Trump’s ‘Shoot the Hostage’ Shutdown Strategy
The White House's 3D-chess move: crushing the economy to own the libs.
Donald Trump’s shutdown strategy: Inflicting maximum economic pain on blue states, without much thought for who it actually hurts.
Bill’s off today to observe Yom Kippur—a day of reflection and atonement. And a day of darkness, too. This morning, we woke up to news of a stabbing at a synagogue in Manchester, England, killing at least two on this holiest day of the year for Jews. It is yet another reminder that houses of worship are increasingly targets of violence. Let’s all collectively pray, regardless of our individual faith, that this comes to an end. Happy Thursday.
A Gun to the Head of the Economy
by Andrew Egger
In theory, Donald Trump and his Republicans are the ones holding the cards in this current government shutdown fight. Democrats had plenty of good reasons to withhold their votes for a government funding bill.1 But it’s always risky being the party that directly provokes a shutdown. Unless you can convince the public that your policy priorities—in this case, renewing expiring health care subsidies—are worth playing hardball, you’re likely to take the blame. And that job is harder when you’re hopelessly outgunned in the realm of industrial-strength Ministry-of-Truth propaganda.2
Then there’s the other problem facing Democrats: They and their constituents will be feeling the shutdown pain more acutely than Trump and his. (Trump isn’t particularly bothered by the plight of federal workers—and he certainly doesn’t mind that, for instance, the Bureau of Labor Statistics wasn’t able to release what was likely to be a third consecutive alarming jobs report yesterday.) In theory, all Trump has to do is play it slow and wait for Democrats to cave.
But that’s not really his style, is it? Instead, Trump and his mooks are taking what you might call the “cartoon supervillain” shutdown approach. Yesterday morning, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced that the administration was freezing $18 billion in federal funding for two major New York City infrastructure works: the Hudson River Tunnel Project and the Second Avenue Subway project. The government was concerned, Vought said, that funding might be “flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.”
That’s right: The White House had suddenly decided—ten months into Trump’s term—that these contracts needed more Department of Transportation scrutiny. And, ah, wouldn’t you know it? That scrutiny can’t take place while the government is shut down. So Vought decided to put the whole thing on ice for the time being. Better safe than sorry—New Yorkers wouldn’t want a woke subway tunnel.
It was a blatantly illegal and nakedly transparent attempt to put the screws on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a fact Vice President JD Vance didn’t bother to hide during the White House press briefing yesterday. “I’m sure that Russ is heartbroken about the fact that he is unable to give certain things to certain constituencies,” the vice president smirked.
And Vought wasn’t done. A few hours later, he had a new announcement to make: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” he tweeted. Of the 16 affected states he named, all voted for Kamala Harris last year and have Democratic senators.
The heedlessness and shortsightedness here is staggering. Set aside the open, obscene partisanship, the loathsome fact that the White House seems to see inflicting economic pain on blue Americans as a worthwhile goal in itself. Although it’s worth wondering whether it will actually be blue America that suffers: The outer-borough blue-collar white guy has been a remarkably valuable voter for the GOP in recent years, handing Republicans a brace of New York congressional seats without which they would not hold the House majority today. Who exactly does Vought think works construction jobs in the Big Apple, or in any of the rest of those blue states?3
But it’s somehow stupider even than that. Keep in mind that all this is happening at a moment of remarkable economic precarity. The jobs data, rattled by tariff pain, looks more unsteady with each passing month; everyone from the chair of the Federal Reserve to the forecasters at Moody’s are warning of storm clouds on the economic horizon. And how does the White House respond to this moment? By firing potentially tens of thousands of federal workers and pulling the plug on a host of already funded and half-finished development projects, most notably in New York City, America’s biggest economic hub. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face—this is more like cutting off your arm.
Bulwark Live in NYC may be sold out, but there are still tickets for our Wednesday, October 8 show at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. Rep. Sarah McBride will join our Sarah Longwell on stage.
Plus: Mona Charen, Will Sommer, and Andrew Egger are joining Tim, Sarah, and JVL for a supersized Bulwark Live experience.
The Miracle of Vaccines
As RFK Jr. continues his campaign of destruction at HHS, it’s worth thinking about what the current moment is like for the vanishing generation of Americans who remember life before vaccines arrived on the scene to protect U.S. children from a host of devastating maladies. On today’s homepage, author and polio survivor Shelley Fraser Mickle describes the midcentury race to develop the vaccine that made her, happily, a “dinosaur” of an earlier, darker era:
I was 6 years old when I was diagnosed and rushed from my little cotton town in Arkansas to an isolation hospital in Memphis. I stayed there for three months, resting next to an iron lung to help me breathe if needed. It was the only thing I was really afraid of. After two days of sleeping off a fever, I woke up to find I was paralyzed from the waist down. The next day, my ability to sit up returned. But when two children near me died, I decided I was being saved for something. . . .
