Like many of you, I’m mad as hell that a group of eight weak-kneed Democratic senators broke ranks to join Republicans in ending the shutdown.
Like many of you, I wonder how Democrats could have willfully undercut their newfound momentum — as shown so convincingly in the recent elections — by giving up the fight. Especially knowing, as I wrote the other day, that a willingness to fight is the only thing Donald Trump understands.
Like many of you, I think it’s time for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down. He’s the wrong face for a forward-looking Democratic Party, which basically doesn’t have a leader now. Schumer either couldn’t hold Democrats together just when they seemed to be winning the shutdown battle or he actually facilitated — this is my guess — the endgame behind the scenes. Either is unacceptable.
The thing is, I think the Dems folded at exactly the wrong time. There would likely have come a point when a continuation of the shutdown turned the country against the Dems, but it wasn’t now. And it wouldn’t have been a week from now or anytime soon.
How did the eight senators think giving Trump, for example, a pass on airport chaos as the holidays fast approach — for very little in return — was a winning strategy? It leaves Democrats having to answer the what-was-the-point question, when it’s Democrats who should still be asking Trump what is the point of his unwillingness to see the suffering of working Americans, especially among those rural whites who voted for him in 2024.
Timing the end was never going to be easy, particularly when it’s impossible to predict what crimes against humanity Trump would present next. We know he was never going to fold on Obamacare subsidies, meaning Democrats could never actually walk away with a complete victory. But winning now matters.
History — or was it political analyst/poker aficionado Nate Silver? — teaches us that you don’t fold when you have the cards. Trump talks all the time about who has the cards. This time, the Democrats had them because Trump unwittingly — or is that redundant? — passed the winning cards to them.
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SUBSCRIBEWith the shutdown, the Trump/MAGA cruelty, their utter ruthlessness, came to the fore for all to see. And it got uglier by the day. Refusing to fund food stamps for the working poor. Chaos at the airports, as Thanksgiving approaches. Refusing to renew Obamacare subsidies, thereby ensuring that prices for health insurance for millions will double or more.
Voters not only blame Trump — again, as the election results showed — they see him, as his cratering approval ratings show. And with each day of the shutdown, it reminded voters of Trump’s ongoing cruelty. I can’t explain why so many couldn’t see it before, but I’m thinking now that, in the best case, it can’t be unseen. I mean, Trump really did hold a decadent Great Gatsby-style party at Mar-a-Lago the night before he cut off funding for food stamps.
And in folding — as renowned columnist Charlie Pierce noted — these senators sold out the No Kings marchers, sold out the voters who swept Dems of all stripes into office last week, sold out the judges who have stood up to Trump, even sold out the jurors who acquitted the sandwich guy.
Many defenders of the surrender and of Schumer say that much of the anger is on the online left and doesn’t hold across the Democratic landscape. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. I’m pretty sure that it misses the point entirely. When seven million take to the streets, it seems inarguable that you have a movement, which fed the off-off-year GOP shellacking.
But the anger, in my view, belongs to mainstream Democrats, a notion underlined by the fact that of the eight senators who voted to end the shutdown, two are retiring next year and the other six are not up for reelection in 2026.
And it should be noted that Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, both moderates, both voted no. I guarantee neither wanted to face angry Colorado voters — and not just the online left — next year if they had voted to end the shutdown.
In a news conference Tuesday, Bennet reiterated that he disagreed absolutely with the vote to end the shutdown, which, he said, highlighted every day Trump’s indifference to all those Americans who rely on, say, Medicaid or on SNAP payments, those who can’t afford to see their health insurance costs “doubling or tripling or even quadrupling.”
So why did Dems fold?
We should admit, even those of us saying that Democrats have played this all wrong, that Republicans have a far higher threshold for causing pain to voters than Democrats do. That’s a good thing, in its way. It’s what you’d like to think is true. And it’s undeniable that the pain was real.
We should also admit that fractious Democrats held together for more than 40 days — and that’s not only a shutdown record, it’s your basic miracle.
And we should admit, too, that even if the Trump-facing Supreme Court would have forced Trump’s hand in fully funding SNAP — which was not exactly a sure thing — that Trump was never going to fold on Obamacare subsidies. Instead he’s making an entirely unserious proposal — showing he doesn’t understand how insurance works — to just give subsidies to people to negotiate their own insurance deals.
But we can’t admit that the unwritten promise by Senate Majority Leader John Thune to allow a vote on Obamacare subsidies is anything other than a joke. No one — as in not a single person — thinks the Democrats could win that vote. And if the Dems somehow did, Speaker Mike Johnson was never going to allow a vote in the House. And even if that happened — it never would — Trump would simply veto it.
So, what to do next?
Republicans, because they can’t seem to help themselves, rejected Schumer’s last-ditch effort at compromise by asking for a one-year extension for Obamacare subsidies. I confess I didn’t figure this out immediately, but if Trump took the extension, it would take away the pain of the insurance hikes ahead of the midterm elections next year. He would wait until after the midterms and then bodyslam millions.
Trump should have grabbed the chance, but the supposed great deal maker is not exactly a great political strategist.
Shutdown or not, Democrats must continue to pound out the message each day that Trump owns the unnecessarily painful costs of health insurance, just as they can pound out the message each day that Trump’s tariffs are making ordinary Americans’ lives harder, just as they can point out every democratic guardrail Trump barrels through on his path toward authoritarianism.
A shutdown focuses the mind.
But ending the shutdown now, when Democrats had all the momentum, just focuses the mind on why the Dems didn’t have the courage to continue the fight.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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