Eight years ago, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) spearheaded largely unified resistance efforts against President Donald Trump as he embarked on his first term, with the vast 2017 Women’s March in Washington capturing the broad bandwidths of the Left’s momentum against the Republican agenda.

In the days since Trump won a second term, everything has changed for House Democrats, particularly for Jeffries, as he has taken the reins from Pelosi. Now, he leads a party in the minority that has descended into constant bickering about how to target a president who just received the highest approval ratings of his career.

Some colleagues want Jeffries to return the party to the thundering Democratic resistance brand of the Pelosi era. Others are burned out after years of opposition to Trump only to lose to him and warn that a decisive change of strategy is warranted to deal with the popular president. Jeffries himself has warned that Democrats are in a different and more difficult position now than they were nearly a decade ago, with less power to negotiate with the opposition.

Republicans “control the House, the Senate, and the presidency,” the House minority leader said during a press conference Friday. “It’s their government. What leverage do we have? We are going to try to find bipartisan common ground on any issue.”

Jeffries’s remarks signaling he would play a less combative role than Pelosi came after he said he wanted the Democratic Party to focus on the economy in an endeavor to course correct after a night of devastating losses on Nov. 5, 2024.

“I think we all have to do a better job of meeting the needs of everyday Americans who are struggling to live paycheck to paycheck,” the minority leader said during an NPR interview shortly after Trump won reelection. “And we have to deal with it and we have to deal with it in as decisive a way possible, hopefully not as Democrats, independents or Republicans, but as Americans.”

Jeffries highlighted the changing dynamic again during an NBC interview last month, when he pivoted to talking about the economy after being pressed on Trump’s effort to deport illegal immigrants. Jeffries subsequently attracted criticism for declining to aggressively attack the president’s immigration agenda during an internal meeting with House Democratic chiefs of staff, according to Punchbowl News.

Yet on the other side of his caucus, Jeffries has the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, who have backed Trump border policies such as Remain in Mexico. Forty-eight Democratic House lawmakers crossed the aisle to pass a Trump-backed immigration reform bill called the Laken Riley Act in January. And the pragmatic minority leader faces the reality that the president is riding a wave of unprecedented goodwill after winning the popular vote, all seven battleground states, and leading Republicans in controlling the House and the Senate.

But even as he attracts frustration from members upset that he is embracing a more bipartisan approach than the fiery Pelosi did during her tenure as House leader, Jeffries has also garnered criticism from centrist colleagues who say he is not going far enough.

“In the here and now, even if you or others think it’s … a little bit more reserved, I still would say that I think that the [Democratic] response [to Trump] has been undisciplined,” Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) said earlier this month. “On this issue of, should Democrats fight, fight, fight on every utterance of the president or every [executive order] that he puts out or every action that he or someone like Elon Musk take? Setting aside the issue of, “Is it constitutional?” … Don’t swing at every pitch, right? But a part of my concern with responding to everything with outrage is it obscures, potentially, what they actually do.

“If you make everything DEFCON 5, then eventually nothing is DEFCON 5, you know what I mean?” Golden added.

To be sure, Jeffries has not backed away from resistance efforts entirely. Under pressure from factions of his own caucus outraged over Trump’s slew of executive orders, Jeffries announced a task force on Monday designed to support lawsuits against the White House.

And on Tuesday, Jeffries issued a resounding condemnation of the president’s actions during an anti-Trump protest in Washington.

“I wanted to make sure I crossed the street to make it clear that the attack on you, the attack on the civil service is unacceptable, unconscionable, un-American, and we are going to stand with you until each and every one of those unlawful executive orders are fully and completely reversed, buried in the ground, never to rise again,” Jeffries told protesters gathered near the Capitol.

But his actions are a far cry from the transparent fierceness with which Pelosi once pursued Trump, a man she once derided as “morbidly obese.”

She accused the president of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election, claimed he conspired with Ukraine in an attempt to win the 2020 election, and even famously ripped up his 2020 State of the Union speech on live television as she sat behind the president. As speaker of the House, she led two impeachment inquiries into Trump, making him the only president to be impeached twice. Pelosi also spearheaded the Jan. 6 House committee that blamed Trump for the chaos at the Capitol, even as he blamed “the wicked witch” for overseeing security lapses.

Now, some of Jeffries’s congressional colleagues, such as Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), are pushing for a more hard-line response to Trump.

“For me, there is a bright line when it comes to the Constitution,” Kim told the New Jersey Globe. “The American people, they’re like, ‘Are you going to find bipartisanship? Do you think Trump has a mandate?’ None of that matters when it comes to the Constitution. No mandate from the people can give Trump the power to be able to override our Constitution.”

But even as Jeffries extended an olive branch to anti-Trump protesters, reports broke the same day that the minority leader was “very frustrated” with progressive organizations pushing an aggressively confrontational approach to the president, per Axios.

Given that Pelosi, his predecessor, had decades to build relationships and messaging strategy on Capitol Hill, some of Jeffries’s colleagues say it could be just a matter of time before he finds his footing and strikes a balance between opposing factions of this party.

“We’ll see,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) said of Jeffries during an interview with Punchbowl. “His profile is going to increase as time passes. He’s new at this job, and you’ve got to give him some time.”