The triumph over the poliovirus cannot be fully appreciated without knowing about the intense competition between two physician-scientists: Salk and Albert Sabin. The human being’s love of competition doesn’t often look pretty—displaying our most selfish traits—yet many manmade miracles have come from a rush to end suffering and a desire to be recognized for it.
Born in New York City the child of Jewish Russian immigrants, Salk entered high school when he was only 12. He fell in love with science’s power to self-correct: Ask a question, try an experiment; if it fails, try another, and on and on until an answer appears.
When he was ready for medical school, his options were limited by the fact that elite universities openly discriminated against Jews. Salk entered New York University, which was inexpensive and open to Jewish students, and studied virology.
Albert Sabin, who was eight years older than Salk, came with his parents from Poland to escape the murderous pogroms that killed Jews after World War I. His family settled in New Jersey, where Sabin entered high school.
To work on his English, Sabin read Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif and Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, two major bestsellers of the 1920s that brought to life the intellectual adventures of medical science. If the stories romanticized the curing of diseases and dismissed the grueling work involved, Sabin did not care.
In his sixth year as president, Franklin D. Roosevelt struck a blow against polio by creating the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. This private charity launched the March of Dimes, which recruited Hollywood figures such as Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, and Bing Crosby to ask every American to send a dime to the White House, to go toward finding a cure. Americans knew Roosevelt had contracted the poliovirus when he was 39 years old, but few saw the effects. The president’s secret was preserved by a “splendid deception,” as writer Hugh Gallagher has described it. Roosevelt enjoyed a pact with the press, according to which he was never to be photographed being carried into a building or sitting in his wheelchair.
Few knew the president was actually paralyzed in the lower half of his body. His valet dressed him lying down to save the president’s energy. His braces were painted black to make them disappear in photographs. His suit pants were hemmed several inches too long so that when he sat down and crossed his legs, his pants would cover his braces. Strong men carried him where he needed to go: to his car, into buildings, below deck on a boat. When going upstairs, they lifted him by his elbows to make it seem as if he was walking between them. He gave speeches from his car, holding on to a pole to make it seem as if he were standing. When he gave his first inaugural address, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” he was fighting a pervasive fear that he would fall in public. After the famous call for dimes to be sent to the White House, so many dimes arrived that a truck had to haul them to the Treasury Department. Franklin Roosevelt’s image is now on every dime in tribute to his search for a cure.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The “Moral Monsters” Among Us… Immigrants are dying now. ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO wonders: Will people of good conscience speak up?
The Big Toronto Hangover Matinee… For our second international show, TIM, SARAH, and SAM take your questions.
‘The Smashing Machine’ Review… Some amazing sequences and strong acting, writes SONNY BUNCH, but an uncompelling and messy subject.
You Have to
Join theBe a Bulwark… On the flagship pod, KEN BURNS joins TIM MILLER to talk about his new documentary, The American Revolution, what lessons from history he tries to apply to our current politics, and how the country has navigated unrest in the past.
Quick Hits
‘GET A MASSAGE, GET A MASSAGE’: These guys just can’t get their story straight about one-time Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein. Last month, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Kash Patel said point-blank that the FBI had no reason to believe Epstein had ever trafficked the girls he abused to other powerful men. “There is no credible information, none,” he told Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “If there were, I would bring the case yesterday that he trafficked to other individuals.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who lived next door to Epstein in New York City for years, has a slightly different take. “This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever, blackmailed people. That’s how he had money,” he said in an appearance yesterday on the New York Post show “Pod Force One.”
“That’s what his MO was,” Lutnick said of Epstein’s dealings with the wealthy and powerful. “You know, ‘get a massage, get a massage.’ And what happened in that massage room, I assume, was on video.” Lutnick speculated that this was how Epstein had gotten off so lightly after facing the possibility of federal charges for abusing underage girls in 2008: “I assume, way back when, they traded those videos,” Lutnick said. “I mean, he’s a serial sex offender. How could he get 18 months and be able to go to his office during the day and have visitors and stuff? Must have been a trade.”
Epstein, in fact, served just thirteen months in state prison (with work release!) under the deal he negotiated at the time with then U.S. attorney Alex Acosta—who would go on to serve as secretary of labor in Donald Trump’s first term. But Lutnick said he hadn’t brought his Epstein theories up to the president: “I don’t speak to him about these kinds of—these are just distractions,” he said, suggesting Trump had more important stuff on his plate.
TROOPS IN THE STREETS: Another day, another round of wild rhetoric from the White House urging the military deployed in U.S. cities to not go too easy on the scum and vermin they’re there to whack. Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Pam Bondi were in Memphis yesterday to speak to a “task force” of National Guardsmen and law enforcement officers that are participating in Trump’s federal crackdown on the Tennessee city.
