What was perhaps the least timely book tour in American history has been postponed.
Fresh from his Friday vote for a funding bill that much of the Democratic base objected to, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was set to embark on a tour this week for his latest tome. But it’s hard to execute a successful book event, let alone a string of them, when fired-up protesters are shouting down the author’s every breath. Over the past few days, that outcome looked increasingly inevitable.
Postponing the tour may have seemed like the only way Schumer could save face. It won’t do anything to defer his reckoning online, however, especially on Bluesky, where the senator has sunk to previously unimagined lows of unpopularity.
The left-leaning alternative to X had been seething with anger the past couple months, mostly directed at omnipresent targets Donald Trump and Elon Musk. At the same time, the social media site also carried an ambient current of rage aimed at Democrats for not mounting an effective opposition to Trump’s administration.
Generally, that rage has seemed kind of amorphous: not bound too much to any particular ball the Dems dropped, but rather a desire to see meaningful action of any kind. Last week’s funding bill vote presented an opportunity for critics to more sharply target their disapproval.
Swallowing the poison pill
To recap: Republicans excluded their Democratic colleagues from negotiations on a spending bill to avert a government shutdown, offering them a bill littered with insulting provisions, like the one that would make it impossible for Congress to undo Trump’s haphazard tariffs. It was a poison pill for Dems to swallow, suffused with the not-even-implicit threat to blame them for the resulting shutdown if they refused (despite the fact that Republicans currently control all three branches of government and polling suggests they would shoulder the blame).
While House Democrats were ready to call the GOP’s bluff, and Senate Democrats hinted that they would do the same, Schumer ultimately capitulated, swallowing the poison pill. On the right, his move was greeted with crocodile-smile congrats from Trump and outright mockery from the House Judiciary. On the left, the response was far more venomous.
Schumer had finally assumed ownership of the general anger toward Democrats that had been roiling online for months, redirecting it toward himself.
While there has been plenty of cathartic venting and activist organizing around Schumer on Bluesky, many of the site’s users have also been channeling their fury into savage memes. Some pop culture-themed digs at Schumer place him alternately in the worlds of Die Hard, Star Wars, and Liam Neeson’s avenging dad series, Taken.
One popular post begged the music industry’s most merciless antagonist, Kendrick Lamar, to turn his attention to Schumer, while another likened the Senate minority leader to Lamar’s utterly annihilated bête noire, Drake.
Other posters on Bluesky played with Schumer’s name in every conceivable insulting permutation. If it rhymes with “Chuck” and is unflattering, people posted it in droves. The fact that the Senator’s last name can be easily slotted into the cross-generational insult “ok boomer” did not escape users’ notice either. And a surprisingly large number of others opted instead for calling him “Charles Entertainment Schumer,” the official full name of children’s pizza restaurant mascot Chuck E. Cheese—who, incidentally, is a rodent.
“So I have a book coming out”
A lot of the Bluesky hostility prior to Monday’s cancellation announcement had focused on Schumer’s planned book tour. One viral tweet depicted Schumer as the fire-engulfed “This Is Fine” dog, a symbol of ill-timed complacency during Trump’s turbulent first term, with the titular phrase changed to “So I have a book coming out.”
Even before Friday’s vote, the idea of such a high-profile member of the opposition party spending valuable time promoting a book during such an incendiary moment in American history rubbed some observers the wrong way.
After the vote? It was more like a massage parlor run by Edward Scissorhands. With activists circulating Schumer’s tour itinerary on Bluesky, clearly not for autograph-obtaining purposes, the senator’s team cited “security reasons” for calling off the tour, according to the New York Times.
The breadth of jokes, memes, and straightforward invective have made Schumer inescapable on Bluesky, leaving room for reflexive jokes about his newfound main character status. At a moment when Democrats’ favorability levels have reached record lows, Schumer’s favorability on Bluesky seemed leagues lower.
As much as all the posts about him represent the simmering outrage and hopelessness shared by many of the site’s users, they may also offer a refreshing change of pace from the constant focus on President Trump and Elon Musk—who seemingly set out to make themselves the main character every day on purpose.
What’s unusual, though, is not just the saturation-level of Schumerposting, but the range of political ideology it encompasses.
For as many publications portray Bluesky as a lefty echo chamber for people who fled X because they can’t handle opposing views, Bluesky tends to be teeming with opposing views—from centrist Dems to progressives to straight-up communists, along with everything in between and some of what’s beyond.
These factions are always infighting, which is reflective of why the phrase “Dems in disarray” has become such a cliché. At this moment on Bluesky, however, each of these groups seem to at least agree on one thing.
That it’s time to chuck Schumer from a position of leadership.
