Seen as a pragmatist, Schumer hopes to reclaim populism for the Democrats. Illustration by Barry Blitt

On a morning not long after Michael Flynn, having lied about conversations with the Russian Ambassador, was forced to step down as national-security adviser, but before Jeff Sessions, having lied about conversations with the Russian Ambassador, was forced to recuse himself from any Justice Department investigation involving the Trump campaign, Chuck Schumer rose from his desk on the floor of the United States Senate to reflect on the state of the union.

“We are in a moment of profound unease about the stability of the executive branch of our government,” he began. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

“I’ve been in Congress a long time and I have never, ever seen anything like this,” he went on. “At this juncture, we would all do well to remember that democracy, the most benevolent, desirable, effective, and just form of government devised by man, is also one of the most fragile systems of government devised by man. It requires constant vigilance.”

Schumer was wearing a dark suit that sagged under the weight of the mike pinned to his lapel. His tie was askew. (New York once described Schumer, the state’s senior senator, as a “zhlub, and in a good way.”) He kept glancing down at his notes through a pair of half-glasses, so that the view from the press gallery, and also on C-SPAN, was mostly of his scalp.

Schumer continued, addressing no one in particular, since the chamber was, as usual, nearly empty. “One of the things that the framers of the Constitution most worried about was the threat of foreign intervention in our government, what they called ‘foreign intrigue,’ ” he said. “The reported contact between operatives in the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence officials is exactly the kind of intrigue that our founders sought to prohibit. I mention all of this because I believe the stakes to be very high.”

When the 115th Congress convened, on January 3rd, Schumer became the Senate’s Minority Leader. (He ascended to the post upon the retirement of Senator Harry Reid, of Nevada.) Two and a half weeks later, on Inauguration Day, Schumer became the country’s highest-ranking Democrat. Neither position was what he had had in mind.

Throughout the campaign, Schumer had assumed that Hillary Clinton would be President. He further imagined that Democrats would pick up enough seats in the Senate to make him the Majority Leader. He would then help shape and enact the President’s legislative agenda. He and Clinton were already considering what their priorities should be for the first months of her Administration.

The election results put an end to this happy dream. The power of the Senate minority is purely negative: it can’t pass legislation; it can only block it. But even exercising negative power requires a great deal of discipline—potentially more than the Democrats can muster.

Next year, ten Democratic senators will be up for reëlection in states that Trump carried. The President has been wooing these senators, and even considered naming two of them, Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Heidi Heitkamp, of North Dakota, to his Cabinet. Meanwhile, Democratic activists—generally in blue states—are calling for round-the-clock resistance. Protesters have gathered in front of Schumer’s apartment, in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, for rallies organized under the tagline “What the F*ck, Chuck?” (At least one demonstrator brought a model of a skeleton, to illustrate the importance of a spine.)

Can Schumer negotiate these currents? Can anyone? It seems no exaggeration to say that on these questions the future world depends. As Schumer himself put it the other morning, to the almost vacant Senate chamber, “This is not a drill.”

Schumer, who’s sixty-six, is an optimist, a trait that he says he inherited from his father, Abe. Abe, for his part, inherited an exterminating business from his father, Jack, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine. The family lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Schumer, growing up, would sometimes lend a hand killing roaches.

One summer, instead of working for his dad, Schumer got a job with a neighbor, Stanley Kaplan, who, at that point, was still laying the foundations of his test-prep empire. Schumer mimeographed thousands of practice S.A.T.s, an experience he credits with boosting his own scores, which were just shy of sixteen hundred. He went off to Harvard. There he tried out for the basketball team, but was cut before he had a chance to touch the ball. This was in the fall of 1967, and a week or so later a fellow-student invited him to go to New Hampshire to campaign for Eugene McCarthy. Schumer had never heard of McCarthy, but he was lonely, so he went.

Almost immediately, in his words, he “caught the bug.” He loved the excitement of politics, along with the camaraderie and the sense of being involved in great events. In 1974, the State Assembly seat for the district that included Flatbush came open. Fresh out of Harvard Law School, Schumer decided to run for it. His mother, Selma, urged her neighbors not to vote for him. Schumer had an offer from the prestigious law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Selma didn’t want him wasting his time when he could be making good money.

Schumer ended up spending six years in Albany. People who knew him in those days mostly remember his ambitiousness. In the New York State Capitol in the nineteen-seventies, county bosses called the shots, and initiative was not encouraged.

“There was an order,” Mel Miller, who was elected to the Assembly a few years before Schumer and eventually became its speaker, told me. “You waited your turn. And Chuck was not going to wait his turn. I think that’s the best way to describe it. He was there to assert himself, and he was there to move on.”

Schumer’s reputation for aggressiveness followed him to Congress, where he arrived shortly after his thirtieth birthday. He won a seat on the House Banking Committee and began courting Wall Street; while still a freshman, he managed to amass the House’s third-largest campaign account. (When, in 1982, Brooklyn lost a congressional seat to reapportionment, Schumer’s enormous war chest insured that it was not his.) Even in the nation’s fund-raising capital, the intensity of Schumer’s efforts stood out. The Hill once reported that, having secured a contribution from a Republican lobbyist, Schumer insisted that the check be delivered by courier.

Just as assiduously as he pursued donors, Schumer wooed the press. Recognizing that it was hard to fill the Monday papers, he took to holding regular Sunday news conferences. He’d rail against college-tuition hikes or present a study documenting what he said were unfair disparities in health-care costs. He was so skillful at generating coverage that his colleagues in the New York delegation invented a new term: to be upstaged on an issue was to be “Schumed.”

In Washington, Schumer roomed with Leon Panetta, then a representative from California, and two other congressmen in a town house near Capitol Hill. To save money, Schumer slept in the living room, on a foldout couch. The place, which inspired a short-lived Amazon series called “Alpha House,” was famously grungy, and Schumer was famously messy. He didn’t worry about niceties like cleaning or even eating; often he dined on cold cereal. (“My favorite food,” he told me.) Panetta, who went on to serve as the director of the C.I.A. and then as the Secretary of Defense, remembers him constantly rushing back to his district.