In about three weeks, the government’s funding will run out. Democrats will face a choice: Join Republicans to fund a government that Trump is turning into a tool of authoritarian takeover and vengeance, or shut the government down. Democrats faced a version of this choice six months ago. “The chainsaw for bureaucracy.” We were in the full muzzle velocity stage of the presidency. More mass firings in the US government froze federal funding on projects across the country. He is taking retribution. The law firms have to behave themselves. Sweeping tariffs. But why. Canada? And Democrats at that moment seemed completely overwhelmed and outmatched. We will win. We will win. I kept hearing people say they lacked a message, but that’s not what they lacked. What they lacked was power. They didn’t have power. They didn’t have the House or the Senate, but they did have one sliver of leverage: In order to fund the government, Senate Republicans needed Democratic votes, not just one or two votes. They needed at least seven Democrats to reach that magic 60 vote threshold in the Senate. All eyes are on Democrats. And what. they’ll do. House Democrats wanted a shutdown, but now I can report that the Senate Democratic leader himself, Chuck Schumer, told Chuck has told Democrats that he plans to vote Yes, and he encouraged a crucial number of his colleagues to do the same. The bill passed. I appreciate Senator Schumer, and I think he did the right thing. To many Democrats, this seemed completely insane. I think it is a huge slap in the face, and I think that there’s a wide sense of betrayal. This was Democrats first real opportunity to fight back against Donald Trump. And what had they done? They’d folded immediately. What were they good for I’m afraid that it may be time for the Senate Democrats to pick New leadership as we move forward. During this period, this early schism in Democratic strategy, I was talking to people on all sides of it. Hakeem Jeffries argument was that a shutdown creates a crisis. A crisis creates attention and attention gives Democrats the chance to make their case to the American people. Schumer’s argument was threefold. First, Trump was being stopped in the courts. There were dozens of cases playing out against him, and he was losing again and again and again, Shut down the government, and you might eventually shut down the courts, freeing him from that constraint. Second, DOGE was trying to gut the executive branch. When the government falls into a funding crisis, the executive gets more authority to decide where the money the government does have goes. In that chaos, DOGE could go farther and faster. Third, the market was already quaking at the threat of Trump’s tariffs. Trump is calling it a period of transition. Many investors perhaps seeing something more concerning. If Democrats triggered a shutdown at that exact moment — at the moment, Trump is creating an economic crisis — they would confuse who was to blame for all the turbulence. It’s the first rule of politics. When your opponent is drowning, don’t throw them a lifeline. It was an act of strength, of courage, and I knew that most people wouldn’t agree with me. And these three arguments, I thought there was a fourth. Democrats had not prepared for a shutdown. They had not explained to themselves or to the public why they would be shutting the government down, or what they wanted to achieve. They had no strategy. They had no message. They didn’t have any clear demands. The one demand I did hear them discussing was that the spending bill needed more bipartisan negotiation. It was just unbearably lame and off key. And so if you had forced me to choose at that moment, I thought Schumer was probably right. It wasn’t the time for a shutdown, in part because Democrats weren’t prepared to win one. But that bill that passed back in March funding the government, it runs out at the end of this month. And so now we’re facing the question again, should Senate Democrats partner with Senate Republicans to fund this government? I don’t see how they can. Not a single argument Schumer made then is valid now. First, Trump is not losing in the courts. Not anymore. This is the story that no one is talking about. And that’s that. The Trump administration is on a major winning streak right now at the Supreme Court. On a recent episode, I asked the law professor, Kate Shaw, what powers the recent set of Supreme Court decision seemed to grant Trump that Barack Obama or Joe Biden just didn’t think they had. Here’s her answer. I mean, I think refused to spend money appropriated by Congress, remove heads of independent agencies protected by statute from summary firing fire. Civil servants without cause. Dismantle federal agencies. Also, just the practices under the Constitution. They didn’t think they had the power to use the power of the state to reward friends and punish enemies, and engage in self-dealing and enrichment. That is a preliminary list, but I think it’s a long one. Those powers Democrats were afraid of Trump getting? He’s got them. Second, the scale of DOJ’s assault on the government has shrunk. Trump and Elon Musk went through a very messy and very public breakup. But the real reason it didn’t continue, I think, is that now it’s Trump appointees running these agencies. They don’t want their own agencies wrecked. And either way, the Supreme Court has already given Trump vast power to reshape the federal workforce in the way he chooses. He doesn’t need a shutdown to do it. Third, the markets have settled into whatever this new normal is, at least for now. Trump’s tariffs are unpopular, but what damage they have done to him politically, they’ve already done, or they’re only going to do over time as price increases squeeze Americans. Democrats cannot stand back and hope the markets are going to do their work for them. But something else has changed, too. We are no longer in the muzzle velocity stage of this presidency, where Donald Trump is trying things and seeing what sticks. We are in the authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency. I want to be very clear about what I’m saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government. He’s using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under mafia rule, get the trash picked up. buy cement. