As President Trump pursued his strategy of “flooding the zone” this week with sweeping and legally dubious actions to reshape the government, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, responded by unleashing a media fire hose of his own.
After the administration’s directive to temporarily freeze trillions of dollars of federal spending, Mr. Schumer went on something close to a two-a-day diet of news conferences, supplemented by speeches on the Senate floor (he delivered eight), videos recorded for social media and news releases. And even so, frustrated Democratic governors pressed him to do much more.
In the House, the other Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, took a different approach. Always careful and calculating, Mr. Jeffries seemed to be channeling his longstanding personal motto, “Calm is an intentional decision.”
With the House in recess, Mr. Jeffries’s first move in response to the freeze was to blast out messaging materials to Democratic members, meet privately with other House leaders and then organize an emergency conference call for the following day during which Democrats could privately plot their strategy to challenge Mr. Trump’s pause.
But the frenetic pace of the Trump administration leaves little time for such deliberating; the freeze was rescinded even as Democrats were in the middle of discussing how best to respond.
The dueling strategies — one rushing to the microphone stand, the other focused on organizing behind the scenes — reflected a very real debate in the Democratic Party about how to counter an unbound president setting an unrelenting cadence of norm-shattering and potentially illegal actions. And it showed off two different temperaments and media strategies that Democratic leaders in Congress are employing as they adjust to a life where their main role will be to block and respond.
During an earlier private meeting two days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Jeffries told Democrats that while Mr. Trump’s approach was to “flood the zone,” their response had to be summed up in three words as well: “Message with discipline,” according to a person in the meeting. As if to drive home his point, he repeated himself: “Message with discipline.”
“They want to flood the zone with outrage,” Mr. Jeffries explained at a news conference in Brooklyn on Friday. “But we can’t chase every outrage.”
Invoking Aaron Judge, the captain of the New York Yankees, Mr. Jeffries said that “one of the reasons that he’s a great hitter is that he does not swing at every pitch. He waits for the right one.”
The federal funding freeze and its quick reversal offered Democrats a fairly obvious place to lean in. Mr. Schumer rushed to define Mr. Trump’s actions as harmful to regular people in a moment that seemed to have caught both the White House and congressional Republicans by surprise.
“This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas,” Mr. Schumer said at one of his many news conferences. “It is just outrageous.”
Mr. Jeffries, who was in California touring communities devastated by wildfires, did not immediately jump into public action. Instead, he dispatched senior members of his staff, along with Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, to brief 80 grass-roots groups after the Trump administration released the memo.
On the emergency conference call, he urged Democrats to conduct a “day of action” on Thursday and to host events in their districts to communicate “how the Republican agenda will hurt working people to reward the wealthy and well-connected.”
He participated in one such event himself while on his trip, criticizing the funding freeze and publicly pushing back on Republicans who have threatened to condition disaster aid to California on Democrats going along with Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Later on his trip, he posted a video on social media in which he stood on the side of the road with cars noisily whizzing by and railed against Mr. Trump for groundlessly suggesting that a deadly plane crash in Washington was a result of diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Administration.
“Have you no decency,” Mr. Jeffries said, somberly addressing Mr. Trump directly in a message that seemed poorly matched to his side-of-the-road backdrop. The location for the video appeared to be selected to show off a sign for Altadena, a historically Black community Mr. Jeffries visited in part because Mr. Trump did not go there when he toured fire damage last week.
Some Democrats argue that Mr. Trump’s actions demand a more aggressive response.
“Right now, you have to swing at every pitch,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview. “If you let some of these egregious acts of his early days on pass without real protest, it normalizes the behavior. It ends up less likely that you convince anyone to get off the mat later on. Trump floods the zone, every hour of every day. We have to do the same thing.”
Mr. Schumer appears to be trying. At the urging of Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, he has converted a conference room in his office into a small video recording studio, where members are encouraged to film TikTok-friendly videos to post on social media.
“The job right now is to convince our members that every day needs to have urgency to it,” Mr. Murphy said. “That is an ongoing challenge, to convince folks that there’s no downside in issuing red alerts on a regular basis.”
If the coin of the realm for communications is authenticity, however, “red alerts” are just not how Mr. Jeffries operates. Elected to lead House Democrats two years ago, he has acted as a serene strategist and communicator who typically does not stray from carefully worded statements, even when speaking casually. In high-pressure moments, he often leans into “listening mode” to take the temperature of members from different factions of his caucus.
He was not yet in leadership during Mr. Trump’s first term, when “Chuck and Nancy,” i.e. Mr. Schumer and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, became a meme-ing duo as they trekked to the Oval Office, where they engaged in heated, televised debates with Mr. Trump about shutting down the government.
It is also a different moment. Democratic lawmakers are no longer riding an organic wave of outrage. This time around, they have to persuade voters to still care.
There is no public dissension within the caucus about Mr. Jeffries’s leadership. But some political observers worry that a cautious approach may risk getting barreled over by Mr. Trump.
“One of the challenges here, given the flood of actions, is to know when to intervene and when not to, so you are not in a perpetual state of lighting your hair” on fire, said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama.
Mr. Axelrod said congressional Democrats were likely keeping their powder dry for battles that pitted tax breaks for the rich against middle-class programs. But, he said, “they need to adapt to the pace and nature of the challenge here.”
Even Mr. Schumer’s rapid-fire responses drew some criticism from Democrats who wanted him to push his caucus to do more, like stand together in opposition to all of Mr. Trump’s nominees.
About half of the caucus appears to be in the mood to push harder. A sudden swell of Democratic protest to the federal grant freezes was apparent in the Senate on Tuesday, when 22 Democrats opposed the confirmation of former Representative Sean Duffy as transportation secretary, a reversal after they had joined the rest of their party in voting the day before to allow his nomination to move forward. Democrats also boycotted a committee meeting to approve the nomination of Russell T. Vought to lead the White House budget office, which issued the memo pausing government funding.
At the same time, Mr. Schumer made himself omnipresent. He scrapped a news conference regarding Mr. Trump’s pardons for violent criminals who attacked police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, and replaced it with one on the funding freeze.
Later that afternoon, he held a second news conference on the same subject. “Chaotic, careless, cruel,” he said. (He also used a malapropism that circulated widely online, saying that “people are aroused, I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very long time.”)
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Schumer held a Zoom call with all the local television stations in New York, a strategy he encouraged his members to deploy in their states. Then, after the memo was rescinded the same day, Mr. Schumer told Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, during the weekly caucus lunch that he wanted to hold another news conference to take a short victory lap.
“Today, we saw what happens when Americans fight back against disastrous policies,” he said. Then he called on the Trump administration to withdraw Mr. Vought’s nomination.
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