THE FACE OF THE OPPOSITION
Put Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump in a room together and you can’t miss the connection. They are the leaders of rival parties, sharp opponents on Twitter and in the press, but they live by the same words, as big and bold as the city that made them. “Beautiful!” they will say, though at different times and about different things. “Wonderful!” “Horrible!” “So, so great!” It is the vernacular of outer-borough kids who, in different ways, scraped their way to the big time. They are two local grandees who boast, yarn, insult and rib each other like they are still on the streets of New York City.
It will take a while—like maybe never—for Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan or other GOP pooh-bahs to build up a store of Trump war stories to match Schumer’s. In fact the first time congressional leaders visited the new President at the White House, most of his attention focused on their Democratic foil. At one point that evening, Trump recalled a 2008 fundraiser he held for New York’s senior Senator at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. The two dozen or so top Democratic donors had cocktails and dinner, serenaded by Peter Cetera, formerly of the rock band Chicago. “I raised $2 million,” Trump boasted.
If you ask Chuck Schumer what it means to be from Brooklyn, he will answer with two words: “No bullsh-t.” Plus he’s a numbers guy. “It was $263,000, to be precise,” he shot back at the President.
For all the chaos and plot twists of the coming weeks, the one sure thing to watch is how these two men go at it, now that Trump presides from the Oval Office and Schumer, 66, is the closest thing the Democrats have to an official opposition leader. Though they know each other and share both experience and instincts, they cannot anticipate each other’s every move. On Trump’s
