In order to pressure the Democrats to cave to Trump’s demands that they sign on to the House Republicans’ continuing resolution to fund the government, the administration has been refusing to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that 42 million Americans depend on to eat.
On September 19, House Republicans passed a continuing resolution to fund the government. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has kept the House from doing any work since then, sending members home in an attempt to force the Senate to pass the House measure. The Democrats don’t want to: they have refused to agree to the resolution unless the Republicans agree to extend the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance markets. The end of those credits at the end of this year means millions of Americans will lose their healthcare insurance and the premiums for others will skyrocket. It will be a blow to the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans want to get rid of.
SNAP needs about $8 billion for the month of November. There are two reserve accounts set up by Congress, one with about $6 billion in it that can be used to fund SNAP during emergencies and the other with about $23 billion to be used for nutrition programs. In past shutdowns, administrations—including the first Trump administration—tapped reserves to fund SNAP.
But in October, the administration said it would not use the emergency funds, essentially starving Americans to get Democrats to do as Republicans want and dramatically weaken the Affordable Care Act. Multiple groups sued.
Last week, U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island ordered the administration to use the emergency reserves to fund SNAP at least partially and to consider using the nutrition money to fund it fully. The administration said it would use the reserve for partial funding but that disbursing a fraction of benefits would create an administrative problem that would take weeks or even months to sort out, delaying payments.
Last Thursday, Judge McConnell found that the Trump administration had ignored his order to pay at least partial SNAP benefits last week and ordered the Trump administration to distribute the full amount of SNAP benefits for November to the states for distribution by the end of Friday.
As Steve Vladeck explained in One First, the administration appealed McConnell’s order to the First Circuit and also asked the First Circuit to pause the order while the court of appeals decided. When the First Circuit hadn’t ruled by late Friday afternoon, the administration filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court to ask it to stay McConnell’s order.
The emergency action fell to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Shortly after 9:00 p.m. EST, she issued the administrative stay the administration wanted, apparently getting ahead of the chance that the full court would overrule her if she declined to issue it. As Vladeck notes, she used her ruling to give the First Circuit a deadline to decide if it would permit the SNAP funding to go forward.
Vladeck writes that Jackson was “stuck between a rock and a hard place,” and he reiterates the obvious point that the Trump administration doesn’t need a court order to pay out SNAP benefits. It could simply do it, as previous administrations have during a shutdown.
In the back-and-forth on Friday, the administration appears to have opened up state payments for SNAP, and several states received their full payments, while others did not. States that received full payments worked to get that funding through to beneficiaries’ Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards immediately.
Saturday, Patrick Penn, the deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees SNAP, sent a memo to the states saying that “[t]o the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized. Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025…. [F]ailure to comply with this memorandum may result in USDA taking various actions, including cancellation of the Federal share of State administrative costs and holding States liable for any overissuances that result from the noncompliance.”
“Yikes,” economic editor at The Bulwark Catherine Rampell wrote. “Astonishing how hard this administration is working to keep people hungry. It’s clear they are trying [to] maximize public suffering, in hopes of getting people to blame Dem[ocrat]s for that suffering. But it’s transparently the White House working overtime to keep the suffering going!”
Rampell asked Georgetown law professor David Super what it means for the states to claw back benefits they already sent out. He answered that “[t]his seems to be USDA howling into the void after its terrible communications led many states to think that they were free to do what USDA should have told them to do all along…. I do not see how USDA can do anything to the states,” he wrote, since the error was not a systems error or mistaken issuance. He speculated that the memo was an attempt “to intimidate states that are considering issuing full November benefits.”
Wisconsin governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, simply posted on social media: “No.”
The administration also ratcheted up pain on the American people by warning that the ongoing crisis of unpaid air traffic controllers would cause more and more disruption to U.S. travel. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has cut thousands of flights from the nation’s busiest airports, and today, when Jake Tapper of CNN asked Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy “how many Americans will not be able to be with their families for [Thanksgiving] because of this,” Duffy answered: “I think the number is going to be substantial.”
