Despite His Best Efforts, People Blame Trump for Shutdown, Poll Shows
Donald Trump is blaming Democrats for the shutdown. Americans aren’t falling for it.

No matter how aggressively the White House tries to frame Democrats for the government shutdown, the majority of Americans see Donald Trump and his allies as being at fault.
A new poll reveals that more Americans believe that the president and Republicans in Congress are to blame for the current partial shutdown, according to The Washington Post. The Post surveyed more than 1,000 Americans this week.
Roughly 47 percent of respondents said so, while 30 percent said that Democrats were primarily responsible. Twenty-three percent of those surveyed said they were not sure who was primarily responsible for the shutdown.
In an open-ended response format, some of those who blamed Republicans cited the party’s current grip on all branches of government and their inability to negotiate. Some of those who blamed Democrats believed that liberals have “untenable” or “unreasonable” requests for funding the government, while still others echoed false narratives that Democrats are trying to offer government-subsidized health care benefits to undocumented immigrants.
The understanding of who was at fault was, unsurprisingly, extraordinarily partisan. The majority of Republicans—some 67 percent of those that identified with the party—responded that Democrats were at fault, while an overwhelming majority of Democrats (87 percent) responded that Republicans were to blame.
The Washington Post noted that the results of the poll were comparable to past government shutdowns, with Republicans shouldering the bulk of the blame.
So far, the shutdown has furloughed more than half a million federal employees, according to a New York Times monitor. That includes 89 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency, 87 percent of the Education Department, and 71 percent of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Trump administration has been crystal clear in blaming Democrats for the critical congressional failure this week. On Tuesday, it issued ideological messaging via executive agency heads to thousands of federal employees, in potential violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch and the Hatch Act. The near-identical notes were received by workers at the Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration.
The White House website featured similar messages Wednesday. A banner atop the page reads: “Democrats have shut down the government,” followed by a timer tracking the amount of time it’s been since both parties failed to reach an agreement to continue funding the country.
A since-deleted animated banner above that read, “Democrat Shutdown: Democrats In Their Own Words.” That banner linked out to another White House page titled “Live News” that features a running feed of edited comments from top Democratic lawmakers about the continuing resolution. (The feed was not live, nor did it direct users toward news.)