I was very pleased to see that Ezra Klein has joined the ranks of those who think that Democrats need to gird themselves for a fight in the budget showdown coming at the end of this month. I have various disagreements with Klein, some rooted in policy and others more attitudinal, temperamental. But his influence within the Democratic elite is unrivaled. His words really matter. They matter enough to make me think Senate Dems may actually shift in time to make a difference here. His essential point is irrefutable. None of the arguments for standing down from back in March, which were at least arguable then, hold up anymore. (It’s this column at the Times that I’m talking about in case you haven’t read it or read about it.)

There are a couple of follow-up points I’d like to make about this. One is the idea that the Democrats are making a decision to “shut the government down.” In a sense this is a semantic point. But some semantic points are extremely important, and this is one of them. You really need to get this right. If Democrats do what a growing number of outside observers say they should and indeed must, they’re not making a decision to shut the government down. In fact, they would very much like to avoid that. Sometimes when there’s a shutdown standoff a lot of Republicans really do want to shut the government down in and of itself because they’re hostile to most of the things government does. None of that applies to Democrats. They’d much prefer that Trump agreed to their demands and the threat of a shutdown never materializes.

Everyone is rightly shocked, disgusted, outraged by Trump’s Truth Social meme threatening to turn Chicago into a war zone. But where’s the National Guard exactly? Trump said he was doing this a couple weeks ago. He said they were “going in” right away a week later. Maybe he’ll do it tomorrow. I’m certainly not promising he won’t. But where are they?

Let me connect a few dots for you that may be a key part of the Trump-Epstein drama and may even be what Trump has been trying to keep hidden in those files. I’m not sure quite what we’re dealing with here. But I think this is significant.

Yesterday Speaker Mike Johnson was on the Hill talking to reporters running Trump defense on the Epstein files. It sounds like pretty standard stuff — and then he says this: “When he first heard the rumor he kicked [Epstein] out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant who tried to take this stuff down.” It’s an odd moment. Because Johnson says it in this kind of off-handed way and without explanation like it’s just one in a litany of talking points. But he clearly suggests that Trump played some role bringing about Epstein’s downfall, that he was an FBI informant who presumably told the authorities about Epstein’s sex crimes. The clip got a lot of attention on social media, unsurprisingly. One of Trump’s top surrogates is suggesting that far from being implicated in Epstein’s crimes, Trump is some secret good guy in the shadows, the guy who out of the limelight helped the authorities bring Epstein to justice.

Total fantasy, right?

I wanted to return one more time — hopefully just one more time — to the question of what Democrats should demand in exchange for their votes on a continuing resolution.

Over the years, I’ve mentioned in various posts that Trump’s world isn’t just winning and losing. It’s the dominationist world in which the only kind of winning is if the other guy loses. Trump’s whole concept of “deals” is based on this idea. The notion of a deal that works for both parties is alien to him. His version of deals is one in which he wins, in which he puts something over on the other guy or forces or pressures him into an unequal bargain. It’s the key to understanding his whole career in business. And as we know much more vividly, it’s the essence of his politics. He wins and you lose. Or to put it more specifically, any working arrangement is one in which he dominates. He’s in charge.

This isn’t a great way to run a civic politics. But as I say in the headline to this post, for the moment, we’re living in Trump’s world. And Democrats need to operate within it.

I had some further conversations this afternoon about the Dems’ strategy on the coming shutdown fight. They basically just confirmed the outlines of what I discussed in the two posts I did earlier today, but with some additional detail and color. One point I heard from one of my colleagues is how much Senate Dems seem to be unified on this strategy — even Elizabeth Warren, who recently had been arguing that there was no point participating in budget negotiations if the White House is not following the budget. She too seems to have shifted to the “give us back the Obamacare subsidies” position.

So what are Senate Democrats thinking exactly? How can this make sense?

I got asked this this afternoon. And I think it’s actually pretty clear what they’re thinking if you look at all the pieces on the playing board. There’s actually a decent logic to it. I just think it’s a bad logic.

I’ve gotten some rather heated responses to today’s Backchannel. The one point which I think merits a response is people saying that I’m not proposing any alternative. I saw that as implicit. But fair enough. Some say I’m just saying shut things down permanently. That latter claim isn’t true. But the first point is fair so let me address it.

