Trump Isn’t Easing the Shutdown Pain—He’s Inflicting It
Mike Johnson says the president is protecting Americans from the shutdown. That’s completely wrong.
REPUBLICANS CLAIM TO HATE the government shutdown and the harm it has done to Americans. But Donald Trump keeps demonstrating the opposite. He’s using the shutdown to hurt Democrats and the people they represent.
Every day during the four-week standoff, House Republicans have held a press briefing to promote their theme of the day. Tuesday’s theme was “pain.” During the briefing, Speaker Mike Johnson used that word fourteen times to describe what Democrats were imposing and Republicans were trying to relieve.
“Republicans have been working very hard around the clock every day of this Democrat shutdown to do our best to reduce the pain for our constituents,” said Johnson. “What are the Democrats doing? . . . They’re bragging about using the American people’s pain as their political leverage.”
To illustrate his point, Johnson pointed to the White House.
“The executive branch in a shutdown has a large control panel full of dials,” he explained. “Under the Obama administration, they turned those dials, the pain dials, to 10,” because “they wanted it to hurt.” Johnson contrasted this with Trump’s behavior. “The Republican party is the opposite, and President Trump has proven that,” he said. “Every day of this shutdown, he has tried to move funds around” to pay troops, to feed women and children, and “to lessen the pain as much as possible.”
It’s comforting to imagine that a president feels our pain. But Johnson can’t hide the truth: Trump is a sadist, and his strategy in the shutdown has been to break the Democrats’ will by hurting the people they represent.
On October 1, the first day of the shutdown, Trump urged his party to capitalize on the impasse. “Republicans must use this opportunity of Democrat forced closure to clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud,” he wrote on Truth Social.
In case his delight and eagerness weren’t obvious enough, he underscored them the next day:
I have a meeting today with [OMB Director] Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.
On October 7, Trump crowed that the shutdown offered Republicans the chance “on a silver platter” to cut “billions and billions of dollars” in spending. Two days later, he made it clear that his goal wasn’t just to save money; it was to punish Democrats.
We’ll be making cuts that will be permanent. And we’re only going to cut Democrat programs. . . . We’ll be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly, because that’s the way it works. They [Democrats] wanted to do this. So we’ll give them a little taste of their own medicine.
Trump didn’t just brag about cutting programs; he bragged about firing federal employees. On October 10, a reporter asked him how many layoffs he had authorized. “A lot,” the president replied. “And it’ll be Democrat-oriented,” he added, because “they started this thing. . . . These are largely people that the Democrats want. Many of them will be fired.”
On October 14, a reporter asked Trump whether he might “reach out” to Democrats to resolve the shutdown. “No,” said Trump. There was no reason to do so, he explained, since the standoff gave him power to maim his political opponents and their favorite programs. “The Democrats are getting killed on the shutdown, because we’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs,” he gloated. “We’re being able to do things that we were unable to do before. . . . We’re closing them up, and we’re not going to let them come back. The Democrats are getting killed.”
Trump took particular delight in extinguishing projects that would benefit blue states, such as the Gateway tunnel between New York and New Jersey. “We’re getting rid of a lot of things that we never wanted, because of the fact that they [Democrats] made this stupid move,” he boasted on October 15. “The project in New York, it’s billions and billions of dollars that [Chuck] Schumer has worked twenty years to get. It’s terminated.”
A week ago, as the shutdown dragged on, Trump hosted Republican senators for an explicitly partisan lunch (“No Democrats are here, right?” he asked) to celebrate their unity in offering Democrats nothing to end the impasse. He solicited applause for Vought, thanking him for taking the opportunity to decimate Democratic programs. “Darth Vader, stand up,” the president told Vought, playing on the budget director’s reputation as a scourge of the left. “He’s cutting Democrat priorities, and they’re never going to get ’em back,” Trump told the Republican senators. By shutting down the government, he clucked, the Democrats “allowed us to do it.”
This is how Trump deals with everyone: foreign adversaries, foreign allies, governors, mayors, members of Congress, news organizations, universities, law firms, and CEOs. His go-to move, when he wants obedience or satisfaction, is to inflict suffering. That’s why he’s done nothing to end the shutdown and everything to exploit it.
Johnson is wrong. Trump isn’t trying to ease the pain; he’s trying to focus it on Democrats and their voters. To Trump, their pain isn’t a problem. It’s a weapon.
Will, Thanks for the reporting and commentary. Explain to me why Democrats aren't having a press conference everyday explaining what Trump & Co. are really doing like taking money from foreign governments, pardoning criminals, raising the cost of living, trashing the rule of law, ignoring the Constitution and my favorite, murdering people in the Caribbean a thousand miles away. Then they could play clips of his insane talk on a loop that would never end. Then they could remind the Republicans and the American people that the President has betrayed his oath of office, you know, to protect and serve ALL of the American people.
Mike Johnson isn't wrong. He's lying. He's got an agenda to push--religion. There's a reason Mike doesn't look particularly pained by any of this. Thing are going really well in his estimation. The government and President are deteriorating in real time. Win win for Mike Johnson.