Agreeing to and then canceling a meeting on government funding makes clear who’s immiserating the public with a costly shutdown.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****SEPTEMBER 23, 2025****

****On the

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****Dayen on TAP****

**Trump decides to own the shutdown**

**Agreeing to and then canceling a meeting on government funding makes clear who’s immiserating the public with a costly shutdown.**

In the past 24 hours, we’ve been treated to a combination of first-term and second-term Trump. On Monday, the president **agreed to a meeting** [link removed] with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to negotiate a government funding compromise, after both Democratic and Republican stopgap bills **failed last Friday** [link removed]. Insiders were concerned mostly about whether Republican congressional leaders would attend to protect their position, lest “Art of the Deal” Trump give away the farm to Democrats.

But by Tuesday morning, Trump realized that his dealmaker persona doesn’t exist anymore, replaced with pure hatred and vengeance. He canceled the meeting in a **rambling denunciation** [link removed] on Truth Social, dismissing the Democrats’ “unserious and ridiculous” demands while simply lying about those demands in unserious and ridiculous ways. I have to just roll the tape here rather than summarize:

**"They are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors, have dead people on the Medicaid roles**[sic]

**, allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits, try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World, allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody."**

Sigh. Democrats are asking for quite a bit of money—**about $67 billion a year** [link removed]—but it’s to maintain enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act health insurance and reverse all the Medicaid cuts from this summer’s GOP reconciliation bill. Trump also whines that Democrats want to eliminate the $50 billion rural hospital fund, but that only exists because the Medicaid cuts took away far more than that from rural hospitals. Democrats also included in their counteroffer the basic demand that Trump **actually adhere to the budget** [link removed], rather than make unilateral cuts or changes.

My concern was always what Democrats would do if second-term Trump, the vengeance guy, said no to their negotiating ploy, no to normal transactional politics. How would they react? Fortunately, they caught a bit of a break: Trump said no in the most obviously insane manner, making it easy to lay the shutdown at his doorstep.

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Agreeing to and then canceling the meeting makes clear who called off the negotiations. Claiming against all evidence that Democratic demands are transgender surgeries and immigrant caravans makes clear who’s being absurd. Democrats can blame Trump for refusing to talk and closing the government. They’d be following the wishes of **their own voters** [link removed], who want a shutdown fight.

The only work left, as casual followers of politics tune in to a dramatic event, is to define the terms. Over the past several months, Trump has illegally withheld appropriated spending, denying money for education for children and meals for seniors and cures for cancer and **hundreds of other worthwhile programs** [link removed]. He’s now coming back to Congress, pretending like none of this has happened, and demanding the ability to do it all over again.

Democrats have something else in their favor: Trump acting like a tin-pot dictator has nullified the agency of anyone else in Washington. If the government shuts down, he must have done it. If your national park is closed, Trump did it. If you can’t get a new Social Security card, Trump did it. If airport lines are long because TSA workers aren’t showing up, Trump did it. If mortgage approvals are delayed because the IRS can’t verify income, Trump did it.

The flip side of rule-by-one is that the one ruler gets blamed for everything. It hasn’t taken much pushback to get Trump to capitulate this term; the main problem is the pushback has been sporadic. Democrats are set up surprisingly well for what is now an inevitable shutdown, despite their somewhat haphazard starting position.

**~ DAVID DAYEN**

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