To counter President Trump’s first major address of his second term, Democrats in Congress selected a middle-aged woman senator with a background in national security to deliver a simple, centrist message, devoid of partisan animus, aimed at voters across the political spectrum.
But the lasting image of Democratic pushback to Mr. Trump on Tuesday night may have come instead in the form of a liberal 77-year-old congressman waving his cane as he shouted at the president in a protest that got him ejected from the House chamber.
The contrast reflected the clash within the Democratic Party as it tries to find an effective message to counter an unbound president who is defying laws and norms while dominating the public’s attention. Under pressure from a restive progressive base, some want to position themselves as part of a party of aggressive resistance to Mr. Trump. Others see a political center that can be peeled away through a sober appeal to center-leaning voters feeling adverse impacts from the president’s policies.
The competing strategies were on display as congressional Democrats face critical decisions in the coming days over how much to obstruct Mr. Trump’s agenda as he tramples over the power of the legislative branch. Most immediately, with government funding set to expire on March 14, Democrats must decide whether they will vote for legislation to avert a shutdown or refuse to do so at a moment when Mr. Trump is defunding and dismantling federal programs all on his own.
The range of responses on Tuesday night was also a reminder that Democrats, locked out of power at every level of the federal government, cannot do much of anything right now to stand in Mr. Trump’s way.
Representative Al Green, a Texas Democrat who has a history of defying party leaders to lodge a one-man resistance against Mr. Trump, repeatedly shouted “no mandate” at the president and refused to take his seat before being removed from the chamber.
That was his plan, he told reporters after leaving, simply “to let people know that there’s some of us who are going to stand up against this president’s desire to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.”
The move frustrated some of his colleagues, who thought it did little to actually challenge Mr. Trump. They said privately that performative actions like Mr. Green’s simply provided Republicans with a rich target. On Wednesday morning, as if on cue, the hard-right House Freedom Caucus announced it would be introducing a resolution to censure him, and Mr. Trump sent out a fund-raising appeal referring to Mr. Green and claiming that Democrats “hate putting America first.”
Opting for a quieter form of protest, some Democrats wore hot pink to signify female power or held up paddles with the words “Musk Steals” and “Save Medicaid” to register silent opposition. Those slogans, selected by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, were carefully chosen to highlight liberal priorities that vulnerable Democratic members representing red districts would also have no problem defending.
Others punctuated Mr. Trump’s speech with their own commentary. “That’s such a lie,” some yelled when Mr. Trump cited debunked claims of people with impossible ages still collecting Social Security checks. “January 6!” they cried out as he praised the police and hailed the virtues of law and order.
More than a dozen progressive Democrats walked out of the speech early, while others didn’t attend at all, and Democratic leaders sat through the whole thing stone-faced, determined not to become the story themselves.
The result was a muddled response from Democrats well aware that whatever they did risked looking like too little or too much.
“The American people want to see some fight from Democrats right now,” said Sawyer Hackett, a Democratic strategist. “They don’t give a damn about decorum or civility — Trump certainly doesn’t. But they’re not looking to their members of Congress for protests; they want to see action.”
Mr. Hackett suggested that a more useful form of resistance for members of Congress would be to “deny them a single vote on government funding.” But Democratic leaders have signaled they are not in the mood to do that and risk carrying the blame for a shutdown.
Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, criticized members of his party who protested on the floor.
“A sad cavalcade of self-owns and unhinged petulance,” he wrote on social media. “It only makes Trump look more presidential and restrained. We’re becoming the metaphorical car alarms that nobody pays attention to — and it may not be the winning message.”
But mostly, Democrats said they were aware that being in the minority during a president’s address to Congress is a thankless task, leaving them in a position to please no one. Their hope was that Mr. Trump’s actions would make the strongest case against him and that Americans facing higher prices because of his policy decisions would not have a strong opinion about the theatrics of who shouted and who didn’t, or what color people wore.
“The No. 1 issue that the American people want us to work on is costs: rising costs of food and of housing and of gas and of cars and of everything else,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on CNN on Wednesday.
Mr. Schumer said he understood that many people were frustrated, but he was dismissive of Mr. Green.
“The best answer in my judgment is to organize,” he said. “Organizing is hard, but it’s effective — and that’s what we’re doing.”
When pressed about Mr. Green’s protest, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and minority leader, said that “the vast majority of Democrats showed restraint, listened to what the president had to say and of course we strongly disagree.”
A day earlier, he had urged his members to show restraint at the speech.
Republicans have long struggled with having carefully laid messaging plans derailed by their most extreme members. At times when they have sought to strike a reasonable and broadly appealing message, it has been drowned out by rabble rousers like Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who heckled President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during his speeches to Congress, becoming the face of their party.
But the days of sidelining those figures are over; Republicans now cater directly to them.
Democratic leaders did try to mount their own form of resistance inside the chamber. They chose to boycott the Escort Committee, a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers who traditionally escort the president into the House chamber for his address.
It was a notable choice, but one whose significance might have been lost on most Americans, who do not tend to follow the customs around presidential addresses to Congress.
“It speaks for itself,” said Christie Stephenson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Jeffries.