Donald Trump is currently governing far outside the constitutional order. We’re operating in a constitutional interregnum. The constitutional order may and I think will come back into force. But right now we’re operating far, far outside of it. The president has seized the power of the purse from Congress. He is depriving states of their sovereignty and liberties by invading them with the U.S. military. He is threatening budgetary cutoffs to assert policy control over areas of governance the president has zero authority over. I could list 10 other forms of extra-constitutional rule and I would still leave many out.

Kate and Josh discuss the short-lived Trump death rumors, the end-of-year shutdown decision for Democrats and some eyebrow-raising GOP retirements.

I agonized for a bit about the point I’m about to discuss. But I didn’t agonize for long because I decided there was not much to agonize about. The topic is the September federal budget showdown, essentially a replay of the March “continuing resolution” drama in which Democrats had their first shot at real leverage against Donald Trump. As you’ll remember, Democrats under Chuck Schumer’s leadership decided to hold out for nothing. This was not only a missed opportunity. It’s fair to say it drove a catastrophic collapse of confidence in the Democratic Party’s elected leadership in Washington, DC., an impact that has been reverberating through national and opposition politics ever since.

Now we have a literal replay of that moment. The White House again needs Democrats’ vote in the Senate for a continuing resolution to keep the government open. Democratic leaders have been insisting they won’t make the same mistake again, and recent reports suggest President Trump’s increasingly aggressive attempts to seize budget authority from Congress all but assure a government shutdown at the end of the month. But a closer look suggests that Senate Democrats will insist on no meaningful brakes on Trump’s lawless actions and may, perversely, help him hold Congress next year.

One big threat that looms over free and fair elections for president is that a tie in the Electoral College or a disputed race gets thrown to the House. That could be a real dispute or, far more likely, a manufactured dispute as part of stealing the presidency. Critically, in this situation, the House does not vote as a majority. It votes by state delegation and the assumption is that the GOP holds the majority of state delegations because of their advantage in low-population Republican states. That’s all true and it leads to lots of bad scenarios. But it’s worth focusing on because it’s not a total done deal. This 2023 piece from the Kyle Kondik at the Center for Politics at UVA goes through the different delegations and the possibilities in each one. A bit of luck and focus could close off this path to a stolen presidency.

An email from TPM Reader PK on yesterday’s post about seating a new Congress in 2027.

Your post was dead on today. I can easily see a scenario where [T]rump GOP majorities in both houses refuse to seat enough Democrats to retain control. There’s actually some examples of this back in the 19th Century where the clerk of the House refused to acknowledge various members-elect. In any event, there could be several Ds elected in states where the GOP SecState refuses to certify the election based on bogus fraud charges—all helped along by bogus DOJ/FBI investigations. And even if the vote is certified, sore loser GOP candidates could ask the House to determine the winner in their races. Again a GOP majority could then seat the losing GOP candidates by a simple majority vote.

In any event, congressional Dems need to figure out how they will handle such a scenario.

The last point is key. This isn’t a call for dooming but rather preparation.

The whole call of “will there be free and fair elections” is simply the wrong question to the degree it is framed as a binary question or of something that Trump will “do.” Under the present circumstances you need to battle to ensure the votes are counted and the results enforced as much as you need to turn people out and get them, as best you can, to vote the right way. This part of the equation shouldn’t be a contest. But under the present circumstances it is a contest.

You have to take it as a given that Trump will exploit every power he has to corrupt the elections in his favor. In the executive branch, where the Constitution gives him a lot of power — and the corrupt Court wants to give him unlimited power — he’s taken all of it. The key with elections is that the forces of opposition actually have quite a lot of power, starting with the key fact that states run elections and the federal government has very little practical access into the process let alone legal authority over it. States have large bundles of executive sovereign authority. January 6th is a very helpful and very instructive example. You need to be red teaming every link in the chain to know what the possibilities are and be prepared for them.

The two key issues I see, from an initial review, is the certifying authorities in the various blue and purple states (usually but not always governors and secretaries of state) and the Clerk of the House. The Clerk of the House is the fulcrum of House continuity in the interregnum between the expiration of one House’s authority and the seating of the next one. That’s usually a pretty no-nonsense career person. We got some preview of this during the Speaker votes for Kevin McCarthy. If that person is a GOP toady that’s very bad. Because the Clerk is the person who — like they wanted of Pence in 2021 — could simply decide to accept some certificates of election and reject others. They have zero authority to do it. But they could.

Again, it’s a matter of thinking through all the possibilities and being prepared.