Amid the fight over SNAP during the longest government shutdown in history, President Donald J. Trump spent the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, where he hosted another extravagant dinner party complete with scallops, beef filet, and ice sculptures. Today, as part of his defense of his tariffs, Trump promised on social media that “[a] dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared to know nothing about the promise but told ABC host George Stephanopoulos that “[t]he $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms and lots of ways,” including in the form of the tax cuts Trump and the Republicans have extended—the ones that primarily benefit the wealthy and corporations.
Tonight Trump attended an NFL football game between the Washington Commanders and the Detroit Lions after ESPN reported that he wants the Commanders to name their new stadium after him. Attendees soundly booed him.
Today, former U.S. district judge Mark L. Wolf, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by President Ronald Reagan, explained that he resigned on Friday because he wanted the freedom to do “everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.” Wolf called out Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to hurt his political opponents, his firing of inspectors general, the administration’s pay-to-play policies in which wealthy donors get government favors, the corruption of cryptocurrency, unconstitutional executive orders, and the threats against judges as Trump attacks the rule of law.
“I resigned in order to speak out, support litigation, and work with other individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting the rule of law and American democracy,” Wolf wrote. “I also intend to advocate for the judges who cannot speak publicly for themselves.” Because Wolf took senior status in 2013 and his successor was appointed then, his resignation will not create a vacancy for Trump to fill.
Tonight, the news is swirling about Democratic senators agreeing to a deal to end the government shutdown, but so far, the contours of such an agreement are not clear.
hcr wrote:Tonight, the news is swirling about Democratic senators agreeing to a deal to end the government shutdown, but so far, the contours of such an agreement are not clear.
but I don't think Trump won a lot of fans for cutting people off of supplementary food aid.
Everyone might get 2,000 bucks
Trump and his Republicans are triumphant, while the Democrats once again appear divided and poorly led.
Last night, the Senate advanced a measure to end the government shutdown, which at 41 days today is the longest in U.S. history.
Seven Democrats and one Independent voted with all but one Republican to advance a measure that funds the government through January 30 of next year. It includes funding for military construction and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and operations for the legislative branch, or Congress. Tucked within that last appropriation is a measure that allows the eight Republican senators whose phone logs were seized during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to sue the government for up to $500,000 apiece.
The measure stops the administration’s firings of public employees during the shutdown, reinstating them with full pay. States will be reimbursed for monies they spent covering for federal shortfalls during the shutdown. This means air traffic controllers, who have been working without pay for more than a month, will get paid again.
The measure also funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), although it does not restore the cuts Republicans made to it in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
While the measure provides more funding for Indigenous health services, it does nothing to extend the premium tax credits for insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act healthcare marketplace. Without those credits, millions will lose their healthcare insurance and millions more will face skyrocketing premiums. Republicans did not extend the premium tax credits in their July budget reconciliation bill, although they did extend tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Senate Democrats said they would not advance a measure to end the shutdown without a deal to extend the premium tax credits, but seven of them, along with one Independent, have now done so. Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has promised to bring to the Senate floor a bill to extend the premium tax credits before the end of the second week of December. It will be written by the Democrats.
In the 60–40 vote, Rand Paul (R-KY) did not join the rest of the Republican senators to advance the measure. Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Independent Angus King of Maine all voted with the Republicans to advance the measure.
Last night’s vote did not pass the bill, which still faced procedural hurdles in the Senate that the chamber is cleared tonight. It now goes to the House, which must either pass it, reject it, or amend it.
If Trump signs the measure into law, the 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP payments will get relief. The two million federal workers who need paychecks will get them, and airlines should eventually get back to business as usual. These are no small things: aside from the individual human cost of the shutdown, the undermining of the federal government threatened to destroy it, and the administration’s cuts to air traffic were hitting cargo planes, adding yet another blow to the weakening economy just before the busiest shopping season of the year.
News of the terms of the deal to end the shutdown hit the country rather like a cue ball hitting a rack: lots of balls started to move in wildly different directions.
The eight senators who voted with the Republicans appear to have lost any hope Trump would negotiate and, in that absence, decided they had to relieve the pain of the shutdown. As Dan Drezner noted in his Drezner’s World, Trump’s behavior during the shutdown made it clear he simply didn’t care how badly Americans got hurt. “He did not just refuse to negotiate,” Drezner noted. “During the shutdown month he also completely bulldozed the East Wing, cut SNAP benefits, witnessed producers passing on the cost of tariffs to consumers, announced curbs on air travel, and participated in a Great Gatsby–style party at Mar-a-Lago.”
