by Chris Brennan
The looming federal government shutdown, which looks likely to happen when Tuesday, Sept. 30, becomes Wednesday, Oct. 1, again demonstrates a recurring, two-step pattern for President Donald Trump’s political proclamations.
It goes like this. First, Trump claims that all of America’s problems will be easily fixed through his leadership if we just elect him president. And then, after he becomes president and those problems don’t get fixed, Trump proclaims that someone else is at fault.
This one-size-fits-all escape from reality and responsibility applies across all topics for Trump – from the shutdown, Russia’s war in Ukraine, inflation to tariffs driving up costs for Americans.
Trump likes to cast himself as the ultimate dealmaker. But how can Trump make a deal when he offers to meet to negotiate, then cancels, then agrees again to meet when he gets the blame for the cancellation, then meets briefly but doesn’t really negotiate but instead just demands surrender?
Would you make a deal with someone like that?
Republicans refused to negotiate seriously with Democrats to prevent shutdown
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, two New York Democrats, emerged Sept. 29 from their short meeting with Trump and Republican congressional leaders and said to reporters outside the White House what they’ve been saying for weeks: The Republicans boxed them out, giving them no say on a continuing resolution to fund the government that passed in the House and then stalled in the Senate.
The Democrats want money for American health care costs ‒ subsidies for the Affordable Care Act and a rollback for some of the Medicaid cuts included in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, followed that consistent messaging with some absolutely ridiculous hyperbole:
Vance claimed that the Democratic leaders have “a gun to the American people’s head.”
Thune called it “hostage taking.”
Johnson called it “tragic.”
Here’s what is tragic: The Republicans rejected Democratic input on the continuing resolution because that’s what Trump ordered them to do. And Johnson canceled House sessions this week before the shutdown deadline, so there would be no chance of working out a negotiated deal other than what he wants.
Those are the voices of politicians who have driven us to the brink of a shutdown, refused to negotiate a way out, then finally met with the Democrats, only to rebuff their attempts to negotiate.
Trump didn’t emerge from the meeting to comment. He’ll probably save his thoughts for unhinged social media bombast.
Trump hates a government shutdown ‒ unless it’s his own
If that happens, remember that Trump talks very differently about government shutdowns when he wants to be president than when he is president. Consider what he told Fox News in 2013, blaming what became a 17-day shutdown on then-President Barack Obama.
“Problems start from the top, and they have to get solved from the top and the president’s the leader,” Trump said then as a shutdown approached. “And he’s got to get everybody in the room and he’s got to lead.”
It hasn’t been very difficult for Senate Democrats to mine news clips from 2011 to 2013 to find instances where Trump made clear that any shutdown is the fault of the president.
“If there is a shutdown, I think it would be a tremendously negative mark on the president of the United States,” Trump said in April 2011, just before Obama and congressional Republicans negotiated to avert a shutdown.
Even if Trump and Republican congressional leaders now offer to negotiate, how can the Democrats have any faith in them keeping their word on any potential deal?
Johnson and Thune have surrendered their roles as leaders of a coequal branch of government, doing nothing when Trump, in late August, moved to cancel $4 billion in foreign aid that had previously been approved by Congress. And then the conservatives who make up the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, in a Sept. 26 ruling, decided that Trump could just kill that congressionally approved funding because he is president.
So one of the three branches of our government, the legislature, isn’t keeping in check another branch, the executive, and the third branch, the courts, just doesn’t care anymore.
There’s a common saying about Trump, that every accusation he makes is really a confession. He takes the sort of things that people criticize him for and rebounds that as criticism for his critics. It’s the childish old schoolyard taunt: “I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”
The vice president is getting the hang of that. At the White House, after the meeting, Vance said, “I think we’re headed into a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing.”
The “right thing” here would be for Trump and the Republicans to stop spouting complaints and start negotiating a way to keep the government open. From the manufactured outrage they shared after their meeting, it is clear Republican leaders don’t want any part of the “right thing.”