“We’re not here to second-guess you,” Hegseth said. “We’re here to have your back, to unleash you to do your job, so you come home safely.” The task force’s hands would be “untied to secure your city,” he said.
Not to be outdone, Miller had his own psychotic psych-up speech for the troops: “The gangbangers that you deal with—they think they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are. They think they’re hardcore? We are so much more hardcore than they are.”4 And lest these officers and soldiers forget whose political side they’re on, Miller added: “President Trump has decided this is a priority, and when President Trump makes a decision, this team behind me executes.”
DON’T SAY GREEN: The party of free speech is at it again. Department of Energy employees were given a list this week of banned words they are to avoid using in their work, per a leaked email obtained by NPR. Prohibited words and phrases include “climate change,” “decarbonization,” “clean energy,” and “energy transition,” with their prohibition extending, per NPR, “to the Energy Department website, internal reports and public documents, including those that describe federal funding opportunities.”
Trump, of course, has long nursed grudges against wind and solar power in particular, and Republicans have long been staunch allies of fossil fuel companies. But the banned-words rollout—which the Energy Department denies, despite the email NPR obtained—comes amid an increasingly hamfisted Republican attempt to make it official U.S. policy that “fossil fuel good, renewable fuel bad.” When Andrew was at the National Conservatism Conference last month, one notable phrase came from West Virginia Rep. Riley Moore, who called for America to become a “global juggernaut” in energy with an “all-of-the-below-the-ground approach.” All power is good, provided you make it by burning something you dug up. Seems that enforcing that sentiment is going to be the policy of the U.S. Department of Energy as well.
Cheap Shots
To wit: Their voters had been clamoring for Democrats to show some fight, and this is one of the only tools they had to do it. Republicans refused point-blank to negotiate on restorations of health-care funding. Donald Trump’s recent adventures in the realm of spending rescissions have done much to short-circuit the very idea of good-faith congressional dealmaking. And so on.
To hear the White House tell it, THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS ARE SHUTTING DOWN THE GOVERNMENT TO DEMAND FREE HEALTHCARE FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS!
Our Jonathan Cohn had a great profile last month of David Langlais, an union ironworker in Rhode Island who had been among the team building an offshore wind farm in the state—until the White House froze the project in August. “This whole thing,” Langlais said, “it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
If there’s one word we’d use to describe Stephen Miller, it’s definitely “hardcore.”
Repeat after me. The Republicans control the White House and Congress. Ergo, this is their shutdown.
Watching this crisis (the federal government shutdown) and Crisis (the entire regime and its wrecking ball taken to shared governance) has been a case study in psychological abnormality no less than political theater and gamesmanship. I suspect many a book eventually will be written about the sadism of those at and near the top of the administration and their open embrace of trying to harm the most perceived enemies possible, in the most abusive ways possible, short of physical torture. (Alas, give them time to figure out a way to get away with that. You just know they're thinking about it, trying to calculate what cards to play in order to justify it. We might as well say it out loud.)
Then there is the gross immaturity of it all, acting like little children when they know they can get away with something because adults aren't supervising them. The current openly racist sombreros-on-Jeffries idiocy, and the snide, giggling responses and justifications for it when called out on the bad behavior, is merely the latest embarrassment to our nation as the world watches and takes note of what a petty, spiteful, disrespectful, untrustworthy country we have become, one that, stripped of our economic and military power, increasingly they would want nothing to do with. The lack of accountability for it is most appalling. Another new poll showed up yesterday indicating that support for the Democratic Party has sunken to a new all-time low. And I ask "Because ... ?" when in fact it is the GOP that has all the levers of power federally -- the presidency, House, Senate, and Supreme Court. None of this makes any sense to a rational brain. It is a fool's errand that targeting just blue states for vengeance and pursuing overall public policies of retribution will not spill over and impact GOP supporters too, and in some particularly painful ways. Yet here we are, and nothing is being said or done en masse to send a message that there are limits to how far they can go. It all goes from bad to worse because enough people allow it to do so. And then what? Where is the sense that there eventually will be a limit, a red line that they cannot cross, when there are no restrictions placed on the bad behavior? This cannot end well for us all. Too many people refuse to see and or acknowledge it, waiting for it to hurt them too before saying, "Hey, wait a minute." Which, of course, is too late.
Our consolation prize will be the ability to say "Told you so." It is cold comfort in the face of how much will have to be rebuilt, and quite likely beyond our lifetime, when our chosen leadership is so childishly gleeful about tearing things down for spite and fun and enjoys ripping the wings off of flies. Aren't there any adults left in the room on the political right? If so, please report to the day care center known as the White House, as soon as possible. Your toddlers are behaving very badly, and now they also have matches in their hands and gasoline by their side.