Voters hated this, but Trump didn’t appear to care. Indeed, his administration was working to ratchet up the pain of lost SNAP payments and canceled flights, including not just passenger planes but cargo planes right before the shopping season in which many businesses make the income that keeps them afloat for the year. In the senators’ statements about why they voted with the Republicans, Drezner noted a pattern: the words “pain” and “hurt.”
As Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark noted, the Democrats gave in to Republican plans with few concessions, but the shutdown hurt Trump’s popularity and the Democrats won a vote on the ACA subsidies, which is a terrible issue for the Republicans. Seventy-eight percent of Americans actually want such a measure to pass, meaning that a vote—even one only in the Senate—will help clarify for voters what’s at stake.
Another moving ball was the voters and organizers who turned out for Democrats last Tuesday and who had made it very clear they think it’s long overdue for the Democrats to stand up to Trump. Ezra Levin of Indivisible, which organized the No Kings rallies, described his reaction to the deal as “incandescent rage, incredible disappointment.” “What do we do to demand a better party, a party that actually fights back?” he asked.
Democratic party leaders appeared to acknowledge that the momentum of the party is behind a fight against Trump and MAGA authoritarianism. The senators who voted with the Republicans are all either retiring, not up for election in 2026, or not running for another office, while Democrats who are in one of those categories were vocal about their anger over the vote.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted a video on social media warning: “Bullies gain power when righteous people yield to the face of their wrongdoing. I didn’t want this shutdown. I want it to end, but not at any cost. And of course, I wish that there was a path to saving this democracy and saving people’s health care that didn’t involve pain. This shutdown hurt. It did. But unfortunately, I don’t think there is a way to save this country, to save our democracy, without there being some difficult, hard moments along the way…. [T]here’s no way to defend this,” he said. “And you are right to be angry about it. I’m angry about it.”
There are Republican balls in play, as well.
President Donald J. Trump did not want the shutdown to end this way. He was trying to use the pain he was inflicting on the American people to force Republican senators to end the filibuster and pass a series of measures that would essentially have made him a dictator. The Republican senators were clear they didn’t want to do that. And now, they haven’t. They chose a way out of the shutdown fight that did not support Trump’s ambitions. After nine months in which they appeared to do his bidding, that’s an interesting development. (emphasis mine)
Trump does not appear to be giving up his position on hurting the country easily. Late last night, three judges from the First Circuit refused to stop the lower court order saying that the administration must pay SNAP benefits in full, and today, the administration went back to the Supreme Court to ask it to freeze those payments.
Trump also posted an attack on air traffic controllers, saying to those who took time off during the shutdown “I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU. You didn’t step up to help the U.S.A. against the FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK that was only meant to hurt our Country. You will have a negative mark, at least in my mind, against your record. If you want to leave service in the near future, please do not hesitate to do so, with NO payment or severance of any kind! You will be quickly replaced by true Patriots, who will do a better job….” In fact, the country has a shortage of air traffic controllers.
Trump called Democrats “the enemy” today, but told reporters he would abide by the deal, saying that “they haven’t changed anything.” But they have.
And that’s yet another moving ball. If the Senate passes its measure and sends it to the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will have to bring the House into session to conduct work. He has had the chamber on hiatus since September 19, 2025, when the Republicans passed a continuing resolution that offered the Democrats nothing, and has kept members out of Washington, D.C., ever since.
Bringing the House back into session will require Johnson to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ). Erum Salam of MSNBC reported that Johnson told Republicans on a conference call today that the “first order of business will be to administer the oath to Grijalva.” Grijalva says she will be the final signer on the discharge petition that will force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. Johnson and administration officials have worked hard to keep those files under wraps, especially since news broke that Trump is mentioned in them.
And then, in the midst of all the drama last night, Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin posted a document on social media revealing that Trump had issued an extraordinarily broad pardon to “all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential Electors, whether or not recognized by any State or State official, in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election, as well as for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.”
As Kyle Cheney of Politico noted, the pardons of those who tried to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump were largely symbolic because they had not been charged with federal crimes. What they do is suggest that he will protect those who try to cheat for him in the future, an interesting development considering the measure in the government-funding bill allowing senators to sue the government for accessing their phone logs during the events of January 6, 2021.
