The shutdown is not yet over: once the bill is through the Senate, it must pass the House—where Democratic leaders appear in no mood to compromise and the G.O.P. majority is slim—before Trump can sign off. But Senate Democrats’ resistance is over, and so this is an opportune moment to evaluate where the shutdown has left the Party. The impression that it contrived not only to snatch a snivelling defeat from the jaws of certain victory but to do so just as it had finally secured some electoral momentum is widespread, intuitive, and appealing—an exquisitely on-the-nose regression to the Party’s hapless recent mean. But I’m not sure that’s what happened here.
First, if the central Democratic goal was to be seen to be fighting back, then the Party already did that: over the weekend, the shutdown passed the forty-day mark, making it the longest in U.S. history. (The previous longest was thirty-five days, in Trump’s first term.) And, at least to some extent, I think Democrats did succeed on the merits, too: not only in focussing attention on health care as a pocketbook issue but in tying it to broader concerns about Trump’s unprecedented corruption, albeit in a more roundabout way than the direct rhetorical fusion that Klein initially proposed. Trump himself helped with this, by hauling down a wing of the White House to build an opulent ballroom and hosting a “Great Gatsby”-themed party at Mar-a-Lago while attempting to withhold food aid from millions of low-income Americans. As the election results filtered in last week, a narrative emerged, including a version among Republicans, that Trump had lost because he had become more fixated on the trappings of power than on high prices.
Presidents typically get a honeymoon period. Joe Biden’s seemed to end in August, 2021, when he was perceived as having botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump’s appeared to last longer, at least in terms of élite consensus. I’ve thought a lot about why this was, and have concluded that the diffuseness of crises that he provoked had a lot to do with it—preventing the concentration of attention on one singular debacle. The shutdown alone did not cut through this dynamic. But it played heavily into the story of the recent elections, which did. The media is now asking whether Trump, finally, might be walking and quacking like a lame duck.
If Democrats’ goal was to guarantee Republican concessions on the health-care subsidies, then they would appear to have failed. Yet I’m not sure that Democrats holding out for longer would have got them much further. Trump did get the jitters, but responded, as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, not by caving on health care but by ranting about the filibuster, ultimately picking a different way of doubling down. (And, as Klein has pointed out, at least in a very cynical political sense, a deal on the subsidies might not have been advantageous for Democrats politically, if it saved Republicans from an acute electoral vulnerability during next year’s midterms.)
Both Chait and Klein argued this week that Democrats should nonetheless have fought on: Chait suggested that an internecine G.O.P. war over the filibuster would have intensified, possibly leading to its elimination (which Democrats ought to welcome, because the filibuster sucks); Klein wrote that the shutdown had only just succeeded in its goal of concentrating attention on Trump’s fecklessness, and that shutdown-induced chaos ruining people’s Thanksgiving trips would have underscored it. But I don’t think Senate Republicans would likely have scrapped the filibuster to end the impasse. (Their leader, John Thune, has at least been clear that the caucus wouldn’t have supported it.) And I don’t see why, at this point, the Democrats need this shutdown to continue marshalling attention—they have made sure that the health-care debate will continue outside that framework, and the Senate deal funds much of the government only through January, at which point Democrats could shutter it again. One could also make the case that by appearing to cave now, the Democrats have forfeited any credit they built for fighting in the first place. But pressing on with this particular fight forever wouldn’t have been costless: the shutdown has inflicted real harm on federal workers and SNAP recipients, among others. There are trade-offs, of course—rising Obamacare premiums will harm people, too.
