How Outrage at Elon Musk Is Helping Democrats Fight Back

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For the first time in weeks, it looks like Democrats are summoning something passing for a plan to counter the unapologetic chaos radiating from the reinstalled administration of President Donald Trump.

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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has laid out a 10-step plan for slowing down Trump. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii says he will force Republicans to waste valuable floor time on State Department nominations by attaching blanket holds to all of them. First-term Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, a Bidenesque pragmatist of the first order, declared flatly that she was a no on all Trump nominees going forward, a gutsy move that signaled even the most centrist of lawmakers were nearing the end of their patience. And, among Democratic strategists, there is a not-even-subtle chatter about recruiting candidates for districts laden with federal workers, including four where Republican incumbents have more than 25,000 feds underfoot. There are also three Republicans representing three districts that went blue in the 2024 presidential campaign. Nothing spurs a conversion like a potential shift in power.

Symbolic? Maybe. Effective? Well, it’s better than nothing.

The proof-of-life moment for Democrats comes as Trump’s third week begins with the same fury as the last two. The difference now may be Trump’s new hatchet man, Elon Musk, stepping to the front of the stage, as he gleefully remakes government as a shadow of itself. In response, a feisty pushback has finally started to take hold, replacing prop-driven press conferences with a rallying cry for voters to pay attention to what is unfolding with breakneck velocity. Democrats may not have the votes, Trump may have an above-water net approval rating, and the rank-and-file liberal base is bluntly exhausted, but nothing is permanent in politics.

That’s not to say any of this gnashing is going to actually result in anything. Two of Trump’s most aggressively trolly nominees, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cleared their committee votes on Tuesday. Despite raising serious misgivings among even some conservatives, that pair now heads to full confirmation votes for gigs running the nation’s spy network and health systems. Similarly, Kash Patel seems to remain on a glide path to take over the FBI.

Outside of marquee personnel choices, widespread disruption across the federal government seems inevitable. Trump is close to finalizing his legally questionable plans to shutter the Education Department. A consumer-protection bureau is on borrowed time after Trump canned its chief over the weekend. Anyone who touched politically sensitive cases at the FBI now expects to be next in the purge, following Justice Department skeptics out the door. Trump has already dispatched just about everyone in the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

It’s why, despite some signs of fight, some Democrats remain utterly despondent.

But the reining emotion was anger on Monday, as a bustling crowd of hundreds listened to Democrats like Reps. Gerry Connolly of Virginia and Jamie Raskin of Maryland—both representing communities with outsized shares of feds—outside the shuttered headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development, not far from the White House.

“Elon Musk may get to be dictator of Tesla, and he may try to play dictator here in Washington. D.C., but he doesn’t get to shut down the Agency for International Development,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen of fed-heavy Maryland said. (A similar such confrontation played out on Tuesday at Treasury headquarters, where a crowd led by more than a dozen Democrats in Congress were rebuffed from entering the building where Musk’s DOGE team has raised alarm bells by gaining access to the department’s payments system.)

Back at the Capitol, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a member of the Democratic Leadership team, threw all her Musk messaging into one blast: “Let’s not mince words here. An unelected, unaccountable billionaire with expansive conflicts of interest, deep ties to China, and an indiscreet ax to grind against perceived enemies is hijacking our nation’s most sensitive financial data systems and its checkbook so that he can illegally block funds to our constituents based on the slightest whim or wildest conspiracy.”

Musk may have finally got Democrats fired up, but “All Things Elon” isn’t a durable messaging plan. Banking on the public to rally against a billionaire and his buddies proved a losing strategy in 2016 and 2024 alike. Beyond that, Musk is not accountable to anyone except for Trump, and the President seems to like what Musk is unleashing.

That’s not that there are no ideas to push Trump and his Republican allies to shift away from some of the more dizzying ideas. A scuttled plan to pause federal spending got heavy rejections from courts. FBI agents are trying to block the release of a list of those involved in the Trump legal sagas. A legal challenge to Trump’s anti-trans policies is moving ahead on a separate track. And two top Senators are asking Congress’ watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, to open an investigation involving Musk and his access to some of the most sensitive government spending records. 

Back at USAID HQ on Monday, Schatz, the Hawaii Democrat who is using the threat of a blanket hold on State Department nominees, signaled more such efforts were emerging.

“A stable world means a stable America. In the last 10 days Donald Trump has done more to destroy things across the planet than perhaps any other President in recent memory,” said Schatz, the Hawaii Democrat who is using the threat of a blanket hold on State Department nominees. “They are counting on some sense of inevitability. This is a bluff. It is a harmful, dangerous, killer bluff. But they don’t have the law on their side.”

The visit was meant as a pick-me-up message to dislodged U.S. AID workers and their allies across government. But it’s one thing to hold optimism and another to carry wins.

In the crowd, current and former U.S. AID staffers were trying to summon hope as they listened to lawmakers pledge to get them back to their desks. One woman who would have celebrated her sixth anniversary in the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance on Tuesday but declined to give her name for fear of retaliation, said her email had been shut down and her access to her desk denied. Like so much of the U.S. AID workforce, she got the note to stay home but showed up anyway. “Honestly, it’s very upsetting at the moment,” she said. “We are worried less about our jobs than programs that people really need. They’re the ones who will suffer.”

Asked about the prospects of Democrats being able to count on Republicans’ traditional support for the soft-power programs, this woman was candid. “I used to work on the Hill so I don’t have much hope,” she said.

A former U.S. AID employee, who also declined to give his name for fear of retribution, was similarly sanguine—viewing the rally as part of a last-gasp performance from a party out of power for at least the next two years. “There’s only so much Democrats can do,” he said as he walked from the rally. “We have to be realistic.”

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