When the Democrats Think Trump Will Save Them - 10/6/25

Ever since the federal government shut down last week, the Republicans have been on the warpath. The GOP leadership on Capitol Hill has lambasted the Democrats for their refusal to support the Trump budget, and the White House is gleefully warning about the titanic spending cuts they are planning for the standoff.

 But the biggest challenge for Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer and their troops is that their strategy to push back against Trump is contradicted by all previous history on these types of confrontations. No previous shutdown had ever resulted in a political victory for the holdouts. Every time this had ever happened before, the party that withheld its votes to achieve a policy goal had ultimately caved and eventually provided the votes necessary to reopen the government. Whether it took a few days or several weeks, at a certain point, the chest-beating stops and the losers slink back to the Capitol with nothing to show for their rebellion.

 Worse, no party had ever achieved the policy goals that caused them to hold out in the first place. During the 2013 shutdown, Republicans attempting to repeal Obamacare finally gave up after it became clear that public opinion was squarely against them. Several years later, Democrats attempting to stop Trump’s funding of a border wall only managed to delay the inevitable, as the president finally provided the money through an executive order rather than budget negotiations. Or look back further to the GOP-driven shutdowns of the 1990’s, when Newt Gingrich retreated after he realized that the spending cuts demanded by GOP conservatives were not going to happen.

 Mindful of these lessons, Schumer provided the votes necessary to keep the government open during the budget impasse earlier this year. But he was attacked so harshly by his own party’s base that he and the rest of the Democratic leadership have made it clear that they were determined to prevent Trump’s budget from passing this fall. And so last week, the government shut down once again.

What makes Schumer and Jeffries so confident that they can avoid the same fate that was suffered by the opposition party during previous shutdowns? The answer is Trump. Democratic leaders look at poll numbers showing the president’s approval ratings at historically low levels. They see the same polls demonstrating that more voters blame Republicans than Democrats for the shutdown (although not by overwhelming margins). And those polls also show sky-high opposition to reducing the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act that the Biden Administration enacted during the pandemic. This is the central issue that Democrats are using to frame their opposition to the Trump budget: they are convinced that this fight will allow them to win the larger budget war.

One person who might agree with their assessment is Trump himself. It has been reported that the president is nervous that allowing health care premiums to increase for millions of Americans heading into an election year could be a significant obstacle to his goal of maintaining the current narrow Republican congressional majorities. There are a number of GOP moderates who have voiced similar concerns, and party leaders have indicated that they might be willing to negotiate a compromise but only after a budget has been passed and the government has reopened.

Democrats recognize that they will lose their leverage on this issue once the shutdown has ended, so they are holding firm. And it’s clear that Republican leaders, who have many members opposed to continuing the subsidies even after the budget has passed, are nervous that Trump may decide to strike a deal of his own with the Democrats to keep the tax credits in place. There’s no way to predict whether Trump would take such a step, but Speaker Mike Johnston and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are sufficiently concerned about that possibility that they acted as chaperones for Trump’s meeting with Schumer and Jeffries last week. 

Under most circumstances, the Democrats would appear to be holding a losing hand. At some point, a sufficient number of their members will reluctantly vote for Trump’s budget, the government will reopen and nothing will have changed, making the holdout a fairly useless exercise. Unless, of course, Trump decides to come to their rescue.

The sight of a Republican president who has vehemently opposed Obamacare since its inception supporting its continued expansion and protecting it from conservative attacks seems like an implausible outcome for the current impasse But during the Trump years, implausibility has become increasingly customary.