Behind a shutdown, the president’s contempt for the middle class
In some ways, it’s remarkable how unremarkable the ongoing government shutdown is. Short-term spending plans, patched together and punted downfield, have become the norm, opening the door to endless high-stakes negotiations and to what former President Barack Obama called “governing by crisis.”
Within Congress, both chambers passed spending resolutions before President Donald Trump’s shutdown, sending a message that funding the government mattered, and debates about the wall could wait.
Since the shutdown began, both parties have continued to emphasize the need to reopen the government, while squabbling over how. Democrats won the House of Representatives campaigning against the unpopular border wall, while most Republicans sense a continued need to stay on Trump’s side of the argument and not seek a legislative solution without a barrier.
Such a solution would involve a Republican revolt, the blessings of Mitch McConnell and the overriding of a veto. That’s not how compromise works in this Congress, under this Senate leadership, and in this Republican Party nor with this president.
Republicans in both chambers were willing to fund the government without a wall until Trump became unwilling to do so. He declared that he’d rather shut the government down than not get his wall.
Literally overnight, enough members of his party changed stances and decided that they’d better agree with him after all.
That’s where all this gets infuriating. So much of this shutdown is due to Trump’s commitment to a dumb, unrealistic speech punchline and to his impotent inability to take an L. Like in all Trump head games, real people pay the price.
The highest price has been charged to the people Trump hates the most: working Americans. Government workers and contractors have been missing paychecks, mortgage payments, and Insulin prescriptions.
These workers remind us what it means to live paycheck to paycheck. A single missed check can disrupt the stability and freedom from fear that America promises to people who play by the rules.
In this case, the disruption comes directly from the president, as hostage ransom for his vanity project. If you’ve ever seen a parent sit at the dining room table, panicking, trying to figure out how they’ll pay all the bills, watching Trump play this game twists your gut every single day.
And the worst part of it all is that Trump claims he can “relate” to unpaid federal workers. He can’t. Trump has long claimed to be the “people’s billionaire,” someone who goes on WWE, eats KFC on his private plane, and puts on a miner’s hat onstage in West Virginia. Yet, his campaign centered on “the forgotten man,” a blue-collar worker whose language he claims he learned on his father’s worksites in the 1960s.
And to be clear, he does clearly speak to the world some part of America fears they lost. Vast areas of the country are devoid of economic activity or even family ties, dark and full of rust and drugs.
But I argue that he speaks to that fear cynically. Trump is at his most confident when he’s onstage at a rally, music blaring, with smiling and trusting faces all around him. He knows he can hit all his impact lines, he knows he can get a chant going, and he knows he can get away with any lie.
To Trump, these people aren’t Wharton grads; they don’t own casinos or cheat on their wives with porn stars. As he told Playboy in 1990, “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination–or whatever—to leave their mine. They don’t have ‘it.’”
Donald Trump lies to you because he thinks he’s smarter and better than you. Never forget that.
That attitude becomes clear when the needs of blue collar workers conflict with Trump’s. The man who “revered” his father’s workers barely paid his own undocumented Polish workers in the 1980s. The man who sends federal agents to arrest law-abiding undocumented people at their homes and jobs has hired undocumented Latin American workers to make his bed for years.
His golf clubs stiffed small contractors so badly they went out of business. And of course, his and Jared Kushner’s family fortunes are built on evictions and racist slumlording.
So is it any wonder that when someone has to suffer for the sake of Trump’s wall, the forgotten man and woman are the first ones Trump forgets?
In the current news environment, stories come a mile a minute. The shutdown is case in point.
So here’s something to take away from all this: Trump doesn’t care about the unpaid TSA agent working at Logan Airport at 4 AM. He doesn’t care about the IRS staffer rationing her insulin. Many Republicans and Democrats in Congress do care, and I fear it may take a tragedy to break debate away from Trump’s ego.
At the end of the day, this is government under Trump—American institutions, ideals, and basic policy functions swaying under the weight of one bad man.
One bad man who will make millions of Americans suffer once again for his own gain.
