Donald Trump wants the government shutdown, which today ties the record for the longest in American history, to end. You might say he’s desperate for it to end, because he’s gone back to the well of demanding the elimination of the Senate filibuster, so Republicans can pass government funding themselves. Killing the filibuster would be a great thing for the country and the world, but it also appears to be the one area where Republicans routinely defy their president, so I’m not holding my breath.
But the context of Trump seeking an escape hatch is worth exploring. If the president were confident that his strategy to make the shutdown painful for Democrats and force them into submission was working for him, his attitude would be far different. Yet his tactics have backfired. Washington’s paralysis is hurting Trump politically, raising the salience of the issues that reveal him as indifferent to public suffering and even cruel. Today’s elections will be one indicator of this, but the legacy of the shutdown miscalculation is likely to linger and define Trump as an unpopular lame duck. His authoritarianism can intimidate elites who seek accommodations with power, but it can’t fool ordinary people who aren’t bought off.
Trump’s first instinct with the shutdown, as with all things, was to punish his opponents. He tried mass layoffs and spending cuts in blue states. The layoffs were put on hold by the courts and the spending cuts were mostly to long-term projects, so the immediate effect was muted. And Trump has been laying people off and cutting spending to blue states all year; nobody bought that it would end if Democrats caved.
Related: The health insurance cost crisis is now upon us
I questioned the Democrats’ primary focus on health care as a policy strategy, but there can be little doubt that as a political strategy it’s been a major success, driving attention to the looming spikes in health insurance premiums that everyone seeking Affordable Care Act exchange coverage can now see during open enrollment. Trump briefly floated coming up with a new health care solution, the latest in a failed ten-year search by Republicans for any health care policy alternative that fits their ideological worldview. This has led to Republicans making ham-fisted arguments about how Americans don’t deserve health care and have been getting a good deal for too long. The Republican House literally not showing up for work for weeks has made this indifference and appearance of being out of touch look far worse.
It would be nice to have a real conversation about why health costs keep marching up endlessly (middlemen, complexity, and corporate control are major factors). But the sticker shock on ACA exchanges happens to fit with the biggest fear the public has right now: the rising cost of living. Republicans have consistently been blamed more for the shutdown than Democrats, but the discontent is bleeding into other issues. Democrats are suddenly trusted more on the economy, with rising insurance rates a symbol of Trump’s neglect of Americans’ well-being. Two-thirds of voters say Trump hasn’t delivered on cost of living and the economy, according to a recent NBC News poll. And with that being the primary policy topic in the country, Trump is extremely unpopular and Democrats have a big generic ballot lead for next year’s midterms.
On top of all that, the White House made an even bigger misstep, deciding to unilaterally and illegally cut off 42 million Americans from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds, which expired over the weekend. The fact that Trump had been moving mountains to pay troops and immigration enforcement personnel with dubious legality, when he wouldn’t use a fully legal contingency fund to make sure hungry people get fed, was bad enough. Holding a Great Gatsby–themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago the night before poor people discovered they weren’t getting their monthly food benefit anymore was much worse. It was so bad that the administration, faced with two rulings ordering them to fund SNAP, decided to comply, though only to provide half the monthly allotment. The decision was made so late that delays in the money going out will certainly ensue.
So on a political level, Democrats have succeeded (with Trump’s help) in painting Republicans as mean and unfeeling stewards of American decline, with no plans for how to reverse the slide. But that doesn’t translate into policy success. And here’s where I must tell you about how Democrats in Washington are pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.
The SNAP showdown was indicative of the whole reason the government is shuttered right now: Donald Trump doesn’t respect the laws of the country, and has repeatedly violated them to nullify the constitutional directive that Congress controls the power of the purse. He got caught doing this with SNAP and meekly changed his position. But outside of that, hundreds of billions of dollars have been withheld, and agencies have been illegally dismantled. How can Democrats make a spending deal with someone who won’t honor it?
I guess the answer is: by getting a pinky swear. For the past week, rank-and-file Democratic senators have been huddling with Republicans to reach agreement on fiscal year 2026 spending bills, as a crowbar to force open the government. There are eight Democrats in the gang, enough to break a filibuster on a funding bill. They are: Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Gary Peters (D-MI), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Peter Welch (D-VT), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Shaheen, Ossoff, Peters, and Baldwin are on the Appropriations Committee, and therefore the most invested in getting a deal with their fingerprints on it. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) isn’t involved in this bargain, but he’s not exactly discouraging it either.
The gang is seeking “strong assurances” from Republicans, presumably about the health insurance subsidies Democrats have put at the heart of the fight, in order to agree to fund the government. They may only be able to get anywhere by getting Trump involved in talks; obviously, his interest is to do it without Democratic involvement at all. So the question clearly becomes: What does “strong assurances” mean, and how can Democrats be satisfied with it if that meaning is unclear?
No party wants to concede a tangible ask in exchange for funding the government. They’d much rather give “assurances” or a promise of a vote. Democrats are dealing with incredibly untrustworthy people on that score: The Senate passed a bad government-funding bill in March with a promise that $1 billion taken away from the District of Columbia would be restored; seven months later, that has yet to happen because the House never passed it.
This is why you see some carping from more progressive Democrats about the trajectory of the endgame. “I don’t need a show vote. We need millions of Americans to be able to afford their health care,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to Semafor. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) penned a whole op-ed in The Guardian, warning that “the consequences will be catastrophic for our country” if Democrats cave, and that “[o]ur children and future generations will not forget what we do now.”
Sanders’s escalation suggests that a resolution is probably near. Democrats didn’t center Trump’s galloping authoritarianism in the shutdown fight, and so they are unlikely to get meaningful safeguards that whatever deal they make will be followed. That leaves only the health care subsidies. On the politics, Democrats already won: They made rising health care costs noticeable to people and tagged Republicans with the blame. On the policy, a vague assurance of some future fix seems far less than a victory.