Former Speaker says Trump has ‘broken the Democratic party’

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy warned that Democratic congressional leaders should be wary of meeting a similar fate to the one that befell him in 2023.

The ex-congressman was interviewed on New York’s WABC 770 AM as part of “The Cats Roundtable,” a show hosted by billionaire John Catsimatidis. McCarthy told listeners that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries were no longer being looked to by voters or even their fellow lawmakers as leaders of their party.

McCarthy insisted the real figures of leadership in the party were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who have embarked on a nationwide tour to rally disaffected Democrats in the wake of Trump’s inauguration. The pair have brought in crowds numbering in the tens of thousands in cities including Denver and Tuscon.

“It is a huge mess,” said the former speaker, according to excerpts of the discussion first obtained by The Hill. “If you think about it, they are leaderless. There’s no message, and their polling continues to drop. They are now fighting among themselves...It wasn’t just that President Trump won the election. He has now broken the Democratic Party.”

“The real leaders of the Democratic Party right now are AOC and Bernie Sanders. Those are the two that are getting the crowds,” McCarthy continued.

The former speaker warned that the two minority leaders — Jeffries and Schumer — would not remain in their posts at the current rate. The two men, he argued, had little to no control over their own caucuses and were not making themselves known to the American people.

“What has Hakeem Jeffries done? He has no messaging. He can’t make a decision,” said McCarthy, while blaming other Democrats for working “against” them.

“I don’t know how much longer Hakeem Jeffries and Schumer can stay leaders. They’re in hiding,” he continued.

Schumer in particular is under the microscope and feeling blowback from his party’s base after he and nine other Senate Democrats voted to break a filibuster and allow voting to proceed on a GOP measure to fund the government — one he and his party had roundly denounced for cutting non-defense spending and failing to restrain the slash-and-burn methods of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort.

Not helping his case: Jeffries and other senior Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, have come out publicly in disagreement with his decision. A YouGov/Economist poll released after the funding bill debate found that six in ten voters now have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Senate minority leader.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, who ran for president twice unsuccessfully while gaining a massive national following in the process, have drawn massive crowds at events where they have called on Democratic lawmakers to reject corporate money and support policies aimed at winning back working-class Americans. Their message has won support in recent weeks from more centrist members of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses such as Chris Murphy, who blamed Democrats for walking away from that agenda in 2024 in an interview with The Daily Show.

However, the move has also faced resistance from more conservative members of the GOP including Kyrsten Sinema, Elissa Slotkin and John Fetterman.

The New York senator embarked on a media tour to defend his decision while postponing a planned book tour. In repeated interviews, Schumer has insisted that the time was not right to mount a resistance against the GOP, and argued that the effects of a shutdown would be drastic.

Still, calls for his ouster as leader of the caucus have grown louder in recent weeks, with one Democratic congressman even coming out publicly in support of what a number of others are reported to endorse privately: an effort by Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star in the party, to mount a primary challenge for Schumer’s Senate seat.

"I'm not stepping down,” he insisted Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.

The senior senator from New York, 74, is up for reelection in 2026.