The sweeping pardons also might be softening up the ground for a pardon or a commutation for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A whistleblower has provided documents to the House Judiciary Committee showing that Maxwell has asked for a commutation of her prison sentence.
And Trump’s popularity continues to drag. Last night he got soundly booed at a Washington Commanders football game.
Lots of balls moving around the table.
The government shutdown is already the longest in American history. But it’s also perhaps the most punishing, in part because President Trump has taken actions no previous administration ever took during a shutdown.
Over the past six weeks, the Trump administration cut food stamps for millions of low-income Americans. It tried to fire thousands of government workers and withhold back pay from others, while freezing or canceling money for projects in Democratic-led states.
It remains to be seen whether there will be a political price to pay for Mr. Trump or his party, with polls showing that voters generally blamed Republicans more for the shutdown. But for now, the tactics appear to have worked, after a group of Democrats agreed to support a bill to end the shutdown and drop the concessions their party had demanded.
“Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, said on MSNBC Monday. “It actually gave him more power.”
The bare-knuckle politics the Trump administration employed during the shutdown — often coming from his budget director Russell T. Vought, whom Mr. Trump refers to as Darth Vader — became too brutal for the handful of centrist Senate Democrats, who never liked the idea of the shutdown much anyway.
The deal they voted for on Monday reverses much of the pain Mr. Trump inflicted. Under its terms, the president must rescind his layoffs and restore back pay to other government workers. Democrats will also get a vote on extending subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, something that Senate Republicans weeks ago offered them.
While the shutdown may be ending, Democratic officials say the party learned a lesson that base voters reward them when they fight. Democratic leaders view last week’s elections, with big victories in governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia, as evidence that their strategy was working. They point to polling that indicates that the public was blaming Mr. Trump and Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown.
“Republicans all across the country got wiped out,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, adding, “As House Democrats, we know we’re on the right side of this fight.”
Democrats also believe they now have an issue to run on in the midterm elections. They have highlighted issues important to voters, positioning themselves in the public’s mind as the party fighting for lowering health care costs, while they can contrast those efforts with the Trump administration’s attempts to deny food stamps to needy families.
But Trump officials have also learned a lesson.
If they wait out Democrats long enough — and turn up the pain enough — they will back down.
Early in the shutdown, White House officials had predicted Democrats would eventually fold. They saw little need for Mr. Trump to negotiate with the Democratic leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Mr. Jeffries.
The strategy, White House officials said, was to wait out the Democrats, ramp up the pain and then watch as they eventually caved.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said he approves of the deal under consideration to reopen the federal government.
“We’ll be opening up our country very quickly,” Mr. Trump said. Asked if that meant he would back off his attempts to fire federal workers, he said: “I’ll abide by the deal. The deal is very good.”
Mr. Trump also made it clear that he wants to position the Republicans as the party that is working for lower health care costs. He said he wants to move toward a health care system that cuts out insurance companies.
“We want a health care system where we pay the money to the people instead of the insurance companies,” he said. “And I tell you, we’re going to be working on that very hard over the next short period of time.”
But Mr. Trump offered no details about what such a plan could look like or how it could save money for consumers.
There may still be more fallout from the shutdown even after it is resolved.
Some House Democrats, dissatisfied that Mr. Schumer couldn’t better control his caucus and hold the line on Democratic demands, called for him to be replaced.
“Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced,” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said in a post on X. “If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”
But Mr. Jeffries said he was standing by his counterpart in the Senate.
“The overwhelming majority of Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, have waged a valiant fight over the last seven weeks,” Mr. Jeffries said.
It turns out Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and House Democrats were right to call it the “Epstein Shutdown” for the last several weeks on social media and in interviews. As Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it today, while it was clear what the Democrats wanted from the shutdown—lower costs for healthcare insurance premiums, affordability, and for Trump to stop breaking the law—it was never clear what the Republicans wanted. They seemed simply to be doing as Trump demanded.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) kept House members from conducting any business at all. The House last voted on September 19, gathering in Washington, D.C., again only after the Senate on Monday passed a measure to reopen the government. The hiatus gave Johnson an excuse not to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), whose voters elected her on September 23. Grijalva had promised to be the 218th and final vote on a discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure that would require the Department of Justice to release files relating to the government investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Elias notes that he, like many of us, considered as plausible the idea that the government shutdown was a way to keep the Epstein files under wraps, but there were other plausible theories as well. Maybe Trump and his cronies wanted to gut the federal workforce. Maybe they wanted to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Maybe Trump simply wanted to run the country without the interference of Congress.
