For the last 48 hours or so, Trump’s toadies and martinets have been putting on a performance which is one half gaslighting, one half effort to create a bit of distance between FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s extortion and ABC’s decision to (now-temporarily) pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Then, late last night, President Trump busted all of their knees by insisting it was him doing it all along and says now he’s going to go to war even harder against ABC/Disney for having the temerity to bring Kimmel back after (Trump claims) telling him they canceled his show.

I have a growing sense of optimism about the political situation in the United States. But it’s not necessarily because I’m more confident about the outcomes, though I am that too. It is more that on a number of fronts the actual fight is coming into the open. Who knows who wins or gets the better of it. But the things the Trump opposition is actually talking about are getting put on the table. And they’re at the center of the table, with everyone watching. They’re fights to get attention and attention outside of the normal political space.

The Jimmy Kimmel Brouhaha is one example of this, which I discussed earlier this week. The impending budget fight is another. I’m also seeing more and more examples of Democrats telling corporations, laws firms and others that Trump won’t be in power forever, and that when that time comes they’ll need to answer for conspiring with President Trump against the American people. Minority Leader Jeffries made clear that when Democrats are in power they’ll hold people accountable for participating in Trump’s pay-to-play schemes.

As we hurtle toward an almost inevitable government shutdown, I want to note one part of the discussion I’ve seen among commentators. This is a bit in the weeds but I think it’s worth discussing. Some writers say that it’s actually a mistake for Democrats to make any policy demands in the budget standoff. So health care, pushing back on ICE, standing up for democracy … regardless of the specific demand, it’s a mistake. I noticed Bill Scher making this argument today in The Washington Monthly. I’ve seen TPM alum Brian Beutler in his Off Message substack newsletter. And these are only a couple of examples.

The argument goes like this.

These shutdown standoffs are technical budgetary questions. The side that is making policy demands is basically taking the budget hostage to extract extraneous policy concessions. Based on the evidence of the last 20-30 years of history, that side is the one who gets blamed for the shutdown because they’re “taking the budget hostage” or introducing extraneous demands even if those demands are good ones on the merits or even supported by the public. Beutler focuses on the “hostage taking” metaphor. Scher puts it this way:

Every past attempt to use government shutdowns to extract policy concessions has failed, even when the policy demands are politically popular, because shutdowns make people forget what you have to say. Public attention shifts to how shutdowns hurt average Americans and how one political party is willing to harm constituents to play political games. Once public opinion quickly turns, the shutdown agitators invariably realize the shutdown failed to provide negotiating leverage and eventually cave.

Going into 2026 and 2028 it’s time for — essential for — Democrats to make clear that the current Supreme Court will have to reformed (expanded in number, reformed in structure) to allow popular government to continue in the United States. This is not so much a litmus test (though it should be that too) as a precondition for any other promise to be credible.

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.

I write fluidly across different venues. Here, on social media, in emails with readers … and I sometimes lose track of where I’ve said what. So I wanted to agree with something TPM Reader XX1 says in this email I flagged. I’m skeptical the White House will follow through on their threats to carry out a new wholesale round of firings, as Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is threatening. I’m not saying they won’t. They totally might. So this isn’t something I’m relying on or telling you to rely on. I’m just skeptical for two reasons. The first is that this White House doesn’t need a shut down to fire people. Despite the law-breaking it entails, they’ve made clear that, with the Supreme Court’s assistance, they can fire as many people as they want. If they thought it helped them to fire more people, they’d be doing that already; the shutdown provides zero new legal power to fire anyone.

“Want” is the key word here.

