Donald Trump Isn’t Helping

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 31, 2025

 

Nearly a month into the government shutdown they sought and initiated but have refused to take ownership of, Senate Democrats are starting to buckle.

 

“There’s a sense within the Senate Democratic caucus that next week will bring significant movement toward ending the government shutdown,” Axios’s Stephen Neukam reported on Thursday.

 

In the Democratic Party’s search for a post hoc rationale for the shutdown, the primary purpose of which was to communicate Senator Chuck Schumer’s resolve to do something, they settled on arguing that the compromise they hammered out with their fellow Democrats to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 should be reversed. That compromise with moderates like former Senator Joe Manchin sunset Obamacare subsidies, and Democrats want to extend the sunset. But Democrats “know it’s incredibly unlikely any extension passes the House,” Neukam added. Negotiators are establishing “off-ramps” so that both parties can climb down from their aggressive postures and save face.

 

Enter President Donald Trump:

 

 

What timing. Just as Democrats are on the brink of suing for peace, Trump bursts through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and insists that the GOP should lend credence to the primary talking point Democrats have promulgated throughout the shutdown. Democrats do want to do something: They want to throw more taxpayer dollars into Obamacare’s insatiable maw. It’s the GOP that has said that issue, like every other ancillary subject Democrats raise to avoid talking about why they actually shut the government down, will be resolved when the government re-opens. On that, the GOP presented a united front — until last night.

 

But that’s not all:

 

 

Once again, Trump would be throwing Democrats into the briar patch if the GOP heeded his call to nuke the legislative filibuster. Trump has long advocated the curtailment of minority privileges in the Senate — he wants what he wants when he wants it. It’s the GOP’s institutionalists, not the Democratic Party, that have rejected his appeals. They are well aware that it’s the Democratic Party that seeks to transform the Senate into a majoritarian body, similar to the House. They know that the filibuster is a weapon the GOP has used skillfully during its periods in political exile. They know that ceding to Trump’s demand would offer them only pyrrhic victories.

 

Hopefully, the president’s ungainly intervention in the conflict in Congress doesn’t restore the Democratic Party’s resolve to hold out, seeing the president’s unwitting support for their own program as evidence that he will pressure Republicans to cave. But it might. If it does, it will needlessly prolong the shutdown.