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the mafia’s power and wealth. This is what Donald Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop. Just in the last few months, we’ve watched Trump fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the jobs data. We watched him fire the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. After the agency suggested that the administration’s strike on Iran only set their nuclear program back by a couple of months. We watched Trump mused about firing Jerome Powell because he wanted interest rates lower. Powell, of course, being the chair of the Federal Reserve. And now we’re watching him try to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, for alleged mortgage fraud. We’ve watched Trump Sic his government on Senator Adam Schiff and Attorney General Tish James of New York. Again, allegations of mortgage fraud. I’m going to note that this is not coming after the Trump administration conducted an exhaustive review of the mortgage documents of every person serving in the executive branch right now. This is just what authoritarian governments do they have a lot of information. If you look hard enough and everyone has either done something wrong or even if they haven’t, you can cause them a lot of trouble by just saying they have. We’ve watched Trump suggest the FCC should pull the broadcast licenses for NBC and ABC, “because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our democracy.” We watched the Trump administration force the resignation of a series of Republican prosecutors because they would not drop their case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. “Game over. Eric” And the Trump administration seemed to have decided it would be more convenient to have Adams in their pocket than defending himself in court. The Trump administration is weighing potential job offers for Mayor Adams. John Bolton became a critic of Trump’s after serving in his first administration. No, I don’t think he’s competent to be president. I think that his political instincts are all about Donald Trump. A couple of weeks ago, Trump’s FBI raided his house. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey Governor, criticized Trump on TV. Donald Trump sees himself as the person who gets to decide everything. He absolutely rejects the idea that there should be separation between criminal investigations and the politically elected leader of the United States. When I listen to Chris speak his hate, I say oh, what about the George Washington Bridge. He blamed other people, but he knew all about it. So no, I don’t know if they want to look at it. It’s not for me. If they want to look at it, they can. Trump has an enemies list, and he’s using the power of the federal government to punish and harass his foes. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal. We’ve watched the Trump family invest heavily in crypto, starting its own coins and companies, and then use their political power and Fame to Hoover in investment. We’ve watched over the past few years as a Saudi, and the Qataris and the Emiratis have made huge investments billions of dollars in Trump family, businesses, and crypto coins. In March, Forbes estimated that Trump’s worth had more than doubled to more than $5 billion just over the past year. It pays to be King, Forbes wrote. It pays to be King. We’ve watched Trump deploy the National Guard to Angeles and then to Washington, DC, with more cities expected to come under federal military occupation soon. Did you make your mind up on Chicago, though? Well, we’re going in. I didn’t say when. We’re going in. We’ve watched masked ICE agents conducting raids all over the country, refusing to reveal their faces, badge numbers or warrants. No, you can’t. We’ve watched Trump systematically purge the government of Inspector generals, of Jags, of military officers, of federal prosecutors. Anyone who seems like they might stand in the way of his corruption, or his accumulation or exercise of power. It is an astonishing fact that the January 6 rioters have been pardoned, and dozens of the Justice Department lawyers who prosecuted them have been fired. You often hear this line this is how authoritarianism happens. No, this is authoritarianism happening. Look at Donald Trump in his Oval Office, festooned with gold. His masked agents roaming the streets. Listen to these cabinet meetings where his appointees compete to lavish him with a kind of praise that would have made Fidel Castro blush. And there’s only one thing I wish for. That Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace this noble award was ever talked about to receive that reward Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker. Tell me that is not what authoritarianism looks and sounds like. And so the question is, what are Democrats going to do about it. What can they do about it. I think the case for a shutdown is this. A shutdown is an intentional event. It’s an effort to turn