Trump and his party’s zeal to strip health coverage and food from 60 million Americans will matter more in 2026 than some Democrats caving.View this email in your browser [link removed]
[link removed]
****NOVEMBER 13, 2025****
On the
**Prospect** website [link removed]
[link removed]
How on Earth Are We Just Now Hearing About Trump’s ‘Hours’ With an Epstein Victim? [link removed]
Epstein said this in writing in 2011.
**BY RYAN COOPER** [link removed]
[link removed]
Starbucks Workers Tell Bosses: No Contract, No Coffee [link removed]
Twelve thousand unionized workers at one of the world’s biggest fast-food companies have waited years for a first contract.
**BY WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH** [link removed]
[link removed]
Key Nebraska House Primary Features an Establishment Progressive and an Outsider Moderate [link removed]
State lawmaker and scion John Cavanaugh and Democratic activist Denise Powell are circling each other in a seat that has narrowly eluded Democrats for years.
**BY AUSTIN AHLMAN** [link removed]
****Meyerson on TAP****
**The shutdown’s end as a Republican victory? No way.**
**Trump and his party’s zeal to strip health coverage and food from 60 million Americans will matter more in 2026 than some Democrats caving.**
Today’s Democratic Party is divided along two separate axes: an ideological one and, for lack of a better term, a strategic one. The former is what separates, say, democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from centrist Rep. Jared Golden; the latter, what separates, say, Rep. Ro Khanna from Sen. Chuck Schumer (whose ousting as party leader Khanna has called for).
It’s important not to conflate or confuse the two, or even to exaggerate each of them. On ideology, there’s clearly a divide between Zohran Mamdani and Abigail Spanberger, yet the two ran successful campaigns focused almost entirely on the same issue: affordability. Republican economic policy incapable of addressing (or actually exacerbating) acute hard times is a great unifier, as the hugely successful New Deal Democrats of the 1930s demonstrated, overcoming the immense cultural, religious, and ethnic divisions that had kept the party as far from power as a party can be during the 1920s.
The strategic divide, of course, is all about how Democrats should grapple with Donald Trump. Nothing about it correlates with ideology, as centrist Democrats’ anger and exasperation (see, e.g., Jon Chait) at the Democrats who voted to end the shutdown makes very clear. It’s worth noting that the Democrat who has most effectively countered Trump—California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who successfully led the campaign to create five new Democratic House seats—has seized the pole position in the party’s 2028 presidential contest. For now, at least, his strategic success is such that it’s rendered him seemingly immune from any ideological profiling by his fellow Democrats. For what it’s worth, he’s clearly more on the Spanberger side than Mamdani’s, though his success at having California’s government fund the production and distribution (starting January 1) of affordable insulin is more socialistic than anything Mamdani ran on. On cultural issues, he’s literally and figuratively a San Francisco Democrat, which means he’d schlep some heavy political baggage into an election requiring 270 electoral votes.
Strategy and ideology don’t rhyme. On most issues, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is a little to the left of his fellow Virginia senator, Mark Warner, certainly on labor issues, as Warner is the one Democratic senator who’s by no means a sure vote for labor law reform. But it was Kaine who voted to end the shutdown even as Warner voted no. (Virginia, of course, was home to more laid-off federal workers than any other state.)
It’s no accident that the most strategically successful Democrats in dealing with Trump are those who actually exert countervailing power by mobilizing a government against him: governors, like Newsom and Illinois’s JB Pritzker, in trifecta states. Congressional Democrats lack the power to do much more than try to shut down the government in the hope that it will compel Trump to accede to their demands. The thought that they could compel Trump to reverse his cuts to Medicaid, however, was never remotely realistic. The harm that those cuts will do to millions of Americans has never mattered a damn to Trump; what matters to him is that the Affordable Care Act, which those millions of Americans could access through Medicaid, was identified with Barack Obama, who once publicly ridiculed Trump, in return for Trump’s claims that Obama was born in Africa, at a White House Correspondents’ dinner, and that getting revenge on Obama was all that really mattered. That Trump used the shutdown to double down on the cruelty of his policies by cutting off food stamps only further demonstrated his, at best, indifference to such matters when weighed against his urge to compel his Democratic adversaries to give up and Obama to lose his signal achievement.
prospect.org/donate
That doesn’t at all mean that Trump and the Republicans “won” the shutdown, as they now are claiming. The shutdown enabled the Democrats to highlight the Republicans’ withdrawal of health coverage to millions of Americans, and Trump’s cessation of food stamp provision—at a time when he was praising himself for building a ballroom and rebuilding the Lincoln bathroom—only accelerated his descent in the polls. That’s some victory.
(As one of my friends recently suggested, an effective Democratic ad might say, “Trump is for me/me, Democrats are for you.”)
Could a longer prolongation of the shutdown have compelled Trump to make concessions? That would have worked only if Trump had some concern for the more than 60 million Medicaid enrollees, food stamp recipients, and federal employees whom he went out of his way to make more vulnerable and desperate in the course of the shutdown, and if he cared more about Republican prospects than he did about his wringing a submission from some Democrats and his taking an axe to Obamacare. A longer shutdown would have continued to benefit the Democrats politically, but at some point the havoc, and hunger, Trump was determined to wreak would have compelled a majority of the Democratic senators to call it off.
Trump reminds me of the Japanese generals who opposed surrendering to the Allies in 1945 even after the U.S. had dropped two atom bombs on their cities. Their refusal compelled the emperor to directly order them to surrender, and, with the full knowledge of their top general, some officers staged a military coup, hoping to seize Hirohito and keep his surrender message from being broadcast, that was only barely repelled. Top generals actually argued that the honor of the military, which they said required never surrendering, was more important than the survival of the Japanese people.
Confronted by a President Trump who thinks and behaves in the same way as those Japanese generals, a business-as-usual Democratic leadership, as personified by Chuck Schumer, is the wrong kind of leadership the Democrats, and the nation, need. That said, the only actually effective way that Democrats can deter Trump is to win a share of countervailing power—that is, the House and perhaps even the Senate—in next year’s midterm elections. On the strategic/nonstrategic continuum, that’s really the only thing that matters.
**–HAROLD MEYERSON**
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter [link removed]
prospect.org/donate
To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to subscribe [link removed]
**Click to Share This Newsletter**
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
To manage your newsletter preferences, use our preference management page [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, follow this link to unsubscribe [link removed].
Sent to:
[email protected]
Unsubscribe [link removed]
The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
