The shutdown showdown is another dangerous Trump power play
By the time you read this, the federal government will be shut down. This kind of regularly scheduled uncertainty used to be something that embarrassed our political leaders and our nation. Now it’s just one more sign of our increasingly unstable and chaotic times.
President Trump’s political extremism has once again careened the nation to the brink of closure. This time he can’t even pretend to care.
For the millions of Americans who have grown numb to government dysfunction, resolving the current shutdown crisis only means resetting the countdown clock for the next crisis. Republican officials from Capitol Hill to the White House have abandoned even the pretense of serving their constituents.
Faced with such apathy, it’s no surprise that only a third of Americans still believe in their government. Trump couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to swipe even more authority from our nation’s gridlocked and widely hated legislative branch.
The federal government increasingly feels unable to handle even the basic task of keeping itself open, and voters see repeatedly that their leaders never learn the lessons of the last crisis. A majority of Americans blamed Trump and his GOP enablers for the last shutdown in 2019, with supermajorities disapproving of how Republicans handled the entire negotiating process. Yet this week’s shutdown drama has played out as if 2019 never happened.
People already have plenty of problems closer to home than worrying about whether the adults they elected can actually do their jobs. Food, fuel and housing costs are rising. New tariffs on common home improvement goods such as lumber and cabinets are about to hit Americans square in their already-strained wallets. Federal workers have to fear not only furloughs but Trump’s threats of additional mass firings should the government shut down.
The political theater of it all is absolutely exhausting to regular Americans who would never dream of acting this way at their own jobs. There have been 13 shutdown standoffs since former Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, and each one was resolved at the last minute after a period of media-friendly brinksmanship. American families are forced to make contingency plans every time Congress has a temper tantrum. No government that cares about its people should ever work this way.
A plurality of Americans (38 percent) say they would blame Trump and Republicans for a shutdown, for the very good reason that Republicans control every branch of government and have repeatedly walked away from meaningful negotiations. That number is slightly higher among independents, 41 percent of whom would place blame on Trump for any interruption in government funding and services. But even with sizable pluralities of angry voters, it is unclear whether disapproval is enough to move a government this intensely polarized by partisanship.
We saw that polarization in full bloom on Tuesday, when House Democrats tried and failed to be recognized during the morning’s pro forma session. Ignoring them was a pure political point, especially since their Republican colleagues chose to grant themselves another week-long vacation in the midst of shutdown negotiations. For the millions of Americans who have unwillingly become fluent in the empty stagecraft of Washington, yesterday’s power politics further confirmed just how ineffective our nation’s legislative branch has become.
Congressional dysfunction plays directly into Trump’s agenda of gradually accumulating many of the taxing and spending powers explicitly vested in Congress by the Constitution, as he did with his controversial “pocket rescission” of $4 billion in foreign aid previously appropriated by Congress. Two weeks ago, Congress made that job even easier when it voted against challenging the highly dubious tariff powers that Trump has claimed.
Most Americans greeted those twin developments with a shrug, because autocracy is always accepted more easily when a nation’s deliberative functions begin to fail. If Congress won’t do the work, voters reason, someone should. Trump is more than willing to take advantage of Congress’s sustained inaction for his own benefit, with the full knowledge that a compliant Republican House will go along with even his most extreme legal oversteps.
The more than a dozen shutdown showdowns since 2021 have convinced plenty of voters that their lawmakers simply aren’t up to the job. That’s an invitation for Trump’s strongman regime to seize even more authority, under the guise of making the government’s trains run on time. By repeatedly failing their constituents, lawmakers have done far worse than just humiliate themselves. They have primed the public to accept even more Trumpian power grabs in the future.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.