‘Peace in Our Time’ Schumer Proved He’s Not the Leader We Need to Save Our Democracy

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had one job: to stand between President Donald Trump and the complete dismantling of American democracy. Instead, he caved—again—handing Trump the power he craved without a fight, without a demand, without even a moment of real resistance. With every cowardly compromise, Schumer isn’t just failing Democrats—he’s enabling an autocrat in real time.

The question most Democrats want to ask of Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate appears to be, “How’s that ‘keeping the government open to hold Trump accountable’ thing working out for you?”

Everything Trump does now going forward, when people or the press complain, he will say was authorized by “bipartisan legislation” with “the full support of the Senate Democrats.”

Democrats in the Senate must stop playing defense, call out the authoritarian threat by name, use government shutdowns and the debt ceiling as leverage, and put democracy at the center of very negotiation.

In fact, just hours after Schumer and a handful of timid Senate Democrats voted to pass Trump’s Enabling Acts of 2025 legislation, the president issued an executive order gifting Russian President Vladimir Putin with the gutting of the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution.

He then assaulted civil service workers by shutting down the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and attacked women and Black people by shutting down the Minority Business Development Agency, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, and the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.

Meanwhile, the House and Senate are both in recess: Congress is shut down, but Trump sure isn’t. Thanks, Chuck.

And this cave-in to the Mango Mussolini has Democratic voters so furious they’re reconsidering donations and even voting in 2026.

Eight years ago, as Trump was starting his first term, NBC News reported that 59% of Democratic voters told pollsters they wanted Democrats in Congress to make compromises with Trump, and only a third (33%) said they should “stick to their positions even if that means not being able to get things done in Washington.”

But that was eight years ago (and apparently the era in which Schumer is still living). Today, Democratic voters have a completely different message for their elected representatives: Fight like hell!

Fully 65% of Democrats say even if it means shutting down the government, their representatives and senators should stick to their guns and fight on both issues and principles; only 32% still want Democrats to compromise with Republicans.

The result of Schumer’s caving in to the GOP is now a shocking 27% approval level for the Democratic Party.

Democratic voters get what Sens. Schumer, Kirsten Gilibrand (D-N.Y.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Schatz (D-Hawaii), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Angus King (I-Maine) did, and they hate it. Those senators had seen this GOP strategy coming ever since the election was called back in November, and they never bothered to inform Americans about what Republicans were up to.

As a result, Trump now has massively more power than he did last week, and Democrats won’t have another chance to force compromise or even stop him until this summer—probably late June—when the ability of the federal government to move money around collides with the debt ceiling (which we hit this past weekend).

Republicans are already planning to punk Schumer and his “peace-in-our-time” colleagues again. And it sure appears that Democrats have already ceded the rhetorical field to them by not letting Americans know—in a way as unmistakable as were the Tea Party protests against former President Barack Obama adding a Medicare buy-in to Obamacare—about what the stakes and Republican plan will be.

As a result, Indivisible, arguably the most powerful and influential Democratic group in the nation, just openly called for Chuck Schumer to step down:

“After weeks of constituents demanding that Democrats use this rare, precious point of leverage on the government funding bill, Schumer did the opposite,” co-executive director Ezra Levin wrote. “He led the charge to wave the white flag of surrender. But Indivisible has no intention of surrendering to Trump, Elon Musk, and congressional Republicans.”

Leadership of the group reached out to their 1,600 local Indivisible groups nationwide with two emergency meetings; 82% of group leaders in New York state (Schumer’s state) and 91% of Indivisible leaders nationwide voted to demand Schumer step down from his position as Senate minority leader.

“We thank him for his service,” the Indivisible press release says, “but we need new leadership in this moment and we understand to get there we need a chorus of support for change… Our democracy is in danger. The path ahead will be hard. Indivisibles are ready to do the work—it’s time for a Senate Democratic leader who is too.”

American political observers who’ve been wondering for years what Putin has on Trump are beginning to alter their perspective, based on how he’s ignoring court orders, using the Justice Department as his own instrument for revenge, and crushing any Republican who dares speak up or stand up against him.

