As Democrats chose to shut down the government instead of rubber-stamping Donald Trump’s Big Ugly Contemptible Act, one thing should be clear: They had no choice.
It’s time to fight. Long past time. If not now, as the millenia-old call to action warns, when?
The questions now are whether Dems are risking too much — I vote no — or whether they’re making this shutdown too much about policy and not enough about Trump’s daily assault on American lives — I vote yes — not to mention Trump’s daily assault on American democracy.
Dems dodged a fight back in March, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries caved to Trump, saying it wasn’t the right time for a shutdown battle, enraging the progressive wing of the party and also tens of millions of rank-and-file Dems.
Schumer and Jeffries have no choice this time — if they hold any hope of keeping their phony-baloney jobs, that is.
Which isn’t to say Dems have chosen the right fight. I wonder if fighting over Obamacare subsidy cuts, health insurance rates and Medicaid access — as important as they might be — is too much the kind of battle you have with a president who respects his own office. Trump is not that president, of course. In the normal course of affairs, Trump is as abnormal as you can find.
And so it isn’t enough to debate policy. The shutdown needs to be a call to arms (figuratively, of course) against Trump, authoritarianism and a nonstop assault on the Constitution.
Sure, a shutdown always presents a gamble. And nobody can say with any real conviction how this one will turn out.
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Sure, Trump seems to welcome the shutdown. As he put it, a shutdown would allow him to “do things” to Democrats — like openly embracing and quickly implementing Project 2025, which Trump used to say he’d never heard of — that would be “bad for them and irreversible by them.”
Of course, Trump has been doing “bad things” without a shutdown. As one pundit put it, Trump is saying he will either make major cuts to government if Dems don’t go along with his contemptible bill — or that he’ll continue to make major cuts to government if Dems do go along.
Sure, Trump is cutting off funding exclusively in blue states. Sure, Trump is shutting down billions of dollars’ worth of projects exclusively in blue states. Sure, Trump is threatening to fire millions of federal workers who are now being furloughed. Sure, pain is the point.
And there’s no guarantee Democrats would even win this showdown. Or that moderate Dems would be in it for the long haul. When John Hickenlooper was explaining his vote to The Colorado Sun not to approve the budget deal, he said he predicted the shutdown might last a week or two. I’m predicting that if the Democrats hold firm, the shutdown might approach, or even surpass, the 35 days of the last Trump shutdown. I mean, why would Trump back down?
And yet.
As I said, Dems had no choice. They have to stand up to Trump. The real question was how.
Trump and his henchmen control the entirety of the federal government. They are sending in the National Guard to blue cities, with the pretense of fighting crime. They rounded up all the top generals and admirals from around the world to tell them to hold the Trump line, to instill Pete Hegseth’s clownish version of the “warrior ethos,” and, most disturbingly, for the military to “train” in Democratic cities, saying they need to “fight the enemy within.”
ICE and other federal officials are now detaining Spanish-speaking workers and other brown-skinned people who might not have legal documentation, even as some of them actually do. They are now rounding up children in immigration raids in Chicago. They are indicting or investigating those on Trump’s enemies list, with James Comey as the most prominent target — so far.
They kill suspected Venezuelan drug runners in international waters, against national and international law. They are threatening the funding of colleges and universities unless they give Trump unprecedented authority over them. My, uh, favorite Trump demand is that schools would have to agree not to “belittle” conservative thought, meaning our major houses of learning would have to belittle the First Amendment in order to appease Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump is sending out AI-generated deepfakes of Democratic leaders — you may have seen the Hakeem-Jeffries-in-a-sombrero-and-mustache video — as a way to convince voters that Democrats are shutting down the government in order to provide benefits for undocumented immigrants. Jeffries called the videos racist. JD Vance called them funny. Furloughed workers, meanwhile, are seeing their voicemail messages at work changed to blaming the shutdown on “radical left Democrats.”
And that’s just this week.
Trump may be losing politically — his poll numbers are down, and as the shutdown began, a Washington Post poll showed that voters blamed Trump and Republicans over Democrats by a 47-30 count — but he’s winning in the fight to become a full-blown authoritarian, which would mean he doesn’t have to worry about polls.
The one thing Democrats must do is be heard. A shutdown, as columnist Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times, is a crisis, and in times of crisis, people pay attention, meaning Democrats would finally be heard.
Being heard is critical. Being heard, in one example being cited, means putting pressure on those MAGA voters who make up large portions of nearly every blue state that is under literal attack. When Trump hurts, say, Colorado, more than 40% of those being hurt may have voted for Trump.
The question heard now is whether Dems are asking for enough. They have to look strong to counter the Phony Strongman in Chief. If they’re going to have a shutdown, shouldn’t they have a real showdown as the 2026 midterms grow ever closer?
It isn’t that Obamacare and Medicare aren’t issues worth going to the mat for. As an impactful video from Bernie Sanders and AOC shows, millions will lose their health insurance and tens of thousands would die each year. That’s real. That’s more than real.
But here are some examples, as proposed by Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark, that Democrats should demand:
To force a vote for D.C. statehood, to end the masking of ICE agents and other federal officers who are terrorizing some people in blue cities, to shut down Trump’s use of “emergency” loopholes that he has relied on for tariffs and deportations, to remove the secretary of state’s power to revoke visas.
That’s a start. But is it a fight that could be won?
Would moderate Dems hold out for democracy, which voters showed in 2024 was not exactly top of mind when they elected Trump for a second time? Would Trump ever give in to those kinds of demands? After all, his theory of the case — or Russell Vought’s theory anyway — is that voters would see that a decimated government will work just fine for them, unless, you know, they want to visit a national park or, I don’t know, go to college.
I don’t know the answer. I do know that Trump’s actions are unpopular, and his tariffs threaten to weaken the national economy, not to mention the economy of everyday workers.
And I freely admit this choice could be a disaster for Democrats, which would be a disaster for the country. The most important thing for Democrats to do is win back the House next year, as they’re slightly favored to do by most analysts, especially as the economy continues to dip.
A shutdown could add more chaos to the everyday chaos of the Trump administration, with Democrats, in the end, getting the blame for the added chaos and not getting much else.
But the shutdown — win or lose — could also show strength and show voters that Democrats stand for something important while Trump stands for persecuting his enemies, for steamrolling the Constitution, for enlisting the armed forces to become his police force, for terrorizing innocents who speak the “wrong” language, for — yes — robbing millions of their health care, for a display of presidential corruption unprecedented in modern times.
People say Democrats, whose polling stands at record lows, lack a message. Surely, they lack a leader who can effectively endorse a message. Joe Biden couldn’t. Kamala Harris couldn’t. I don’t know which 2028 Democratic presidential hopeful can.
But the message must be about Trump, and not just about his cruel health care cuts. And when Democrats are heard, as a shutdown ensures, they must be heard saying that nothing about the Trump restoration is normal and that the awakened (vs. woke) opposition — Dems, never Trumpers, betrayed independents and even some Republicans who think Trump has broken his promises to fix government — can provide the way out of this mess.
It may be a long shot. But may also be the best shot Democrats have.
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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