Early this afternoon, multiple federal departments and agencies sent out an email to employees blaming the impending shutdown on the Democrats. I didn’t see one from every department and agency. (I saw with my own eyes the versions at Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Justice and the National Science Foundation. TPM’s Emine Yücel separately saw one from the Department of Commerce.) I saw enough to see that they were going out government-wide. They were all identical. So, unsurprisingly, they were produced at the White House or possibly the General Services Administration. It was a top-down decision. “Unfortunately,” it says, “Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the Senate due to unrelated policy demands.” The website of the Department of Housing and Urban Development currently has a pop-up message claiming that the “radical left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people …” This is hardly surprising. Legalities mean nothing to the Trump administration. So following the Hatch Act would almost be quaint.
Meanwhile, as you’ve likely seen, at the much-anticipated convocation of general officers at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Hegseth encouraged generals and admirals who don’t agree with Trump administration policy to resign. In his speech, President Trump announced that he wants to make American cities the “training ground” for the U.S. military.
My take on that is similar to the Hatch Act-violating emails. This isn’t a surprise. It’s exactly what we expect, exactly where we know we already are. There’s a certain sense of foreboding some people have right now about how this shutdown drama, this confrontation, is going to go. And the truth is we don’t know. As I mentioned yesterday, this is why all those general theories of shutdowns don’t make a lot of sense. Each one involves a unique set of players and specific context, what it’s actually about. There’s no such thing as a “shutdown” in the abstract any more than there is an “election.” What matters is who the players are and what’s being fought over. They’re highly dynamic and unpredictable.
All we can really know is why, I at least think, Democrats need to do this. The doctrine of the second Trump administration from its first day has been to dismantle the architecture of the American Republic, annihilate independent sources of power outside the reach of the president. They’ve already succeeded at quite a lot of that within the executive branch. But in the broader national mood, it’s different. They’re rushed, impatient and seeing increased resistance — both in semi-symbolic fights over stuff like bringing the TV networks to heel and even more in the drift and hardening of public opinion, which has turned solidly against them. The message in the areas where they have the power is consistent: We have the power. You don’t. Too bad.
Given all this, the opposition — to be an actual opposition — has to find the sources of power it has at its disposal and use them to their absolute limit. Most of that power, as we’ve discussed, is in the independent sovereignties of the states. The need for votes for “continuing resolutions” to fund the government is basically the only locus of power for the congressional opposition. They not only have to use that power for whatever they can get with it, they need to show there is an opposition out there willing to fight the imposition of a presidential autocracy. If they’re not, who else will have the courage or inclination to take any risks and fight? An opposition requires morale to remain in the fight and endure while its opponents are holding most of the power.
The one point that has resonated most strongly with me in recent months is that there is a consistent pattern with autocratic takeovers that succeed. They are imposed by presidents or prime ministers who, for contingent reasons, are actually very popular. Fujimori in Peru, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Bukele in El Salvador. The pattern is the same. Either they tamed inflation or a crime wave or removed a deeply unpopular government. They did it in a window of overwhelming popularity. Trump is not popular. He’s actually quite unpopular. So I don’t think he can manage this if the opposition is concerted. So this is the right thing, really the essential thing, to do. A necessary but not sufficient condition of turning back this threat. So it’s essential to fight this. And what happens happens.