Some see the US president’s recent bombing campaign in Yemen as contradicting his promises of seeking world peace.

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Security was to blame. Voters rebelled against his plan to partially privatize the popular retirement program and, the following year, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The events of 2005 cemented Social Security’s reputation as the “third rail of American politics.” For the next two decades, Republicans didn’t touch it.

Perhaps Elon Musk wasn’t paying attention. Back then, he had yet to vote in a U.S. election (or launch a rocket). Now, as a leader of DOGE, he’s opened an unexpected crusade against Social Security.

Musk recently called the program “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and claimed that it’s rife with waste and fraud. DOGE staffers have gained entry to the Social Security Administration and obtained sensitive taxpayer data, and the Trump administration has cut the agency’s workforce by thousands. Earlier this week, Social Security officials announced changes that could make it harder for retirees to access their benefits. These moves—and Musk’s rhetoric—have frightened voters, who have jammed congressional phone lines and town-hall meetings to register their concerns. And they’ve alarmed GOP lawmakers, who could pay for Musk’s decisions in next year’s midterms.

[Read: The GOP’s fears about Musk are growing]

If Musk wants to meet his goal of cutting $1 trillion in federal spending, he’ll have to do a lot more than eliminate USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and even the Department of Education. He knows the real money is in the three pillars of America’s social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. “Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” he said earlier this month. “That’s the big one to eliminate.”

Republicans have learned that going after these programs carries a huge electoral risk. Musk, apparently, has not. “He doesn’t think politically,” Tom Davis, a former House Republican from Virginia who ran the party’s campaign committee in the early 2000s, told me. His approach, Davis said, is “ready, fire, aim.”

Musk has “been quite successful in business, but he is clearly not very popular, and his DOGE actions are making him less popular,” a senior GOP strategist told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid provoking a fight with the president or his wealthy lieutenant. “He will end up being a heavy weight around the neck of not only President Trump but Republicans generally.”

Most elected Republicans have been careful to avoid criticizing Trump or Musk. But as DOGE has continued to assail Social Security, some have started feeling pressure from their constituents. Callers inundated Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan with concerns about Social Security cuts during a telephone town hall the Republican held earlier this month. He assured them the program would not be touched. “I will admit that there have been times where Elon Musk has tweeted first and thought second,” Huizenga told me, summarizing his message to constituents.

Trump might be able to claim a mandate from voters to justify some of his early cost cutting; he’s long criticized foreign aid, for example. But during the 2024 presidential campaign, he repeatedly vowed to preserve entitlements, even when some in his party wanted to trim them. Republicans have relied on those promises to try to reassure voters that their benefits are safe. “I think President Trump has made it very clear that he does not want to touch Social Security,” Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, a Trump ally, told reporters at the Capitol last week. “We are not cutting Social Security.”

Musk’s offensive against Social Security, however, has made those claims harder to sustain. And Trump himself has amplified some of Musk’s most specious charges about the program. During the president’s address to Congress earlier this month, he said his administration had identified “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” in Social Security. But the examples he cited—people born in the 19th century supposedly still getting checks—were almost certainly data-processing errors that reflected the program’s antiquated computer systems, not fraud.

[Read: What Trump and Musk want with Social Security]

The administration’s attempts to reduce fraud could jeopardize legitimate recipients. Beginning next month, people will no longer be able to call the Social Security Administration to file for benefits or update their banking information. Instead they’ll have to do so on the agency’s website or—if they can’t verify their identity online—visit an SSA office in person. The new requirements could be a particular hardship for older beneficiaries who live in rural areas—a constituency that leans heavily Republican.

“If they kill the ability to phone Social Security with questions, that will cause real problems with seniors,” the GOP strategist warned. “This would give Democrats an opening."

Polling backs up the strategist’s claims. In a survey released yesterday, the Democratic firm Blueprint read respondents a list of 20 different facts about Musk and what he has done with DOGE, then asked which ones they found concerning. The four examples that respondents worried about most all involved possible cuts to Social Security. “This is what Democrats need to get through their heads: It’s all Social Security right now,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s pollster, told reporters during a briefing.

What Trump and Musk are doing now is far different from what Bush proposed two decades ago. His plan called for structural changes to Social Security that would allow recipients to put their benefits into private investment accounts, which Bush argued could yield more earnings for beneficiaries while extending the fiscal solvency of the program. Davis was serving in the House when the public rejected Bush’s idea. He offered a reminder that Trump and Musk might want to consider: “When you move too far, too fast in politics,” Davis said, “the voters pull you back.”

