Dems Reward the Hostage-Taker
Perhaps ending the shutdown was the responsible thing to do. But by caving, Democrats risk legitimizing Trump’s maximum-pain shutdown tactics.
Lots of news to chew on today, but we’d be remiss not to mention this at the top: Donald Trump got mega-booed by D.C. fans when he showed up at the Washington Commanders’ game yesterday.
Not the biggest deal in the world—but it seems appropriate, given that Trump appears interested in strong-arming the team’s owners into naming their new stadium after him. Happy Monday.
So Much For All That
by Andrew Egger
After weeks of impasse, the government shutdown is ending at last. Yesterday afternoon, a centrist group of eight Senate holdouts1 broke ranks, striking a deal with Republicans to end the longest-ever lapse in government funding. What do Democrats have to show for it?
Despite the flood of understandable anger and discontent coming from progressives right now, the answer is: a fair bit.
From an ordinary-times electoral-positioning standpoint, Democrats inarguably got at least one very important win: They have placed a glaring spotlight on Republicans’ refusal to renew the Obamacare healthcare subsidies, hanging the blame for spiking healthcare costs around their necks as the midterms draw near. And they have exposed once again the remarkable callousness of the Trump administration, which spent the last week of the shutdown fighting tooth and nail in court to avoid paying out this month’s SNAP benefits to food-stamp recipients. These things may prove useful to Democrats’ prospects as they try to build toward a blue wave next year. It’s not hard to paint a picture to voters of a president who spends his November yanking food away from the poor while he dines on seafood towers with the mega-wealthy at a Great Gatsby party at his palatial Florida club. It’s not a bad thing to tell those same voters that your party decided that was simply not acceptable.
But we do not live in ordinary times. And from the standpoint of wielding the leverage they have to bring a power-drunk, increasingly authoritarian White House to heel, it’s hard to argue this shutdown was anything but a Democratic failure.
Some of the seeds of that failure were likely baked in from the start. By picking the Obamacare subsidies as their shutdown issue—as opposed to, say, any of Donald Trump’s illegal usurpations of the legislature’s power—Democrats were digging in on an area where they were confident they already enjoyed broad popular support. But that decision also locked them into an argument that became more difficult to sustain as the shutdown dragged on. “We’re shutting down the government because we can’t accept the level of economic pain this policy change is going to inflict on the American people” is a difficult posture to maintain as pain piles up from the shutdown itself.
But what’s most perplexing about the decision of these eight caucusing Democrats to fold now is the timing.
According to the grisly political scoring of the shutdown blame game, the Democrats’ position was strengthening, not weakening. Polls consistently showed the public was disproportionately blaming the GOP and the White House for the impasse. Democrats got a strong vote of relative confidence in last week’s off-year elections. And it’s hard to argue Republicans weren’t starting to sweat, with Donald Trump starting to push every button on the dashboard in an attempt to shake something loose: demanding the Senate abandon the filibuster and firing off cockamamie ideas about mailing out stimulus checks in lieu of restoring healthcare subsidies.
In the end, none of that mattered. All that mattered was two things. The first was that Democrats were unlikely to ever convince Trump to get to the negotiating table (which was the only way they were going to extract any policy wins). The second was that the shutdown ultimately exceeded their pain threshold before it exceeded the Republicans’ pain threshold.
“The question was, does the shutdown further the goal of achieving some needed support for the extension of the tax credits? Our judgment was that it will not,” Sen. Angus King told reporters yesterday. “And the evidence for that is almost seven weeks of fruitless attempts to make that happen.”
What “concessions” did Democrats get for their cave? Again, not nothing. They got a promise from Majority Leader John Thune for a standalone vote on Obamacare subsidies in December—a vote that is pretty much guaranteed to be dead on arrival, with all Democratic leverage vanishing as the shutdown ends. They got some good outcomes for federal workers: an unraveling of the widespread firings Trump tried to carry out in the early days of the shutdown, as well as a prohibition on those firings so long as the soon-to-be-passed funding deal is law. They also got assurances that workers furloughed during the shutdown will receive their back pay and an increase in funding for SNAP benefits.
If you’re a federal worker, if you’re a poor parent hoping to feed your family, this is good news.
But by treating these things as “concessions,” Democrats are ultimately rewarding Trump for his bare-knuckle shutdown tactics. It is plain-letter federal law—a law Trump himself signed in his first term—that furloughed workers be given back pay at the end of a shutdown. And yet the White House pretended all along that this law simply didn’t exist, and that back pay for workers was something it was up to Democrats to win back at the negotiating table. For Democrats to treat federal workers getting back pay as a hard-won concession is to legitimize the administration’s ridiculous tactics.
