The activist machine the Democratic establishment built to fight Trump is now coming for the establishment itself—and Chuck Schumer is the first target.

Soros-funded protest group 50501 joined Sen. Chris Van Hollen's bid to unseat Schumer as Senate Democratic leader this weekend, demanding what it called an "open and formal Senate Leadership Debate" between the two. "The American people deserve to hear how the next Senate leader will fight for them," the group wrote on Facebook and other platforms, according to The Post Millennial. Van Hollen hit CNN, ABC, and Fox News on Sunday to make his case, claiming 15 Senate supporters and growing.

The fight matters because Democrats just retook Congress in the November midterms and will assume the Senate majority in January. Who controls the floor and the caucus agenda for the second half of Trump's second term is the immediate question. The deeper story is the coalition cracking apart: the protest groups the party nurtured to harass Trump are now turning their fire on the party's own leadership.

The Post Millennial reported that 50501—spawned from a Reddit post promising "50 states. 50 protests. 1 movement"—was quickly co-opted by a network of NGOs funded by the Soros family, Reid Hoffman, and Neville Roy Singham. The same group played a lead role in coordinating the "No Kings" protests. Now those dollars are backing a leadership coup.

Van Hollen leaned hard into the party's Israel fault line. On CNN, he noted that Schumer "joined with Aipac and crypto to try to defeat" Sens.-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine—two progressive candidates Schumer did not support. "They would not be there" if Schumer had his way, Van Hollen said, according to The Guardian. The Post Millennial reported that radical leftists have been demanding Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries step aside, largely over their support for Israel and AIPAC.

Schumer's team pushed back. A Schumer confidant told The Hill that Van Hollen has "no chance of winning" and that progressives are using his candidacy to extract a "liberal wishlist of priorities" from Schumer. Van Hollen called that "a bunch of nonsense" on Fox News Sunday. "This is a wide open race," he said. "The other team has been putting out numbers that are flatly wrong."

Van Hollen also accused Schumer's allies of leaking a list of supposed committed votes to The Hill that included senators who had actually pledged to him. "They're essentially trying to instill fear in people who may say that they're going to support me as a new leader," he said on ABC's This Week. He charged Schumer with trying to move the leadership election—currently scheduled for December 1—earlier to short-circuit the challenge. "If they really believed that they were ahead, they wouldn't be trying to move up the elections," Van Hollen said.

Schumer's vulnerability is partly self-inflicted. The Post Millennial reported that he capitulated on a budget deal early in Trump's second term to avoid a shutdown, then reversed course under pressure from his base, presiding over two of the longest congressional shutdowns in U.S. history over federal immigration enforcement funding. The fringe-left group Indivisible wrote that Schumer's "second massive capitulation to the Trump regime has shown Trump that he can continue to plow forward with his authoritarian agenda without meaningful opposition from Congress."

Van Hollen, first elected to the Senate in 2016 and a former chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, positioned himself as the economic populist in the race. He told ABC's Martha Raddatz that Democratic leaders need to take on an economy "rigged in favor of the very wealthy." Voters, he argued, "haven't fully hired the Democrats" despite rejecting Trump's policies. "We're given a chance. We need to earn people's trust."

He also wants to kill the legislative filibuster, calling it "anti-democratic" and "not in our Constitution." The Post Millennial noted that this aligns him with the party's far-left wing—and that Republican Majority Leader John Thune's refusal to touch the filibuster may have cost the GOP its majority by blocking the SAVE Act. On ABC, Van Hollen softened slightly, saying he would not immediately push elimination but that the rule should eventually be reformed.

Not every Democrat is convinced. The New York Post reported that Sen. Angus King of Maine questioned why the party would replace its leader after winning the midterms. Van Hollen dismissed the skepticism. "This really is a response to the call of the voters," he said on CNN.

The uniparty spent years building a protest machine to mobilize the streets against Trump. Now that machine wants Schumer's seat—or his head. The billionaires who funded the mobs are getting their return on investment either way. The only open question is whether Senate Democrats hand the caucus to a man backed by Soros-funded activists, or whether Schumer's grip holds for another term.