When I walked into Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn apartment, he was puttering around in his socks. This wasn’t household policy, the 74-year-old Democratic Senate minority leader assured me, so there was no need for me to shed my shoes. But, as a gesture of hospitality, he asked, “Do you mind if I keep mine off?” I didn’t seem to have any actual say in the matter, and so minutes later, we were lounging on the L-shaped sofa in his study, as he discoursed on the color of the walls—call it terra-cotta—that he told me that he really likes, but his wife, Iris, doesn’t.

He had invited me over because there was a hole in his schedule. This was supposed to be the week that he embarked on a multicity tour for his new book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning. The launch was going to be his literary bar mitzvah, where he would bask in the glory of publication. Schumer had poured himself into the project, forcing himself to write intimately about his career, his faith, and his actual bar mitzvah, an event that had come to feel like an omen. Then, as now, the outside world trampled his big moment, and Schumer disappointed loved ones at the very moment he hoped to reap their praise.

As he tells the story, he was scheduled to become a man, in the eyes of the Jewish community, on November 23, 1963—a case of terrible timing, because Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president a day earlier. Even though nobody was in the mood to celebrate anything, his family plowed ahead with the event. And in front of a mournful congregation, Schumer choked. He humiliatingly fumbled through his Torah portion and had no fun at the party that followed. His abiding memory of the day is his father arguing with the caterer to recoup the costs for the after-dinner drinks that never were served.

[From the April 2024 issue: The golden age of American Jews is ending]

Similarly inopportune timing has wrecked the launch of his book. Days before its publication, he announced that he would be supporting a Republican continuing resolution that would prevent a government shutdown. The decision was wildly unpopular with his party’s rank and file, who accused him of squandering the Democrats’ last remaining source of leverage over the Trump administration.

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mocked him: “Senator Schumer, no disrespect, but you are a disgrace to Jewish stereotypes about financial negotiation.” Outside Schumer’s Park Slope apartment, on seemingly every mailbox and street sign, there were posters with his photo that read, Missing Backbone … If Found Contact Charles Schumer.

Schumer’s security team began to track specific threats against him. They worried that the furor over the shutdown would create a wave of protests that would test their ability to safeguard him. So Schumer accepted advice that he postpone his tour for a more placid moment in the indeterminate future.

With newfound time on his hands, Schumer and I began to kibitz. He splayed on his sofa, tucked his stocking feet under his knees and propped his head on his hand, striking a Cleopatra pose. He badly wanted to talk about his neglected book and not the continuing resolution. But I began to realize that two subjects were, in fact, woven together. The book is unintentionally a political self-portrait. Schumer’s Jewish identity is at the core of his beliefs: that the viability of public institutions should be defended at all cost; that the fragility of Jewish existence, and of democracy, demands that he resist emotionally satisfying gestures, if they ultimately risk damaging those institutions.

Few American politicians are more unmistakably Jewish than Chuck Schumer. Soon after he joined the House of Representatives in the early 1980s, he recalls in the book, a woman in Queens rushed up to him: “You have more courage than any of the other members of Congress.” Schumer didn’t just take the compliment. He wanted to know why she was lavishing him with such praise. “You’re the only one who had the courage to wear a yarmulke,” she told him. To disabuse her of that idea, he bent down to show her “the appetizer-plate-sized bald spot”—his words—that she had confused for a skullcap.

Despite the expectations Jews might have had for him, he didn’t define himself that way. He told me, “I was always proudly Jewish, but I never emphasized Jewishness. When I ran for the Senate, I was really worried. How would these upstate people react to me?” (Perhaps he need not have worried; he defeated the incumbent, Alfonse D’Amato, after an only-in-New-York controversy over whether the Republican senator had called Schumer a putzhead, a riff on the Yiddish slang for penis.)

Decades passed, and his cautious attitude didn’t change. But then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, and Schumer felt a new sense of responsibility. No Jew in American political life had ever held the power he then possessed. (The Democrats held a majority in the Senate, so he was running the chamber.) Witnessing the outpouring of anti-Semitism on the left, which focused its harshest criticisms on Israel rather than Hamas, Schumer felt compelled to fully embrace his identity, in all the ways he’d historically resisted.