Concessions or no concessions, maybe reopening the government was the right thing to do anyway. I am not a SNAP recipient. I am not a federal worker or an air traffic controller. I’m not even flying anywhere for Thanksgiving. The shutdown’s economic pain was not my pain; perhaps I’d feel differently if it were.
But I can’t help feeling like the biggest takeaway from all this is that Donald Trump learns another lesson in the virtues of brazening it out. He is willing to shoot the hostage, and the Democrats are not. That this ultimately strengthens his negotiating hand is a freeing lesson for him—especially because there is a non-zero chance we repeat this all over again at the end of January when the funding deal will run out. There’s a reason you’re not supposed to negotiate with terrorists.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Elise Stefanik’s Bad Bet on MAGA Politics… For a promise of power, she has let herself be yanked around. Now she’s launched a longshot, Trumpian campaign for governor of New York, writes JILL LAWRENCE.
Gen Z: They’re Zooming Apart… On The Focus Group, RACHEL JANFAZA joins SARAH LONGWELL to break down why young women are drifting left while young men move right, how their priorities diverge, and what Gen Z’s loneliness and tech habits reveal about their politics.
No One Matters to Trump But Trump… His self-serving treatment of last week’s elections shows his disregard for his party, argues WILL SALETAN.
Why MAGA Loves Illiberalism… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN talk with LAURA K. FIELD about her new book: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right—from Claremont and the “Flight 93” essay to post-liberalism, Catholic integralism, national conservatism, and the theocratic ambitions that shape today’s Trumpist movements.
This State Will Determine If Dems Win the Senate—and Give an MRI of Their Soul… A three-way contest for the nomination in Michigan is a microcosm of the debate over the party’s future. JONATHAN COHN lays it out in The Breakdown.
The Revolutionaries Were Exactly Like Us… On How to Fix It, KEN BURNS joins JOHN AVLON for a conversation that feels like a pep talk America desperately needs.
Quick Hits
[OPRAH VOICE] YOU GET A PARDON! YOU GET PARDON!! EVERYBODY GETS A PARDON!!!: While you were sleeping, Donald Trump issued a slew of pardons for those allies who assisted in his bid to undo the results of the 2020 election. The murderer’s row of failed saboteurs include Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, Ken Chesebro, Christina Bobb, Kelli Ward, and Jenna Ellis.
While we personally would feel a deep sense of embarrassment and shame to be on such a list, those who put it together acted triumphant. Ed Martin, Trump’s henchman at DOJ, attached the announcement of the pardons to a May 2025 tweet titled: “No MAGA left behind.”
Still, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney notes, the pardons themselves were basically symbolic: “[N]one of those identified were charged with federal crimes. The document posted by Martin is also undated, so it’s unclear when Trump signed it. The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.”
DO YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?: If watching Trump run the country into the ground this year has been a tragedy, watching him do the same to D.C.’s Kennedy Center has been more like a farce. The president has taken a bizarrely heavy hand with the venue, appointing himself chair of the board and turning over its daily management to a gang of showbiz neophytes picked primarily for their dedication to stamping out wokeness. Ticket sales are cratering, the venue is hemorrhaging staff, and morale is in the basement. But hey, at least they’re not putting on any drag shows!
The New York Times’s Shawn McCreesh has a great new piece about the center’s dismal state of affairs, and it’s full of delicious little details. Take, for instance, the section on executive director Ric Grenell—about whom “the most important thing to understand” is “that he did not want this job.” He wanted to be secretary of state. Instead, he found himself as Trump’s theater manager, apparently on the strength of his being married to a man who once danced on Broadway. Grenell insisted his staff call him “the ambassador,” proclaimed his desire to run Kennedy Center programming that could “be like Paula Abdul,” and fired the center’s longtime dance director in favor of a fellow who promised to “end the dominance of leftist ideologies in the arts and return to classical ballet’s purity.”
There’s plenty more where that came from. Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
The defectors were Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Tim Kaine of Virginia, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.
Duffy threatened their Thanksgiving travel plans and they blinked.
There's a way to message this that's not weak. All the cavers have to say is "Republicans have made clear that they are perfectly content to let Americans starve and have Thanksgiving travel plans to see family disrupted in order to avoid seriously dealing with the costs of health insurance for Americans who do not have the luxury of employer provided insurance. While some may view our decision as a point of weakness, let's not forget this white house allowed this shut down to drag on so long American soldiers were getting food at food banks"
It's a deal that could have been made 5 weeks ago without all the harm and carnage.
Democrats just reinforced to the GOP that if they just hold out long enough, they will eventually cave.