For what seemed to be the first time over the weekend, the Trump administration openly defied a judge’s order. The administration loaded 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members onto two airplanes Saturday night headed for El Salvador. While the plane was in the air, a judge ordered that the planes return to the United States. Trump ordered them to continue on. The White House says it did not defy the judge because the aircraft were already in international territory at the time the judge spoke, but that’s silly. You can turn around a plane any time. Attorney and commentator Mark Zaid said this was the “start of true constitutional crisis.”
This followed Trump’s outrageous speech at the Department of Justice last Friday. For a president even to go to Main Justice and give a speech is potentially dubious, unless that speech says, “You just do your jobs and ignore me,” which is obviously not what Trump said. In fact, he made it crystal clear to our country’s top lawyers, without exactly saying so, that they’d be well advised now to pursue his revenge agenda and go after lawyers, journalists, and others who’ve found their way into his sights.
This, Democrats, is what you need to focus on. You had a bad week. Check that—a horrible week. It was mostly Chuck Schumer’s fault, and people are quite rightly furious at the Senate minority leader for caving to Republicans in the government funding fight. Now you are collectively polling below 30 percent—just about your worst approval number ever. But the country needs you to fight Trump, not each other.
I would like to have seen the Senate Democrats vote “no” to the GOP’s continuing resolution and force a shutdown. This was just one of those moments when history was grabbing them by the lapels, shaking them, and saying, “Do something dramatic!” That’s the bottom line here. They should have taken a stand.
And, if they weren’t going to take a stand, Schumer certainly should have signaled as much earlier in the week. If he hadn’t been so emphatic in saying he was voting “no,” his 180 last Thursday wouldn’t have been such a shocker (indeed, by definition, it wouldn’t have been a 180). So he really blew the politics of this, in a way he normally doesn’t.
But having said all that: There is in fact a case for wanting to avoid a shutdown. And it’s not a political case. It’s a substantive case.
Schumer’s critics, from what I can see, are focused almost wholly on the politics of the situation—public perception, and who’d be blamed. Much was made of that Quinnipiac poll last week showing that 32 percent of respondents would blame Democrats while a combined 53 percent would blame Republicans (31 percent the GOP Congress and 22 percent Trump).
Democrats could have won the politics. So why on earth should they have had any hesitation at all? Because aside from politics, there’s substance, and I became convinced over the weekend through some things I read and conversations I had that, as bad as Trump and Elon Musk are now, and as bad as this funding bill is, a shutdown could potentially give them vastly more power.
Read this thorough and calm and well-reported piece posted by Substacker Gabe Fleisher last Thursday. He goes into a lot of history on shutdowns. They didn’t exist until a memo by Jimmy Carter’s attorney general conjured them into being. This means that there is no congressional law involved here. It also means that Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, can write any sort of memo any time she wants to redefine the terms of a shutdown.
But that’s not the worst of it. Basically, it would be entirely up to Trump (and Musk) to decide who is and isn’t essential. And the whole thing would be run on a day-to-day basis by the Office of Management and Budget—in other words, by Russ Vought, the lead author of Project 2025.
Trump could unilaterally shut down entire agencies. Conversely, he could take activities he deems “essential”—mass deportations, say—and dramatically expand them. Permanently.
So what, you say? He’s already doing that. Well, he is, to an extent. But during a shutdown, he can order the shifting of resources from one agency to another with no checks at all on his decisions. That is different. Fleisher quotes law professor Charles Tiefer as saying: “I think [Trump] views his powers as limitless in a shutdown situation. And so, yes, he would move money around, so that he could increase [immigration] holding facilities. He’s already said that there’s an emergency, so this would just be one more use of the emergency status. And who is there to stop him if he turns to Russell Vought and says, ‘Would you move money from the Department of Education to ICE?’ Vought’s not going to say no. And Pam Bondi is not going to say no.”
It’s true that the GOP bill the 10 Senate Democrats supported hands Trump a lot of power too. And it’s difficult to know exactly how much more power Trump would have during a shutdown to shape the executive branch to his liking. But to me it stands to reason that the unilateral power to declare employees nonessential would let Trump do anything.
No more Environmental Protection Agency? He probably couldn’t do that if Congress had a say in it. Even this Congress—they’d cut it deeply, but I doubt they’d just eliminate it. Do we doubt Trump would?
So—sure, Democrats could win the politics of a shutdown. But the substance of a shutdown would hurt: thousands of federal employees, and millions of Americans who need them to do the jobs they do.
As for what the Democrats should do now? Let’s start with what they shouldn’t do. They shouldn’t tear each other apart. Schumer made a terrible own goal, but for now, he’s probably not going anywhere. Post-2026 is another matter. There are smart younger senators in that caucus, and it’s their time. Schumer needs to bring these people forward and showcase them: Senator A leads a weekly press conference on Veterans Affairs cuts, Senator B leads one on Medicaid cuts, Senator C on all the legal cases, Senator D on Project 2025, and so on. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries needs to do the same in the House. Just keep punching, week after week after week.
I know that sounds unglamorous and a little dull. But nothing is going to change overnight here. Trump is unpopular by presidential honeymoon standards; on the other hand, that he’s even in the mid-40s is troubling, and a sign that a decent chunk of swing voters are not yet enraged. And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that these angry town halls mean that the Trump-Musk agenda is failing. An NBC poll over the weekend delivered a mixed verdict on DOGE, but “mixed” isn’t all bad—46 percent thought it was a good idea versus 40 percent who said bad.
This is going to take time. Schumer said one true thing in that big New York Times interview Sunday: Getting Trump down to 40 percent approval is key. When Trump was president before, Schumer said, “when he went below 40 percent in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us.” When their leader is unpopular, lawmakers start thinking about what they need to do to save their own necks.
He’ll get there, as people see the consequences of the tariffs and other policies, and as he forces a constitutional crisis or three. Democrats need to be ready for that moment. And they just need to pick themselves up and fight. They may be mad at each other, and fine, let them have that argument for a few days. But they need to keep their eyes on the prize here.