Today put the Epstein files firmly in the center of the story.
The House got down to business this morning after a 54-day break to work on the Senate measure to reopen the government. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform immediately released three emails from a cache of more than 23,000 documents the committee received recently from the Epstein estate. The first email was one Epstein sent to his associate Ghislaine Maxwell on April 2, 2011. It referred to a story in which the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes solved a case by noting that a dog didn’t bark at a crime scene because it knew the perpetrator. The reference has come to mean an expected action or piece of evidence whose absence proves guilt.
Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there.” Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that…”
The second email the Democrats released was from January 2019, from Epstein to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. In it, Epstein said of Trump: “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop[.]”
In a third email thread from December 2015, after Trump had declared his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, Wolff told Epstein that CNN would ask Trump about his relationship with Epstein. Epstein asked what Wolff thought Trump should answer. Wolff wrote: “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house,… [y]ou can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”
As legal analyst Asha Rangappa noted, this exchange suggests that Epstein would have leverage over Trump if Trump tried to say he had not been at Epstein’s house or on his plane, in other words, that Trump was there and Epstein had receipts.
After the Democrats released these three emails, Johnson called the release “[a]nother publicity stunt by the Democrats” and claimed: “They’re trying to mislead people.” Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) issued a statement accusing the Democrats of “cherry-picking documents and politicizing information.” The committee then released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the Epstein estate.
Those were hardly better. In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad [sic] almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered “photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.”
But a story revealing this information did not appear in the New York Times before the 2016 presidential election or afterward.
In one 2018 email referring to Trump’s payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, Epstein wrote: “i know how dirty donald is.”
Despite how explosive these documents were, they do not appear to be the end of the story. They came from the Epstein estate, but the files from the FBI investigation into Trump have not yet been released. Whatever is still outstanding appears to be even worse than what we have seen, as evidenced by Trump’s frantic attempts to stop the discharge petition.
With the House back at work, Johnson had little choice but to swear in Grijalva. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00.
In the hours before that deadline, the president tried to get one of the four Republican representatives who had signed the discharge petition to remove their signature. He appeared to focus on Nancy Mace (R-SC), with whom he tried to connect by phone, and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whom he invited to meet with him in the White House Situation Room, which is equipped to prevent recording. CNN reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel joined Trump and Boebert at the meeting.
When asked about the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” For his part, Trump took to social media to call the released documents an attempt by Democrats to bring up the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to deflect from “how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” He urged “any Republicans involved” to be “focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”
Trump’s efforts to get someone to take their name off the discharge petition failed. Johnson swore in Grijalva at 4:00, as scheduled, and she immediately signed it. Now the petition needs to “ripen” for seven legislative days. Then Johnson has two legislative days to schedule a vote on a measure to require the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files it holds.
Faith Wardwell and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported this evening that senior Republicans believe as many as 100 Republicans will support the bill when it comes to the floor. Many of them are facing constituents who voted for Trump in the belief that he would release the Epstein files as he promised and who are angry that the administration appears to be covering them up in the service of rich elites. Others likely recognize that they do not want to be seen as participating in that coverup, especially with the threat of even worse material waiting to drop.
If the House passes the bill, it will go to the Senate and, if the Senate passes it, to Trump for his signature. If he vetoes it, Congress has the option to override his veto.
In the past, Trump has managed to avoid accountability for his actions by using lawsuits to delay while whipping up his supporters to take his side against what he called “witch hunts” or “hoaxes.” Republican lawmakers went along in part because they didn’t want to alienate his base.
Now, though, a significant portion of MAGA has broken with him, his popularity is low—a new Associated Press–NORC poll has his approval rating at 33%— and last week’s elections showed his coalition is abandoning him. It is not clear that Republican senators will defend him, especially since his erratic behavior—like bulldozing the East Wing of the White House—appears to be increasing.
As Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who backed the House discharge petition, told CNN: “This vote is going to be on your record for longer than Trump is going to be president. And what are you going to do in 2028 and 2030 when you’re in a debate…and they say, ‘How can we trust you? You covered up for a pedophile back in 2025.’”
Midday today, as new revelations from the Epstein documents were hitting social media every few minutes, Representative Swalwell posted: “This is the beginning of the end.”
Tonight the House passed the Senate’s continuing resolution to fund the government, ending the longest government shutdown in U.S. history: 43 days. The vote was 222–209, with all but two Republicans voting in favor and all but six Democrats voting against it, saying they would not support a continuing resolution that did not extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act markets. Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—and without them, millions of Americans will be unable to afford healthcare coverage, and premiums will skyrocket for millions more.
The measure funds the government through January 30, 2026; overturns the layoffs of federal employees administration officials made during the shutdown and guarantees workers’ pay; and appropriates money to pay for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits through September 2026, taking them out of Trump’s hands as a pressure point in January.
Failing to get an extension of the healthcare premium tax credits into the continuing resolution, House Democrats filed a discharge petition to force the House to vote on a measure that would extend the credits for three years. “There are only two ways this fight will end,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told his colleagues. “Either Republicans finally decide to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits this year. Or the American people will throw Republicans out of their jobs next year and end the speakership of Donald J. Trump once and for all.”
On October 1st, in the hours after Senate Democrats forced a government shutdown, I argued that starting a fight seemed to be the point. Earlier in the year, Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, had rallied enough votes to keep the government open and faced a furious backlash from the Democratic base; capitulating again would have been politically intolerable. As the Times columnist Ezra Klein observed, a shutdown also presented the Democrats with an opportunity to focus public attention on President Donald Trump’s corruption, turning what had been a “diffuse crisis” into an “acute” one. In the end, the Democrats mostly oriented their demands toward health care—above all, the renewal of expiring Obamacare subsidies—as opposed to, say, prioritizing more abstract ultimatums related to creeping authoritarianism. (Klein suggested that the two could be linked.) The health-care dispute looked like typical grist for a shutdown, insofar as such events can be considered typical at all: before the current one, there had only been three of significant length. On those occasions, the party forcing the issue wilted under public pressure without getting what it came for, as the other side pointed to the intensifying costs for federal workers and average Americans.
What happened next, this time, was strange, and not uniformly validating for the Democrats’ strategy. The shutdown became a big news story, of course, but didn’t concentrate attention to the degree one might have expected—in no small part because, in Trump’s Washington, there’s always something else going on. Not enough pressure mounted on the Democrats to give in, either. Republicans tried to make them take difficult votes to reopen the government, but those attempts never really cut through; as one G.O.P. strategist noted, the mainstream press lacked its past power to push a unified narrative that one side or the other appeared to be winning. To the extent that the press did do this, the answer was that it was good for Democrats: polls mostly showed them getting blamed less than Trump and other Republicans, whose ability, at least in principle, to drum up sympathy for federal workers was hamstrung by the Administration using the shutdown as a pretext to fire a bunch of them. Last week, Democrats swept the board in off-year elections across the country. Whatever role the shutdown played in those results, Trump put it center stage by declaring that the Republicans’ handling of it was a major reason for their bad night, then loudly urged his party’s majority in the Senate to nix the filibuster, a move that would have enabled them to reopen the government unilaterally. Democrats appeared to have all the momentum.
Then, on Sunday, eight moderate members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate voted with Republicans to move forward with a plan that would reopen the government, circumventing the filibuster; under the terms of the deal, agencies and programs will be funded through January (and in some cases beyond), laid-off federal workers will be reinstated, and the Obamacare subsidies will come up for a separate vote next month, but its success is far from guaranteed. Cue more furious backlash from the Democratic base. When I logged onto Bluesky this morning, I saw the eight Senators being referred to as “Cavers,” “Turncoats,” “Chickenshits,” and “Fuckers” (all in one post); as “QUISLINGS”; and as “Pathetic.” The last of those darts was fired (initially on X) by Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who is a resistance darling of the moment after forcing through new, Democrat-friendly congressional maps in his state last week. Other Party bigwigs expressed disappointment, too, from the progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to the milquetoast Democratic National Committee leader Ken Martin. A group of Democrats ended the shutdown “in return for—if we’re being honest—very little,” Klein wrote, in the Times. “If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise.”
