As Democrats scramble to resist a second Trump administration, they have landed on a consistent attack: Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their GOP allies, they say, are upsetting the status quo with “chaos,” “dysfunction” and “uncertainty.”
But if Democrats hope to land their blows, Republicans are cheering them on. Disruption, the GOP insists, is precisely the point.
“We promised to reduce the size and scope of government, and there’s been so much action on that that it’s caused controversy,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters last month after a federal judge paused the Office of Management and Budget’s attempted federal aid freeze.
“That’s a good thing,” he said. “We’re disrupting.”
Disruption is not a new word in Washington. A wave of frustration against the so-called swamp swept Trump into the White House in 2016. Railing against the “deep state” ushered him back to D.C. for Round 2. And disruption, of course, is not new in Musk’s tech world, where the word is often the ultimate compliment.
But these days — as the Trump administration overhauls the executive branch, overrides the legislative branch and threatens to overrule the judicial branch — “disruption” is the magic word on Capitol Hill. It’s a catchall for every manner of shake-up or sin, depending on a lawmaker’s party affiliation.
“Real innovation isn’t clean and tidy; it’s necessarily disruptive and messy,” Oversight Chair James Comer said as Democrats tried to subpoena Musk last week. “But that’s exactly what Washington needs right now.”
Even when Musk personally derailed the House GOP’s spending plan in December by insisting Republicans attach a debt ceiling hike to the measure, lawmakers aligned with Trump claimed that Musk’s involvement was an unexpected but welcome gift.
“He’s got a disruptive style that’s ultimately going to make us a lot stronger,” Rep. Dusty Johnson said of Musk at the time. “There are going to be times that puts the D.C. normal into some discomfort.”
In the interceding two months, “D.C. normal” has, in fact, been thrown into discomfort. Trump and Musk have fired or put nearly 10,000 federal employees on leave and offered buyouts to tens of thousands more. The prospect of mass layoffs has stoked economic panic in a city greatly reliant on federal contracts and a sprawling bureaucracy.
Even outside of Washington, Trump has warned of short-term disturbances to everyday lives, admitting, for example, that tariffs against Mexico and Canada would cause “temporary disruptions” to costs.
“People will understand that,” Trump said.
Comments like those have become the rhetorical battleground for Washington’s latest partisan feuds. Democratic Conference Chair Rep. Pete Aguilar responded to Trump on social media, translating “temporary disruptions” to “higher prices for the American people.”
Democrats have hoped that the Trump administration’s shock to the system — potentially harmful economically and certainly suspect constitutionally — would be enough to turn the public against the president. But Republicans insist it’s the only way to fix Washington’s spending addiction.
“It would be comical if it wasn’t such a serious issue,” DOGE subcommittee member Michael Cloud told NOTUS of Democratic attacks.
Cloud and other Republicans enthusiastically cite Trump’s latest approval ratings — which are higher than any point during his first term — as further proof of their mandate to take a sledgehammer to federal departments and congressionally approved funding. A recent CBS News poll showed that a majority of U.S. adults see Trump’s presidency as “tough,” “energetic,” “focused” and “effective.”
“America says he’s doing exactly what he said he would do, and none of them are debating the findings,” Cloud said. “They are only debating the personalities.”
Meanwhile, Democrats counter that Trump isn’t fixing D.C. — he’s just breaking it more. And they are perfectly happy to let Republicans own the chaos.
“If they think that they were elected to make disruption, then they should ride that out through the 2026 elections,” Rep. Jamie Raskin told NOTUS.
Raskin is leading a newly minted Rapid Response Task Force and Litigation Working Group with Reps. Joe Neguse, Gerry Connolly and Rosa DeLauro to make the case against the DOGE-ification of the U.S. government.
Democrats have their own set of data points they’re eager to run down with reporters. Virginia Rep. Don Beyer — who represents much of the federal workforce — urged NOTUS to review the latest Small Business Optimism Index, which shows optimism falling and uncertainty rising. Beyer noted, correctly, that the same poll showing Trump’s high approval rating shows more adults think Trump’s policies will leave them financially worse off than better.
“Disruption is bad for business,” Beyer told NOTUS.
He continued that, in any business, employers have to build a culture. “And it has to be a culture where people feel confident about coming to work in the morning,” said Beyer, who built a sprawling network of car dealerships across northern Virginia.
For people who count on the federal government for pay or aid — and some of the people who represent them — getting up in the morning is an increasingly worrisome prospect. And even though most Trump allies in Congress have been energized by the president’s first month in office, GOP moderates are looking at the chaos with a little more caution.
The same week that Speaker Johnson celebrated Republicans causing controversy and “disrupting” the system with a federal aid freeze, Rep. Don Bacon — who just won reelection in a district Vice President Kamala Harris carried — expressed frustration.
“He likes a little disruption,” Bacon said of Trump. “We’re getting it. But again, this should be short term.”
And yet if Bacon is alarmed by the disruption, some Democratic lawmakers — like moderate Maine Rep. Jared Golden, who just won reelection in a Trump district — are alarmed by Democrats sounding the alarm.
“If you make everything DEFCON 5, then eventually nothing is DEFCON 5,” Golden told The Washington Post last week, seeming to mix up the DEFCON system.
Still, as lawmakers in the middle debate the merits of their party’s messaging strategy, everyone in Congress seems to agree that Trump’s disruption, good or bad, is underway. And it’s going nowhere.
“He’s such a disrupter,” Rep. Mike Kelly told NOTUS days before Trump’s inauguration.
“He talks about things that people say, ‘You can’t do that,’” he continued. “He says, ‘Why? You can’t?’”
—
Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS.