Donald Trump and the Government Shutdown

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

President Donald Trump, who constantly boasts that everything he does is “the greatest the world has ever seen” (and everything someone else does that he doesn’t like is “the worst thing the world has ever seen”), has now presided over a shutdown of the U.S. government that is, you guessed it, the longest the country has ever seen. Not surprisingly, the record this shutdown broke was set in 2018, during Trump’s first term, which lasted 35 days and was over funding for Trump’s proposed 2,000-mile long wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

The main issue that sparked the current shutdown was over federal subsidies for health-care exchanges that provide insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These subsidies were expanded in 2020 and 2021 to deal with COVID-19, but this year Trump and Congressional Republicans were determined to gut them. So they put into their so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” a provision that terminated them as of the start of the open enrollment period for health-care plans on or around November 1.

Congressional Democrats, though a minority in both houses, were determined to restore these subsidies so people already at lower income levels wouldn’t be hit with health insurance premiums that were double, triple, or even a higher multiple of what they were paying earlier. They apparently thought they could shame Republicans with tales of people on the spot and forced to choose between access to health care and paying for rent and food. They thought wrong. Today’s Republicans are not only against the whole idea of a social safety net, they’re actually proud of their ability to make people starve.

The reason is the modern-day Republican party is dominated by the Libertarian agenda, which holds that it is not only bad public policy but actually immoral to tax rich people to help non-rich people. Libertarianism’s founder, novelist and political commentator Ayn Rand, said in response to a question about whether society had an obligation to take care of people with disabilities, “Misfortune does not justify slave labor.” She meant that taxing the rich to pay for social services for the non-rich essentially turns the rich into slaves.

In 2017, during Trump’s first term as President, I wrote that though he had campaigned for office as a European-style nationalist conservative, pledging to protect safety-net programs like Social Security and Medicare against other Republicans who wanted to cut them (and blaming so-called “illegal” immigrants for the economic crises facing those programs – actually immigrants aren’t allowed to collect Social Security, though they have to pay the payroll taxes that fund it), he was governing as a Libertarian. The reason, I argued, was that Libertarianism appealed to the two most important things to Trump: his bank balance and his ego. Not only does Libertarianism generate public policies that make Trump and other rich people even richer, it assuages his fragile sense of self by telling him that his wealth establishes his superiority to the common run of humanity.

When the Republicans swept the 2024 national elections, winning back the U.S. Senate, keeping the House of Representatives, and winning back the Presidency, Trump and his advisors, including Russell Vought and the others behind the so-called “Project 2025” (a massive 922-page blueprint from the Heritage Foundation for a Right-wing remaking of America), saw the chance for a thoroughgoing Right-wing transformation of America. Among their weapons was the theory of the “unitary executive,” which basically holds that since the executive branch was the only one for which the framers of the U.S. Constitution gave ultimate responsibility to just one person (the President), they meant that the President should have near-dictatorial powers.

Trump expressed this late in his first term, when he said about the Constitution, “There’s this little thing called Article II, which says I get to do whatever I want.” Since he returned to the Presidency on January 20, 2025, he has made it clear that he intends to impose near-absolute one-man rule on the U.S. Among other things, he hired 200 people involved in drafting Project 2025 for jobs in his administration, including Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). (For more information on Russell Vought, see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/russell-vought-profile-donald-trump).

During his first month back in office, Trump unilaterally created a new federal agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and put his chief campaign donor, multibillionaire Elon Musk, in charge of it. Musk and DOGE sent their minions into various government departments and fired employees wholesale. Sometimes they had to hire them back almost as quickly – like when they fired people in charge of securing America’s nuclear weapons or tracking down potential epidemics – and then had trouble reaching them because as part of firing them, they’d canceled their government e-mails and had no other contact information.

Trump also made it clear that he didn’t consider himself bound by any ethical norms against directly profiting from being President. The record of Trump’s second term is replete with deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars Trump has made with foreign governments to invest in businesses owned by himself or his adult children. There’s a clause in the Constitution that is supposed to make this illegal – Article I, section 9, which reads, “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” – but during his first term Trump denounced this as “that phony emoluments clause” and made clear he doesn’t consider himself bound by it.

Trump has essentially recruited private police forces, accountable not to the United States government but to him personally, within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). He has sent these forces into cities and states whose mayors and governors don’t want them, and he’s also federalized National Guard troops and even sent in U.S. Marines to enforce immigration laws. These have resulted in mass sweeps through areas with large Latino populations, detaining U.S. citizens as well as both documented and undocumented immigrants. Often Trump’s agents wear masks, drive in unmarked vehicles, and literally “disappear” people to unknown locations either in the U.S. or elsewhere. During the 2024 campaign Trump made it clear that immigrants are to him what Jews were to Adolf Hitler – never more so than during his one debate with his major-party opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, when he accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio of eating other people’s dogs and cats.

Trump has also openly expressed his contempt for the constitutional order on numerous occasions. On his way home from a state visit to Japan, he said that once Congress passed his “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” which slashed taxes for the very wealthiest Americans and eviscerated Medicare, Medicaid and other social-service agencies, he needed nothing more from them. (This echoed his statement during the 2024 campaign in which he told supporters, “Vote for me just this once, and you’ll never have to vote again.”) During his 2025 State of the Union Address he boasted that he’d issued more executive orders than any President ever. Clearly Trump intends to follow the classic dictator’s playbook and rule by decree, the separation of powers and the rest of America’s Constitution be damned.

Also Trump has actively sought to silence all public criticism of him. As part of a so-called “budget rescission” bill by which Congress repealed funding they’d already approved, he was able to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump installed Brendan Carr as head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Carr used that authority to threaten commercial broadcast networks with loss of their station licenses if they aired programming critical of Trump. The firing – blessedly temporary – of ABC late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was just the most blatant instance of Trump and Carr teaming up to silence a prominent critic. And Trump’s friend David Ellison bought Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. Trump responded by putting out an exultant post on his “Truth Social” media site which demanded that NBC similarly fire its late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

The most bizarre and visible manifestation of Trump’s desire to rule by diktat was his physical destruction of the East Wing of the White House. In late October he called in a wrecking crew with bulldozers to demolish the East Wing, added to the White House in 1902, to make room for the 90,000 square-foot “ballroom” he wants to build on the property (dwarfing the 55,000 square feet of the White House itself). The ballroom is estimated to cost $250 to $350 million, and the money is being contributed by wealthy individuals and corporations (including Comcast, parent company of NBC and Universal, as well as Amazon.com) that want to curry favor with Trump. Apparently this is a classic strategy of property developers – if you’re waiting for approval of a new project, destroy what’s already there to present the authorities holding up your project with “facts on the ground” and leave them with the alternatives of letting you build what you want or leaving an unsightly mess.

More recently Trump not only gutted the White House bathroom adjoining the Lincoln Bedroom, turning it from a tasteful blue-green art deco interior into an expanse of marble that makes it look like a mausoleum, he was so proud of this he posted 25 photos of it to social media. And he’s said in public that getting the ballroom done is his highest current priority – while the government is still shut down and millions of Americans are threatened with losing not only SNAP and affordable health insurance but the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and Head Start to fund children’s pre-school access. Trump’s bizarre noblesse oblige attitude also led him to host a 1920’s-style “Great Gatsby” Hallowe’en party on his private Mar-a-Lago golf course and resort in Florida on the eve of the demise of SNAP funding. Can you say, “Let ‘em eat cake”?

And Trump has successfully intimidated both the Republicans in Congress and the six-member radical-Right majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court to go along with him and his totalitarian project. (I call Trump a “totalitarian” rather than an “authoritarian” because authoritarians merely want to be obeyed. Totalitarians want to be worshiped.) One of his key strategies was his blanket pardon of all 1,500 people facing criminal prosecution for having participated in his unconstitutional attempt to stay in power after losing the November 2020 election that resulted in a riot in and around the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This created a cadre of people who not only had committed political violence on Donald Trump’s behalf before, but had gone on social media expressing their willingness to do so again. More recently, when one of the January 6 defendants committed a new crime, Trump fired federal prosecutors for having referenced his January 6 involvement in their sentencing memo.

The Government Shutdown in Context

Both Trump and Republicans in both houses of Congress have made it clear that their price for restoring funding to the federal government is the complete capitulation of Congressional Democrats. The last time they threatened a shutdown, in February 2025, they got their wish. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) got enough Democrats to vote to keep the government funded on Republican terms because, as he said at the time, he feared what Trump and the Republicans would do if they were given blanket authority under shutdown conditions to decide unilaterally which government departments would be considered “essential,” meaning they would be kept open, and which wouldn’t be, which would mean even more mass firings and the permanent ending of many government agencies.

Already Trump has targeted entire agencies for abolition even though they were initially authorized by Congress, and therefore only Congress can get rid of them. Among his targets are the Department of Education, which Republicans have been trying to get rid of since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1981; the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB); and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump said he went after USAID because its mission to help alleviate starvation and disease epidemics in Third World countries ran counter to his so-called “America First” agenda – and then he contradicted himself by pledging $40 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money to the government of Argentina to help keep its far-Right President, Javier Milei, in power. Democrats glumly pointed out that $40 billion would have been enough to keep the Affordable Care Act subsidies in place for another year.

The government shutdown reached an acute phase on November 1, when funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, ran out. Trump and Congressional Republicans openly boasted that they were essentially holding SNAP, and the estimated 42 million Americans who depend on it, hostage to get Congressional Democrats to reopen the government on their terms. Already House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who often seems to be Donald Trump’s Mini-Me, had unilaterally taken the House out of session for a month and a half so Senate Democrats would have no choice but to pass the House’s version of a funding bill if they wanted the government to stay open.

At least two lawsuits were filed in federal court to force the Trump administration to continue to fund SNAP. In one of the cases, judge John McConnell in Rhode Island ordered the government to pay for SNAP using a contingency fund created under the same law that created and sustained SNAP in the first place. On November 3 the Trump administration announced that it would comply with that ruling, but said they would only pay half the regular amount of benefits for November. “Even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out,” Trump posted on Truth Social, his own site. “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay.”

That’s already authoritarian enough – Trump presenting himself as the Great White Father deciding unilaterally who gets paid and who doesn’t – but it didn’t last long. The very next day, Trump did another Truth Social post reneging on his pledge to follow the court order and saying he wouldn’t allow SNAP benefits to go forward until the government reopens: “SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

The People Fight Back

Trump’s bizarre attempts to turn himself into an American dictator ruling by decree have generated push-back from millions of Americans. A series of three major nationwide mobilizations, one called “Hands Off” and two called “No Kings,” have taken place. The most recent one, on October 18, drew an estimated 7.5 millions Americans into the streets in all 50 states, including out-of-the-way locations whose citizens had voted solidly for Trump. Trump’s response was to create and post to social media a childish AI video featuring him as a Top Gun-style fighter pilot flying a plane and literally dumping shit on the protesters.

People have also started to fight back at the ballot box. While there aren’t that many U.S. elections held in odd-numbered years anymore, the ones that took place on November 4, 2025 were disastrous for Republicans. Moderate Democrats Alison Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, beating their Republican opponents by 15-point margins – considerably larger than the last pre-election polls had predicted. New York City just elected its first Muslim and first openly socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, with a shade over 50 percent of the vote in a three-person race against former Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

In an intense victory speech, Mamdani directly attacked Trump by name. (Spanberger had avoided criticizing Trump and Sherrill made just a veiled reference to him.) Mamdani also cited various people as his exemplars, including Eugene Debs, first Socialist Party candidate for U.S. President (he ran five times between 1894 and 1920); Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of an independent India after British colonial rule ended in 1947; and Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s Mayor from 1933 to 1945, whom Mamdani said was his role model for what he wants to do with the office. Mamdani’s most intriguing reference was to a major politician who had said, “You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose.” Though he didn’t name the person he was quoting, it was Mario Cuomo, former New York Governor and Andrew Cuomo’s father.

Later in the evening California voters learned that they had passed Proposition 50, put on the ballot by the California legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom to redraw the state’s Congressional district maps. Newsom intended this as an answer to a similar mid-term redistricting in Texas, where at Trump’s behest the state legislature sought to redraw their maps to add five more Republicans to the next Congress. Proposition 50 was designed to counteract the Texas gerrymander by adding five more Democrats to California’s House delegation. Just as Spanberger and Sherrill did 10 points better in the election than in the final polls, Proposition 50 had been expected to pass by a 10-point margin but the actual tally was nearly two to one.