Instead of fearing Putin, there’s a growing consensus that Trump simply sees Putin as his role model, a situation that’s actually even more dangerous.

He, too, lusts for absolute, unquestioned power in a major nation, democracy be damned. He’s already taking steps to enrich his friends and imprison his enemies, regardless of the legality of either. He’s laying the foundation to shut up or break any opposition, be it in the media, in Congress, or in the streets.

This is how democracies die, from the end of the Roman republic to Germany in the 1930s to modern-day Russia and Hungary. In every case, there were opponents of the wannabe dictator who tried to warn the people, and in each of those cases they were ignored (even though they reflected majority public opinion).

Both Russia and Hungary show how democracies don’t collapse overnight—they erode step by step. Institutions are undermined, dissent is crushed, elections are rigged, and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a corrupt elite. Once these three pillars—governance, civil liberties, and economic fairness—are dismantled, reversing the slide into tyranny becomes increasingly difficult.

Last week, Trump snatched three students from their homes and is detaining them—in defiance of our nation’s First Amendment—pending deportation simply because they said things that pissed off him and his fellow criminally corrupt autocrat, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He’s been in defiance of multiple court orders to restore funding and hiring to federal agencies, and just defied a federal judge who ordered his deportation planes to turn around in midair (they didn’t).

And now his Justice Department is investigating green organizations like Habitat for Humanity (having frozen their checking account) as well as people involved in movements like Black Lives Matter. It’s just a matter of time before they go after groups like Indivisible and FiftyFifty.one, commentators on TV (he said MSNBC and CNN are “illegal” on Friday), and writers on Substack (they’ve already sued Jim Stewartson for over $1 million).

Trump is punishing prosecutors for investigating his crimes, politically destroying Republicans who dared challenge him, and trashing American media and allies who don’t suck up to him sufficiently. His cabinet meetings resemble something out of North Korea (or the old Apprentice show), with his underlings engaging in effusive, slobbering, over-the-top praise of Dear Leader’s brilliance, charisma, and manliness.

He is, in other words, following Putin’s template from the late 1990s and early 2000s as if it were a checklist. Which is, in part, why Schumer’s betrayal was so destructive, both to the Democratic Party and the country.

The U.S. still has time to rescue our democracy, but only if our elected Democrats will explicitly recognize the warning signs and act decisively.

Schumer and his colleagues could have demanded Republicans fund election security (Trump just shut down that agency), reinstate ethics laws, get big money (Elon Musk, et al) out of politics, expose disinformation in media and social media (Trump shut that agency down, too), and restore accountability for the traitors who killed three police officers and smeared literal shit all over the offices of Democrats in the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Even if he got none of it, the demands and negotiations would have gotten all of them into the media.

Instead, Schumer gave it all away. He gave Trump exactly what he wanted, without even the smallest glimmer of a fight.

This is no way to run a political party or the Democratic faction in the Senate.

It’s time for new leadership that understands how communication works in the 21st century, is committed to defeating Trump and Trumpism, and can effectively tour the media and the country to galvanize the people.

Democratic decline doesn’t spontaneously stop itself; it must be fought tooth-and-nail at every level. Every time Democrats hand Republicans a win without even exacting a symbolic concession, it strengthens the GOP’s hand both in public opinion and future negotiations.

While Democrats play by the old rules, Republicans have fully abandoned them, and, so far, they’ve suffered no consequence whatever for attacking our democracy. They won’t stop until it’s too late to prevent the authoritarian slide.

Democrats in the Senate must stop playing defense, call out the authoritarian threat by name, use government shutdowns and the debt ceiling as leverage, and put democracy at the center of very negotiation. Every budget fight, every bill, every debate must include protections for our democracy.

It’s too late to screw around any more; Vladimir Putin, fossil fuel billionaires, and their neofascist and white male supremacist buddies have declared open war on our democracy, and we need a warrior, not a backroom dealer, at the front of our movement if we are to rescue this nation.

There is no more room for weak leadership, no more time for calculated political inaction. Schumer must go, and Democrats must replace him with a leader who understands the existential stakes of this moment.

If we don’t mobilize now—if we don’t demand real resistance—we won’t just lose another election. We’ll lose our democracy.