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President Donald Trump rarely embraces a battle where he’s not the aggressor. The government shutdown fight is an exception to that rule.
Six years ago, Trump picked an unwinnable brawl over border wall funding, declaring that “I’ll be the one to shut it down. I’ll take the mantle.” The result was the longest partial government shutdown in US history.
This time around, he’s in a wildly different position — lobbying for the status quo, in part because the Republican Congress has already given him everything he wants.
And it’s Democrats who are now driving a strategy that could end in a shutdown over the extension of expiring insurance subsidies and reversal of Trump-backed Medicaid cuts. Trump is digging in because he knows a shutdown is “a misery march,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.
“He’s recognizing the Democrats really don’t have enough leverage here to convince the American people that we should shut the government down,” Capito added.
It’s a strange position for a president who spent much of his first term picking fights with Congress that he couldn’t win. Trump gets his way far more often from this Republican Congress, which means he’s entering the current cliff with more confidence.
He can embrace a simple stopgap funding bill without making big demands because he’s already gotten what he wanted from the recent party-line tax-cuts law, including border wall and immigration funding, a military spending boost, and a $5 trillion debt ceiling hike.
Should Washington tip into a shutdown, Trump’s fusillades against Democrats will be a welcome diversion from the Epstein case, a weakening economy, and other pressure points.
“The president is not going to negotiate from a position of weakness,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio. “We passed ‘one big beautiful bill’ to avoid [Democrats] being able to hold this hostage.”
Democrats believe Trump would attack them no matter what and see reducing health care costs as a uniting issue to fight for, so they see little downside to what’s coming. Some Republicans see the shutdown impasse as a gift.
One GOP aide said a shutdown would be “a distraction from Epstein” and a reminder that “we’re no longer the only team that eats its own.” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said Democrats are “underestimating” what Trump would do during a shutdown.
One of the two Democrats currently defying party leaders on a shutdown agrees with them.
“They’re begging us to shut it down. That’s a honey trap,” said Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. By making health care funding their “red line,” Fetterman added, Democratic leaders have “effectively just painted themselves into their corner.”
Despite some polls showing the public would blame the party in power for a shutdown this fall, Trump is betting that he can frame the public debate around Democrats’ demands — and their readiness to risk the type of shutdown that many of them have opposed in the past.
A senior White House official told Semafor that in the administration’s view, “the aggressor ultimately is blamed by the American public for a shutdown.”
“And what you’re seeing here with the Democrats is, they have put down a very clear proposal, which establishes them conclusively as the aggressor here,” the official added, citing Democrats’ spending bill to reverse health care cuts and those expiring subsides.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., a friend of Fetterman’s, said the Pennsylvanian had a point about leverage but argued that Trump’s opposition to a shutdown rings false given his unilateral spending cuts.
“I think he wants to shut down,” Welch said of the president.
Know More
Republicans picked a fight over health care in 2013, pressing to defund the Affordable Care Act, and Democrats refused to deal with them. That painful shutdown ended after 16 days.
The lesson, according to Senate Majority Leader John Thune: “When you’re the ones who are trying to add a whole bunch of new stuff, generally you’re the ones who end up getting blamed.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hasn’t gotten the health care negotiation with Republicans that he wants. He sought over the weekend to bypass GOP leaders, demanding a negotiation with Trump himself, asserting it is the president’s obligation “to meet with us directly to reach an agreement.”
GOP leaders and a White House official say they are open to talks about reviving health care tax credits — many Republicans fear the looming rise of premiums — but not as a part of a spending debate.
Democrats’ strategy, however, got effectively locked in after Trump said publicly he didn’t want Republicans to deal with them.
“I don’t understand whether he doesn’t know how to count to 60 or not,” said Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn. “What they are basically saying is: ‘Trust us, give us this continuing resolution and then we’ll negotiate with you.’ I mean, how many times are we going to fall for that?”
Democrats see one big difference between the 2013 health care shutdown and today: Republicans were fighting then for less health care spending, and this time they’re pushing for more. They also believe that because Trump’s party runs all of Washington, he would receive an inordinate amount of the blame.
“They’re in charge of the House, the Senate, the executive, and they have more votes on the Supreme Court,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla. “I don’t understand how, if the government shuts down, it’s not their way to figure out the way out.”
Trump doesn’t seem concerned that a shutdown could blow back on him.
“Why would voters blame the president? He supported a clean temporary funding bill,” the White House official asked rhetorically.
Room for Disagreement
At least one Republican is not ready to blame Democrats for a shutdown.
“I think a 600-pound man is more likely to pass up a donut than the Democrats [are to] shut down the government,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Burgess, Shelby, and Eleanor’s View
All of our reporting leads to one conclusion: Trump wants this showdown and thinks, for once, that he can win it.
It’s no surprise why: This shutdown fight is a nearly pure partisan exercise pitting his party against Democrats, and it’s a change of pace from the sinking public approval of his handling of other issues like immigration and the economy.
Notable
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Some Democratic lawmakers are privately leery of how their shutdown strategy will play out, CNN reports.