The next morning, Trump got unexpected resistance from the United States Supreme Court. The Court heard arguments November 5 on two lawsuits that aim to reverse Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs on other countries. Trump has claimed the power to enact his own tariffs on any country in the world at any rate he wants for as long as he wants under a 1977 law called the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). This allows the President to “regulate … transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.” There are a few problems with that, including that IEEPA doesn’t mention the word “tariff” and that the Supreme Court has consistently held that the power to “regulate” does not include the power to “tax,” which is reserved to Congress under Article I of the Constitution.

The tariff issue is especially significant because it’s one item on which Trump has not only not embraced the Libertarian agenda, but has gone exactly in the opposite direction from it. While Trump has fulfilled the Libertarian agenda in his attacks on the independence of government workers and in seeking to abolish social-service and regulatory agencies like CFPB and USAID, he’s violated the central Libertarian tenet that capital – and capitalists – should be free to roam the world and invest wherever they like without pesky government restrictions. Trump has also violated Libertarian orthodoxy in insisting that the government take shares in private companies and force major retailers to “eat” the cost increases from his tariffs – which has led the Libertarian Cato Institute to denounce him as a socialist. (He is not; he’s a Vladimir Putin-style “crony capitalist” who uses his power as a national leader to demand deals that will make money for him personally.)

As reported on the Vox.com Web site (https://www.vox.com/politics/467485/supreme-court-tariff-argument-trump-learning-resources-vos-selections), the objections of radical-Right Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Any Coney Barrett (the latter two appointed by Trump in his first term) mirror classic Libertarian notions of the limits of governmental authority in general and Presidential authority in particular. Gorsuch asked Solicitor General John Sauer, who argued the case for the Trump administration, if Congress could delegate to the President other powers the Constitution specifically grants Congress, including the power to “regulate …commerce between the states” and the right to declare war. Roberts said he was troubled that Sauer’s position would give the President the right to impose tariffs “on any product, from any country, in any amount, for any length of time.”

But so far the indications from Trump and his minions are that he’s responding both to the election defeats and the Supreme Court’s skepticism about his tariff authority by doubling down on his positions and policies. Once again he’s insisting that he won’t negotiate with Democrats until they agree to reopen the government on Republican terms. In the meantime, thousands of government employees have either been laid off altogether or “furloughed,” forced to keep working without being paid. We already know from Trump’s experience as a private businessman that his favorite way to employ people is to promise them anything, get what he wants from them, and then weasel out of the bothersome necessity of actually paying them.

Trump has asserted that even after the government reopens, he personally will decide who gets back pay for the shutdown’s duration and who doesn’t. There’s a little problem with this: a law, passed in 2019, that requires that government employees who weren’t paid during a shutdown are supposed to get every dime they’re owed in back pay once it reopens. The President who signed this bill into law: Donald Trump. As the shutdown drags on, Democrats are becoming increasingly worried that Republicans will use it as an excuse to get rid of SNAP and other social programs they’ve never liked, as well as end so many of the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies it will become the Unaffordable Care Act and Republicans will have achieved by indirection what they failed to do both in Congress and the courts.

Trump is also calling on the Senate Republican majority to eliminate the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes for the Senate to accomplish almost anything. (Exceptions are “budget reconciliation” and “rescission” bills, which can pass with a simple majority.) So far Senate Republican leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) has resisted getting rid of the filibuster for the same reason that the late Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) did the last time Trump got impatient with the filibuster in 2017. Like McCain, Thune reasoned that the Republicans were in the Senate minority before, they might well be again, and when they are they will want the filibuster in place to resist what a Democratic President and Congress might do.

So the shutdown continues, seemingly with no end in sight. We’re heading into the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons, and millions of Americans will have to worry about what air travel will be like over the holidays with air traffic controllers working without pay and frequently calling in sick. The Republicans are increasingly counting on more Democrats to cave until the 60-vote threshold is reached to pass the House’s bill to reopen the government on Republicans’ terms. After the November 4 election, in which voters rewarded Democrats who fought back against the administration instead of yielding to it, this looks even less likely than it did before.