The shutdown is not yet over: once the bill is through the Senate, it must pass the House—where Democratic leaders appear in no mood to compromise and the G.O.P. majority is slim—before Trump can sign off. But Senate Democrats’ resistance is over, and so this is an opportune moment to evaluate where the shutdown has left the Party. The impression that it contrived not only to snatch a snivelling defeat from the jaws of certain victory but to do so just as it had finally secured some electoral momentum is widespread, intuitive, and appealing—an exquisitely on-the-nose regression to the Party’s hapless recent mean. But I’m not sure that’s what happened here.
First, if the central Democratic goal was to be seen to be fighting back, then the Party already did that: over the weekend, the shutdown passed the forty-day mark, making it the longest in U.S. history. (The previous longest was thirty-five days, in Trump’s first term.) And, at least to some extent, I think Democrats did succeed on the merits, too: not only in focussing attention on health care as a pocketbook issue but in tying it to broader concerns about Trump’s unprecedented corruption, albeit in a more roundabout way than the direct rhetorical fusion that Klein initially proposed. Trump himself helped with this, by hauling down a wing of the White House to build an opulent ballroom and hosting a “Great Gatsby”-themed party at Mar-a-Lago while attempting to withhold food aid from millions of low-income Americans. As the election results filtered in last week, a narrative emerged, including a version among Republicans, that Trump had lost because he had become more fixated on the trappings of power than on high prices.
Presidents typically get a honeymoon period. Joe Biden’s seemed to end in August, 2021, when he was perceived as having botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump’s appeared to last longer, at least in terms of élite consensus. I’ve thought a lot about why this was, and have concluded that the diffuseness of crises that he provoked had a lot to do with it—preventing the concentration of attention on one singular debacle. The shutdown alone did not cut through this dynamic. But it played heavily into the story of the recent elections, which did. The media is now asking whether Trump, finally, might be walking and quacking like a lame duck.
If Democrats’ goal was to guarantee Republican concessions on the health-care subsidies, then they would appear to have failed. Yet I’m not sure that Democrats holding out for longer would have got them much further. Trump did get the jitters, but responded, as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, not by caving on health care but by ranting about the filibuster, ultimately picking a different way of doubling down. (And, as Klein has pointed out, at least in a very cynical political sense, a deal on the subsidies might not have been advantageous for Democrats politically, if it saved Republicans from an acute electoral vulnerability during next year’s midterms.)
Both Chait and Klein argued this week that Democrats should nonetheless have fought on: Chait suggested that an internecine G.O.P. war over the filibuster would have intensified, possibly leading to its elimination (which Democrats ought to welcome, because the filibuster sucks); Klein wrote that the shutdown had only just succeeded in its goal of concentrating attention on Trump’s fecklessness, and that shutdown-induced chaos ruining people’s Thanksgiving trips would have underscored it. But I don’t think Senate Republicans would likely have scrapped the filibuster to end the impasse. (Their leader, John Thune, has at least been clear that the caucus wouldn’t have supported it.) And I don’t see why, at this point, the Democrats need this shutdown to continue marshalling attention—they have made sure that the health-care debate will continue outside that framework, and the Senate deal funds much of the government only through January, at which point Democrats could shutter it again. One could also make the case that by appearing to cave now, the Democrats have forfeited any credit they built for fighting in the first place. But pressing on with this particular fight forever wouldn’t have been costless: the shutdown has inflicted real harm on federal workers and SNAP recipients, among others. There are trade-offs, of course—rising Obamacare premiums will harm people, too.