On Monday I saw a bunch of people on Bluesky mentioning and praising this essay by Andrea Pitzer. It’s quite good. I recommend reading it. It’s about the recent podcast discussion between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. And that conversation turns a lot on the much-derided column Klein wrote about Charlie Kirk and how “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

Regular readers know that I have a number of enduring disagreements with Klein. They’re actually more and less than disagreements. They’re more like dispositional disagreements. Pitzer says up front that a lot of people are dumping on Klein now and she’s not trying to do that or at least not add to that. (And I second that for what I write below.) What she sets out to do is explain why she thinks Klein is “lost” in the present moment (a point Klein actually agrees with) and, secondarily, why Coates, whether you agree with him specifically, is not. Again, it’s worth reading Pitzer in her own lucid words rather than just my synopsis. But I would summarize it thus: Pitzer says that Klein has something called “bright-kid syndrome,” by which she means the idea that a smart and hyper-educated young(ish) person like Klein can and should come up with a prescription or fix to the ills he sees in front of him. It’s not quite like the “one weird trick” of memeland. But it’s kind of like that, inasmuch as it rests on the assumption that the intractable and overwhelming can actually be solved if you think about it hard enough, if you have enough cleverness and ingenuity.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve had in the last nine months and especially since the summer is how to convey both the very brittle, thin nature of Trump’s power and also the scale of the threat his government poses. Jamelle Bouie captured a key dimension of this in a weekend column in the Times: if you wanted to drive the country into literal disunion it’s hard to imagine what you’d do differently than what he is doing right now. He is both rhetorically and (with increasing intensity) literally unleashing the U.S. military on the strongest bastions of opposition to his government (basically blue cities in blue states). He is also canceling more and more of the funding the federal government gives to those states, despite the fact that it is disproportionately funded by taxes from those states. This is definitionally fairly close to warlordism, a broken state in which the leader holds on to power — if not legitimacy — by hoarding state resources for loyalists and depriving opponents of any of them.

I have a deep ideological commitment to the American union. And beyond ideology, red and blue states are largely a fiction. The big red and blue states have huge minorities of the other “side” within their borders. Still, governance on these terms is illegitimate and unsustainable. The only recourse is a much more aggressive use of the sovereign powers of the states than state governments are currently doing.

News comes today that Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is now threatening not to pay back pay to federal employees after this shutdown ends. There’s both more and less here than meets the eye. The step Vought has taken is to remove references to back pay from OMB guidance about the shutdown. The backpay rule is not based on OMB guidance. It’s federal law. And even better than that, it’s a federal law Trump signed.

Yes, yes, I know: federal law isn’t a big constraint on Trump White House planning. Make of that one what you will. But I want to zoom in on something else. The big, big threat coming from Vought was that the Trump administration would use the opportunity of the shutdown to institute large-scale firings of federal employees on the unsupported theory that the shutdown opened up more powers to fire federal employees. That’s not true. But that doesn’t matter. Because the Supreme Court has already given Trump power to fire as many federal employees as he wants, federal law notwithstanding.

It’s always a complicated matter to say who is “winning” a shutdown fight. By one measure, no one “wins” since voters are unhappy with everyone and more generally the “system” for letting things get to such a point of dysfunction. Polls provide one of our most objective measures. But majority opinion isn’t always the terrain that one or both parties is playing to. What’s more, it may be fickle. If it doesn’t last until the next election, does it even matter? The real measure is who’s moving and who’s not, who is coming off their first positions, negotiating with themselves? By this measure — and in fact the others too — Democrats are pretty clearly winning the current shutdown fight.

Polls have been clear: more Americans blame Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown then Democrats. Every poll that I’m aware of has shown this. Republicans now say the latest polls show the blame divide narrowing in their favor. And it’s possible that’s true, though it could just as easily be noise in the polls. And in any case losing by slightly less isn’t exactly a big rallying cry. The real evidence is who is budging. The shutdown started with the White House saying it absolutely wouldn’t budge and threatening a big new round of layoffs to punish Democrats into submission. More and more evidence now shows that the firings threat was a bluff the White House feels unable to follow through on. As this has become more obvious, they’ve been forced to say that they’ve simply decided to delay the firings for no apparent reason. Even the elite media outlets which for days were passing on the White House threats as news are now, belatedly, seeing that it’s not happening, at least not yet. After failing to follow through on that threat, the White House and OMB moved to a new threat: no back pay. But that seems as empty a threat as the first one. In any negotiation or test of wills the failure to follow through on a threat always signals weakness. And these are no different.