Trump 'showed his weakness' with voters — and Democrats can exploit it
On Monday, President Donald Trump threw a ‘deranged rant’ on Truth Social, attacking air traffic controllers who dared take time off during their unpaid shutdown. He also falsely claimed additional money can be sent to controllers who did not take time off.
It was all nonsense, said “Daily Blast” host Greg Sargent, but the tantrum “showed his weakness,” on the shutdown.
Eight Democrats in the Senate broke with the party and agreed to a temporary funding bill that does not contain the signature health subsidies that Trump and Republicans stole from Americans with Trump’s budget bill this past summer. This is galling, said Sargent because the concession comes “right after Trump and the GOP suffered a massive electoral rebuke” that proved their weakness to voters.
“That Trump rant illustrates the power dynamics here pretty clearly,” said Sargent. “As long as the government is shut down, he’s reduced to ranting furiously and threatening government workers to try to get them to somehow minimize the political pain he’s feeling. ‘Go to work or else I’ll dock you,’ right? Yet this dynamic seems lost on the Democrats who caved. We keep hearing from them stuff like, the shutdown wasn’t working because Trump wasn’t caving, but he was swirling down the drain politically. So it was working in that sense.”
“Off Message” substack writer Brian Beutler, said many Democrats were driven to cave by a “generosity of spirit” that Trump does not have.
“The shutdown went on for 40 days, there was real pain, not just for government employees — people who lost SNAP benefits were gonna go hungry. And people who needed to travel were finding their flights canceled or delayed, “ Beutler said. “… But Trump chose to do those things. Trump chose to make that pain happen, thinking that it would hurt Democrats, but it kept hurting him.”
Beutler went on to point out that Trump wanted to cut SNAP benefits “because he thought it would hurt Democrats with their bleeding hearts, … but then he realized that it was going to cause him pain. So, he said he would reinstate some of the SNAP benefits. And then he went to court to [stop that]. He kept going in these circles because he didn’t have any good moves,” Beutler said.
“All the pain is experienced — or at least most of it is being experienced — by him, politically speaking,” said Sargent.
Democrats’ concession, said Beutler, may act as a kind of bluff call that highlights the president’s cruelty and his willingness to cause voters pain.
“If you win [the subsidy battle], then you actually shield Donald Trump and voters from the consequences of Republican policy. You reduce the harm he meant to inflict on the public. And if the public never understands what they voted for, they’ll never necessarily know why they shouldn’t vote that way again in the future.”
Hear and read the “Daily Blast” episode at this link.