the diffuse crisis of Trump’s corrupting the government into an acute crisis that the media that the public will pay attention to. Now, Democrats have no power, so no one cares what they have to say. A shutdown would make people listen, but then Democrats would have to actually win the argument. They would need to have an argument in my head. The argument is something like this. Donald Trump won the election. He is the legitimate president. His government should be funded. So long as it is acting the way the government is supposed to serving the people, being held accountable. But there are red lines that cannot be crossed. ICE can conduct legitimate deportations, but it can’t be masked men roaming the streets refusing to identify themselves or their authority. Remember your right to remain silent. The Trump family cannot be hoovering in money and investments from the countries that depend on us and fear our power and our sanctions. There have to be inspectors general and Jags and career prosecutors watching to make sure the government is being run on behalf of the people, rather than on behalf of the Trump family. Democrats would have to pick a small set of policies. Policies that represent the larger set of problems and stick to them. They’d have to choose those policies wisely. They would have to hold the line even when it got tough. And right now, Democrats have not picked those policies. They’ve not settled on that message. Now, they are no more prepared for a shutdown than they were in March. There’s an ongoing debate inside the party on whether they should talk about Trump’s corruption and authoritarianism at all, or instead just say that armed troops in DC are a distraction from the price of groceries and health care. And look, the reality is that Democrats best issue is health care. Trump has looted Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for him and his friends, and Democrats should never let the voters forget it. But I don’t think it’s impossible to turn these two realities into one story. Corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescriptions. Corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied. So Trump promised to attack a broken system, I get it. Ripe target. But here’s the thing. He’s a crook and a con man. And he wants to be a King. Yes, the system really is rigged, but Trump’s not rigging it. He’s rerigging it for himself. I think that argument works. But I am to be clear on the side of this debate that says Democrats cannot pretend this is a normal Republican administration and a normal political moment. They cannot ignore masked men in the streets, armed troops in the cities, billions of money going into the Trump family’s pockets, an administration that spins off multiple scandals in a week that would have consumed other presidencies for years. If Democrats cannot make an issue out of all that, then they’re screwed. And so are we. And you know what. We might be. Even if Democrats could agree on a message, do they have the messengers have Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer distinguished themselves as here as able to win an argument. Are they going to hold the line as national parks close closed down as federal employees are furloughed if checks stop going out the door. If flights are delayed because air traffic controllers aren’t getting paid. I don’t know that they will. We all want to pursue a bipartisan, bicameral appropriations process. It is absolutely the case that Democrats could lose a shutdown. But whatever they’re doing right now, it’s not called winning. According to Gallup, the Democratic Party is polling at 34 percent lower than Donald Trump, lower than the Republican Party, the lowest level in the decades that Gallup has been asking the question. What’s happening here is that Democrats are so unpopular because of their own side is losing faith in them. One flashing Warning sign is fundraising. Democrats are just failing to raise money. The Democratic National Committee under Ken Martin has just been a disaster. At the end of June, the DNC had $15 million on hand as compared with the RNC’s 80 million. And it’s just been consumed with infighting that matters. Enthusiasm matters. The trust of your base matters. Democrats don’t just need people to want them to win. They need people willing to help them win. Make them win. The political scientist Russell Hardin made an argument. I’ve been thinking about a lot. Power is a coordination problem. Everyone in society, every person, every institution is a node of coordination. The secret of society is people do what others do. And so if you look at Democrats in Congress right now, the signal they’re sending is to not take any risks. Everything is normal. Just wait for the election and hope for the best. I think both that strategy, but also sending that signal is a mistake. The 2026 midterms are 14 months away. The machinery of the state is being organized to entrench Republican power through redistricting to control information, to punish and harass enemies, to create a masked paramilitary force roaming the streets. Do you just let that roll forward and hope for the best. I’m not going to tell you I’m sure Democrats should shut down the government. I’m not. At the same time, joining Republicans to fund this government is worse than failing at opposition. That is complicity. Democratic leaders have had six months to come up with a plan. If there is a better plan than a shutdown, great. But if the plan is still nothing, act normal and hope for the best, then Democrats need new leaders.
Opinion | If Democrats Have a Better Plan, I’d Like to Hear It
