On Monday, President Donald Trump launched a “deranged rant” on Truth Social, attacking air traffic controllers who took time off during the unpaid government shutdown. He also falsely claimed that additional money could be sent to controllers who did not take time off. According to “Daily Blast” host Greg Sargent, it was all nonsense, but the tantrum “showed his weakness” amid the shutdown.
Eight Senate Democrats broke with their party and agreed to a temporary funding bill that excludes the key health subsidies. These subsidies were removed by Trump and Republicans in their budget bill this past summer. Sargent described this concession as galling, especially since it came “right after Trump and the GOP suffered a massive electoral rebuke” that exposed their political weakness to voters.
“That Trump rant illustrates the power dynamics here pretty clearly,” Sargent said. “As long as the government is shut down, he’s reduced to ranting furiously and threatening government workers to try to get them to somehow minimize the political pain he’s feeling. ‘Go to work or else I’ll dock you,’ right? Yet this dynamic seems lost on the Democrats who caved. We keep hearing from them stuff like, the shutdown wasn’t working because Trump wasn’t caving, but he was swirling down the drain politically. So it was working in that sense.”
Brian Beutler, writer for “Off Message” on Substack, explained that many Democrats were driven to cave by a “generosity of spirit” that Trump does not possess. “The shutdown went on for 40 days, there was real pain—not just for government employees, but also for people who lost SNAP benefits and were going hungry. People who needed to travel were facing canceled or delayed flights,” Beutler said.
“But Trump chose to inflict those hardships. He deliberately made that pain happen, thinking it would hurt Democrats, but instead it kept hurting him,” he continued. Beutler also pointed out that Trump aimed to cut SNAP benefits “because he thought it would hurt Democrats with their bleeding hearts, but then he realized that it was going to cause him pain. So, he said he would reinstate some of the SNAP benefits—and then he went to court to stop that. He kept going in these circles because he didn’t have any good moves,” Beutler explained.
“All the pain is experienced—or at least most of it is—by him, politically speaking,” Sargent added.
According to Beutler, the Democrats’ concession may act as a kind of bluff call that highlights the president’s cruelty and willingness to cause pain to voters. “If you win [the subsidy battle], then you actually shield Donald Trump and voters from the consequences of Republican policy. You reduce the harm he meant to inflict on the public. And if the public never understands what they voted for, they’ll never necessarily know why they shouldn’t vote that way again in the future.”
https://www.alternet.org/msn-uk/trump-government-shutdown-democrats-cave/
