With Trump Unbound, It’s a Tale of Two Strategies for Democrats in Congress

President Trump’s blizzard of actions elicited two very different responses from Senate and House Democrats — one media-saturating and one restrained — reflecting a debate on how best to respond.

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But the frenetic pace of the Trump administration leaves little time for such deliberating; the freeze was rescinded even as Democrats were in the middle of discussing how best to respond.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.