‘Hostage Taking’: Trump Is Hurting Americans to Force Dems to Cave on Shutdown
In 2011, on the eve of a potential government shutdown under former President Barack Obama, Donald Trump — then a famed reality TV host and tabloid staple — told The Today Show that a government shutdown amounted to a “tremendously negative mark on the president of the United States.” Now, for the second time while he has been in office, Trump’s government has shut down.
The Republican-controlled Congress is not running to get it reopened, instead working hard to shift blame off of themselves and onto Democrats. The White House is doing the same, while Trump seems borderline giddy over how he can use the shutdown to lay people off and cut government programs — never mind the Americans who will suffer as a result.
The government shut down after the Senate failed to pass a continuing resolution to extend the congressional budget on Tuesday night. At the core of the dispute are Republicans’ plans to allow Covid-era enhanced subsidies for insurance plans purchased under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) to expire at the end of the year — a move which would jack up health care prices nationally and kick millions off of their health insurance.
In March, Senate Democrats capitulated to Republicans and voted to pass a continuing resolution packed with MAGA funding priorities — and paved the way for a devastating reconciliation bill (the “Big Beautiful Bill,” according to the president) that included deep cuts to Medicaid and other critical social safety net programs. This time around, Democrats at least seem like they are prepared to dig in their heels in order to force concession from the GOP.
“Republicans would rather shut down the government than help Americans afford health care,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tells Rolling Stone. “That’s actually been true for a long time. During the last Trump administration, they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, now they’re just trying to take big bites out of it.” Warren added that Democrats goals are two-pronged: securing a rollback of cuts to Medicaid passed in July’s reconciliation bill, and preventing further decimation of the ACA.
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Sen Andy Kim (D-N.J.) notes that while Republicans are pushing for a short term extension on current funding legislation, the open enrollment period for ACA plans is set to begin next month. People signing up for plans in the coming weeks may end up paying significantly more for their health care should the subsidies lapse in a few months. “We don’t have the luxury of kicking the can down the road until Thanksgiving like the Republicans wanted to,” Kim says. “We need to address it now, and it’s what I’m hearing first and foremost from constituents.”
By contrast, the White House and Republicans are claiming that Democrats are holding the government hostage in order to provide health care coverage to “illegal aliens” — a claim that has no basis in fact. ACA subsidies have by law never been open to undocumented migrants, and have been made narrowly available to some migrants with legal status. Undocumented migrants are also ineligible for Medicare and Medicaid, despite Republicans claiming migrants were draining the health care programs while the party was trying to pass the “Big Beautiful Bill” earlier this year.
“Republicans’ response is a bold-faced lie, and they know it, but it is the only thing they have to say about health care,” Warren says. “Republicans recognize that their health care cuts are deeply unpopular, and their response is not to roll back the cuts, it’s to change the subject and hope that they don’t get tagged for what they are trying to do to the American people.”
Shutdowns are a pain, and have long-lasting consequences, but even during a shutdown mandatory spending programs like Medicare and Social Security remain active. Members of the military and other federal employees performing essential duties are furloughed or receive backpay whenever the shutdown ends. Self-funded programs like the postal service continue to operate. This time around, the Trump administration is broadcasting plans to take advantage of the funding lapses to permanently shrink the federal bureaucracy in a continuation of its DOGE-era firing spree.
Trump said as much on Tuesday during a televised appearance from the White House, telling reporters that “a lot of good can come down from shutdowns. We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want.”
“When you shut it down you have to do layoffs, we’d be laying off a lot of people,” he added.
The president gleefully wrote about his plans to cut programs in a Truth Social post on Thursday. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” he wrote. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
Trump’s comments on Tuesday, and a memo instructing agencies to prepare for layoffs from the Office of Management and Budget, which Vought runs, prompted a lawsuit from a coalition of unions representing federal workers. “Announcing plans to fire potentially tens of thousands of federal employees simply because Congress and the administration are at odds on funding the government past the end of the fiscal year is not only illegal — it’s immoral and unconscionable,” American Federation of Government Employees president Everett Kelley told The New York Times.
That very same day, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance met with congressional leadership — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) — ostensibly to negotiate an offramp. What ensued was an unproductive troll session in which the president displayed “TRUMP 2028” hats on the desk of the Oval Office in, as Kim described it, a performative display of “political domination and gamesmanship” by the president.
“These are people that are playing with someone else’s chips. They’re not feeling this. They don’t seem to care about it, internalize it,” Kim says. “Right now, today, no military service member in America is getting their paycheck. Today, no civil servant, no public servant, is getting their paycheck except members of Congress and the president of the United States. House Republicans didn’t even bother to show up to work this week, and they’re still getting paid.”
During Wednesday’s White House press briefing, Vance threatened that if the shutdown were to continue, the White House would be forced to conduct widespread layoffs of federal workers in order to maintain funding for essential government services.
To Warren, the tactic is blackmail. “It’s hostage taking,” she says. “What kind of president of the United States says either do what I want or I will hurt tens of thousands of people across this country — deliberately hurt them — not because they’ve done anything wrong, but just to wreak revenge on my political enemies?”
But by leveling the threat of mass federal firings, Republicans are hoping to turn the screws on moderate Democrats to secure the 60-vote threshold they would need to pass a continuing resolution and end the shutdown. Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), and Angus King (I-Maine) all voted with Republicans in support of the bill. Now, it’s up to their colleagues to hold the line and force concessions, or risk another instance of jellied spine in the eyes of voters.
“I talked with a number of Republican senators today,” Kim says, “and they’re hearing the same thing from their constituents, who are worried about health care. They know that they’re on the wrong side of this, and they’re concerned that this is not moving forward in a way that’s going to be helpful to them. I hear that from Republicans in the House, from swing districts.”
Warren adds that if Democrats fold in the face of threats from the White House of potentially illegal mass layoffs, the president will be emboldened to use similar tactics in his next clash with the opposition. “Trump will just use it again and again and again and again. If [he] decides that he can get something by firing more people or shutting down more government operations, he’ll do it unless Democrats and people across this country finally push back,” she says.
Warren adds: “Fighting to lower health care costs for tens of millions of Americans is a righteous fight. If Republicans are willing to shut down the government to ensure that millions of people lose their health care and millions more pay higher health care premiums, then they need to go explain to the American people why they deserve reelection.”