His decision to expend so much time talking about anti-Semitism didn’t please his aides, who urged him to steer clear. On the political merits, his staff had valid arguments. Schumer planned on chastising the left, attacking members of the party he led. He writes that he was determined to make a fervent case for Israel, despite that country’s diminishing popularity among die-hard Democrats. He recalls telling himself, “You are no great Jewish sage or scholar, you are no King Solomon or Maimonides or Elie Wiesel, but for better or for worse, you are here, and you ought to try to do some good.”

[Read: Trump’s crocodile tears for the Jews]

What’s interesting about the book was that writing it didn’t just inspire him to more strongly identify himself as a Jew, but also prodded him to consider the Jewish roots of his approach to politics. (Full disclosure: At several points in his book, Schumer approvingly quotes an essay I wrote about Judaism in America.)

He began to think back to his time as a student at Harvard, in the late ’60s. Even though he protested against the Vietnam War, just like his classmates, he didn’t like how they took over buildings in the name of the movement. In the book, he recalls, “I was never going to be on the side of the radicals. I was going to take my own path and try to work through the system and get results, even if it meant compromise and concession from time to time.”

Schumer’s recollections of that era mirror his current difference of opinion with his base over the government shutdown. “Even if I failed and they shut me down and some of them told me I was a sellout,” he writes, “I would try to convince them to seek progress with me on the issues we both cared about. It was more of a human principle and less of a political one.”

When I brought up this passage, he told me that this human principle grew subconsciously, at least in part, from his Jewishness. Schumer viewed the preservation of American institutions as a matter of Jewish preservation, because those institutions were equipped to protect religious minorities. They were the source of America’s exceptional tolerance of Jews: “One of the great things about America is we’ve always had these norms, and we don’t want them broken,” he said, “because they protect all Americans, but particularly Jewish people, who have been so subject to problems and vilification through the centuries.”

In the past few weeks, many of the American institutions he reveres, and the constitutional system designed to insulate them, have come under intense pressure that they might not withstand. And, apropos of Schumer’s book, Trump has created conditions for anti-Semitism to flourish. The president has surrounded himself with a disturbing collection of appointees with records of repeating old canards about Jewish power.

As Schumer explained the president’s attitude toward Jews, he told me a story that he left out of the manuscript: After Trump came to office in 2017, he invited congressional leaders to meet with him. “There’s a spread in the White House, and the first thing he says to me is, ‘Chuck, have a pig in the blanket. They’re kosher.’ First, I’m not sure they were kosher. Second, what was he thinking? He’s a Jew.” (I reached out to the White House for comment on this anecdote and have not yet heard back.)

Trump, in his autocratic mode, seemingly ascribed himself the power to determine what’s kosher and not. And more than that, he’s determined that he has the ability to determine who’s a Jew and not. Last week, he bizarrely declared that Schumer “is not Jewish anymore.” In the words of the president of the United States, “He has become a Palestinian.” (“Don’t tell my mother,” Schumer told me in response.)

The president was assuming a posture that rarely ends well, in which the regime separates the good Jews from the bad ones. By deeming them religious reprobates, the regime is signaling that they are the acceptable ones to abuse.

Does Schumer’s institutionalism have the fortitude to resist Trump? When he voted to prevent the government shutdown, he was acting not just on instinct, but on intelligence gleaned from Republican sources, who told him that the administration was baiting the Democrats into shutting down the government. The White House had a plan for how it would use the cover of a shutdown to accelerate its assault on the government, while pinning blame for the crisis on the Democrats.

But Schumer was also acting on instinct. As he remembers the radicals at Harvard, he says, “I saw how their zeal and fury led them to be not only demeaning to other students but disruptive, which was ultimately counterproductive. They turned too many people off.” In the end, he was right, and they were wrong. The backlash against antiwar protest helped to doom ’60s liberalism, ending the Great Society and stalling the advance of civil rights.

As I sat with him on the sofa, I received an alert from Axios: “Schumer faces growing House Dem calls to step down.” But he seemed unfazed. “The higher you go on the mountain, the more fiercely the wind blows,” he told me. “The only way to protect yourself from these fierce winds is to have your own internal gyroscope. That’s what motivated me in how I voted.” The same instinct motivated him back at Harvard, he said. “I hated the Vietnam War, but I felt there was a right way.” He was now lying on his back, his feet propped up, the knot of his tie dangling at his torso, a man either oblivious to the revolt brewing against him, or at ease with his own political choices.

Republican calls to dismantle what they have called a "bureaucratic boondoggle" go back more than four decades.