As the ongoing US government shutdown continues, it would be wrong to think that it is merely the latest in a long line of similar interruptions that have upended Washington going back decades. Rather, President Donald Trump’s 2025 version of the shutdown is unlike anything America has ever witnessed, and offers fresh portents of his determination to brutalise his Democratic Party opponents at every turn and treat their voters as his own personal enemies.
All previous American presidents have conceded there can be no winners from a government shutdown, and that the mere notion of bringing the machinery of non-essential governance to a standstill is to be avoided at all costs. But Trump is relishing the opportunity to try and persuade the public that the Democrats are to blame for the standoff. He is also indicating that if they fail to cave in to his demands for reopening the government, he will eviscerate core fully-funded programmes that he considers to be nothing more than Democrat-backed pet projects.
Announcing a Thursday meeting with Russell Vought, the “Make America Great Again” ideologue who serves as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, the President vowed to exact revenge for the shutdown. The meeting, he wrote, would “determine which of the many Democrat agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, [Vought] recommends to cut”. Trump said that he would personally determine “whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent”, an effort that blatantly overrides the constitutional role allotted to Congress in deciding how the nation spends its money.
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this opportunity”, Trump gleefully wrote. And indeed, he is maximising that opportunity to the full.
His blame game is playing out constantly on the White House website. “Democrats have shut down the government,” reads a banner that appears atop every page. Accompanying it is a clock counting the days, hours and minutes since the shutdown began. Over on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website, a large red banner appears on the homepage. “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government”, it proclaims. Red is also the chosen colour for a banner on the State Department’s website. “Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume,” visitors are informed.
There is no precedent for using official government websites for avowedly polemical attacks on any of the president’s opponents, and the claim that Democrats are solely culpable for the shutdown is also not entirely accurate. Republicans can be equally blamed for prompting the crisis, since they refused to back any kind of compromise measures proposed by Democrats that would have provided even short-term funding to keep the government open.
More chilling still, has been the President’s open pledge to withhold billions of dollars in funding for projects that are either already under way, or being planned, in Democrat-run states. Within hours of the shutdown commencing, Vought targeted 16 states, all of which were won by former vice president Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled”, he thundered on social media. He also put on hold $18 billion in funding for infrastructure projects in New York City, another Democrat stronghold, specifically targeting the planned construction of a new tunnel under the Hudson River and the renovation of the Second Avenue Subway, two projects heavily favoured by Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.
Schumer, along with Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives, has also been targeted by an AI-generated deepfake video that the President posted to his social media account on Tuesday. It depicts the two men briefing reporters at the White House following a futile meeting earlier this week with Trump, and Jeffries (the first African American ever to serve in his position) is shown wearing a sombrero and sporting a large moustache that the Democrats argue is racist. “Look guys, there’s no way to sugarcoat it”, Schumer is portrayed as saying, via AI-created audio, “nobody likes Democrats any more. We have no voters left because of all of our woke, trans bullsh*t”, continues the synthetically produced voice. “We’re just a bunch of woke pieces of sh*t”, the Senator is depicted as saying.
The President’s distribution of the video has deeply unnerved Democrats, who fear that many Americans may actually believe that it represents reality, further undermining public confidence in the party and politics more generally. But Vice President JD Vance defended the President’s conduct. “I think it’s funny”, he told reporters. “The President’s joking, and we’re having a good time”.
That may come as cold comfort to 750,000 federal government workers who are home, furloughed thanks to the possibly lengthy shutdown, and to voters watching legislation that they helped pass being arbitrarily shredded by the country’s authoritarian leader.