Two of the Democratic standard-bearers to emerge from last week’s elections—Abigail Spanberger, the incoming governor of Virginia, and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City—have emphasized different sides of these arguments in recent days. Before the eight Senators did their deal on Sunday, Spanberger had warned that, despite the Democrats’ good electoral showing, they did not have a mandate to continue the shutdown, and that Virginians, many of whom are federal workers, “want to see the government reopen”; Mamdani posted on X that a deal that raises health-care premiums “should be rejected, as should any politics willing to compromise on the basic needs of working people.” This, and the broader fury about the deal emanating from the base, has looked like a manifestation of what many observers have characterized as a conundrum for the Party: Does its future lie in moderation, or in uncompromising combativeness? Ultimately, I don’t see this as a conundrum so much as an opportunity. In September, I argued that Democrats needed to embrace what I saw as a pre-Trump strength of the G.O.P.—namely, an ability to build broad coalitions by cultivating a diffuseness of spirit and allowing politicians with different electorates to appeal to those differences. It’s at least worth considering the possibility that the end of the Democrats’ shutdown firewall, rather than reflecting a troubling lack of unity or disgraceful capitulation, is evidence of that spirit in action. Strictly speaking, the Democrats didn’t vote to end the shutdown. Two handfuls of them did. Many others were very angry about it. There’s a world in which both these positions—and their constituencies—can coexist.
The cost of such a spirit, as Republicans long ago learned, is occasional chaos, and headlines suggesting that your Party is in a “civil war.” Some politicians will fall down the resulting cracks: Schumer, for instance, refused to vote for the Senate deal, but was nonetheless accused of either tacitly sanctioning it or failing to stop it; even though he seemed to reverse course from his earlier vote to keep the government open, the satirical publication The Onion reposted a headline it had written back then: “Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back from Brink of Courage.” But he might be as much a victim of his recent actions as an ossified reputation. On October 1st, I noted that, even if Democrats’ shutdown gambit were to succeed, it wouldn’t prove a panacea for its reputational malaise, and that the Party was in need of new leaders either way. Those leaders have now begun to emerge.
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.
That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.
Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.
The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.
Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.
Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.
On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.
Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.
As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”
The executive director of Cristosal, Noah Bullock, accused the administration of wanting “to demonstrate and send a message of brutality.” A White House spokesperson said:: “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”
Today, retired Chicago broadcast journalists published a letter to people in the Chicago area saying what the federal government is doing to Chicago is “wrong.” It is “a brutal and illegal campaign against fellow Chicagoans, mainly Latinos: violent abductions, gutting families, using tear gas around children, roughing up witnesses, ramming cars and even taking a day care teacher from her school.” This “is not law enforcement,” they wrote; “it is terror.”
For the first time in twelve years, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a “Special Message” yesterday. Addressing the administration’s immigration enforcement policies, the bishops said they were “saddened by…the vilification of immigrants,” “concerned about the conditions in detention centers,” “troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and…hospitals and schools,” and “grieved” over the damage the immigration raids have done to families. “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people,” they wrote. “We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”
But the administration’s attempt to convince Americans to believe them, rather than their lyin’ eyes, doesn’t appear to be succeeding very well.
MAGA has been at least partly demoralized by the information coming out of the Epstein documents, with right-wing influencer Dinesh D’Souza, for example, defending Trump by saying: “Right now, we don’t have anyone else.” Trump media ally Stephen Bannon told supporters: “Trump’s…an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. Without him, we’d have nothing.”
Bloomberg reports that 62% of Americans they polled say the cost of everyday items has climbed over the past month and that 55% of employed Americans say they’re worried about losing their job. It also notes, as CNBC economic commenter Carl Quintanilla pointed out, that international stocks are outperforming the U.S. S&P stock index by the widest margin in 16 years. Yesterday the University of Michigan consumer confidence survey hit its lowest reading in 65 years.
Tonight Ana Swanson, Maggie Haberman, and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that the administration is attempting to lower food prices by preparing exemptions to tariffs, suggesting that some members of the administration are finally facing the fact that Trump’s fantasy ideology cannot defy reality forever.
Other administration officials are still clinging to their ideology. Although Colombia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have stopped sharing certain intelligence information with the U.S. because they consider the administration’s strikes on small boats illegal, Jennifer Jacobs and James LaPorta of CBS News reported today that senior military officials have presented Trump with options for land strikes in Venezuela.
Tonight, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “President Trump ordered action—and the Department of War is delivering. Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR.” “[T]his mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood—and we will protect it.”
It appears that the administration is considering attacking another country under the pretext of stopping drug trafficking, in an echo of nineteenth-century imperial power that mimics the territorial ambitions of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
Political strategist Simon Rosenberg commented: “If Trump wags the dog in Venezuela it is going to do enormous damage to his already degraded brand here in the US. Zero support for this in the public. Will be seen for what it is—[a] transparent attempt to rescue his flailing Presidency.”
