Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is facing the biggest revolt from Democrats in years, but in a conversation with The Interview after his crucial vote supporting a Republican federal spending bill this past week, he tried to brush off questions about whether he should step aside. Democratic officials appeared stunned when Schumer did an about-face on the spending bill, arguing that the choice was the lesser of two evils. Schumer defended his decision in the second part of our wide-ranging interview, even as questions over his leadership by senior party officials continued.
Here are three takeaways from the shutdown portion of our conversation .
Schumer said that he made a “very, very difficult” decision to support the Republican bill in order to avert a government shutdown that, he said, President Trump and Elon Musk wanted. He called Trump and Musk “anti-government fanatics” and “nihilists.”
They want to shutter “agency after agency,” he said, which would create a situation far worse than the Republican bill. He continued:
While he accepted that there were “divisions” within his party around his vote, he insisted that he and his fellow Democrats have a respect for each other and that they are united in their fight against Trump.
Schumer reluctantly acknowledged that he and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who talk often, have not spoken since Schumer’s surprising vote, suggesting that there is a rupture between the two most senior Democrats in Congress.
Here is that portion of our exchange:
The divisions in the party about how to face down Donald Trump exploded into view with Schumer’s vote, placing his leadership into jeopardy.
In both conversations with me, Schumer made clear that, despite broad concerns from some that Democrats are operating with an old playbook, and specific concerns about his own leadership surrounding the shutdown vote, he’s still the right person to be Senate minority leader. In our first conversation, he said that he sees himself as “sort of like an orchestra leader,” and when pressed on this in our second conversation, he dismissed the idea that he wasn’t the man for the job, saying “We are a united and strong caucus fighting against Trump.”
Furious Democrats have even called for fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge Schumer in the next primary. When I pointed out that Schumer had been a leading voice in calls for Biden to step down, and asked if it was time for him to step down, he insisted that the Democrats were in a “spirited disagreement.”