do.”

Democrats see Vought as the one pulling the strings on key elements of Trump’s agenda. And they believe that once he’s confirmed, nearly every dispute will run through Vought. Vought’s nomination is expected on the Senate floor as soon as next week.

“He is just so bad,” Schumer said of Vought. “He’s going to be a focus for a very long time. And Trump is going to learn that he’s a liability — not as a person, as a symbol — for his policies. Already they’ve had to back off.”

Vought, though, isn’t widely known outside of Washington. And Democrats’ Project 2025-related messaging in last year’s election clearly didn’t resonate enough with voters.

But with the aid freeze, Senate Democrats undertook a coordinated messaging strategy. Schumer did several local TV interviews and urged his colleagues to do the same in order to “localize” the issue.

On the floor: Schumer was especially happy that Democrats banded together to filibuster a GOP-drafted Israel bill earlier this week after negotiations to tweak the measure collapsed. The legislation, which imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court, could still come back up. Schumer said he called the GOP’s bluff.

“We came to the conclusion that they’d rather have the issue than pass the bill. Until the end, they thought they’d get 10 Democrats,” Schumer said. “[But] it showed something way beyond ICC — that Democrats are not going to let them bully us and push us around.”

And it was much-needed. Schumer was getting grief a week ago from some rank-and-file Democrats over his hands-off approach on an immigration bill that split the party.

Schumer dismissed this as a “one-off,” noting some had already committed to backing it “because it was such a campaign issue.”

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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. Political ads courtesy of AdImpact.