The shutdown is no longer ignorable
You can see why President Trump might not have been particularly worried about the government shutting down last month. During his first term in office, the government shutdown twice, once setting a new record in duration, but it didn’t really affect him politically. So Oct. 1 this year arrived without a funding bill and the government shutdown and Trump just moved forward with his second-term approach of doing whatever he wanted to anyway.
No prior president had ever seen more shutdown days during his presidency but he won reelection (eventually) anyway. So who cares?
That was all well and good while the government was still able to keep things running without obvious interference or hiccups. It’s probably useful, in fact, that shutdowns are now so common; many parts of the government know how to function without formalized funding, and that experience kicked in. But now, with this shutdown setting daily records for duration, those hiccups are starting to appear.
For example, Trump’s Transportation Secretary and fellow reality-TV veteran Sean Duffy appeared on Fox News this morning to explain how the administration would be forcing flight cancellations in 40 airports given air-traffic-control shortages.
As he spoke, an on-screen box showed the locations where those stoppages would occur: Boston, New York, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas. Basically any major hub might see cancellations that are a function of the shutdown. Luckily, there are no major travel-focused holidays coming up, right?
Trump, at least, believes that the shutdown was one reason his party fared so badly in this week’s elections. He’s probably right, at least in part. But that was also before problems really started to manifest for the public at large.
Polling conducted by SSRS for CNN in late October found that most Americans, including most Republicans, view the ongoing shutdown as at least a major problem, with 3 in 10 Americans viewing it as a crisis.
Again, that was before this week. It was also already the case on Election Day that Americans were more likely to blame Trump and Republicans in Congress for the shutdown. Polling from NBC News makes that clear.
Granted, the difference between the parties was relatively narrow, as it was when CNN asked whether respondents approved of those groups’ handling of the shutdown. A majority of respondents disapproved of Trump, Republicans and Democrats.
Clearly, Republicans think that they can shunt blame for the negative effects of the shutdown onto the opposition.
“The Transportation Secretary yesterday said 10 percent of flights are going to have to be cut back because we don’t have enough air traffic controllers,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said this morning, “because Democrats chose not to pay them.” That was the gist of Duffy’s Fox News appearance, too: Democrats were forcing a “not-great situation” on the public.
Maybe that will work. It will certainly work in the right-wing media bubble that Fox News and the administration so assiduously inflate. If your media allies let you wave off an electoral decapitation as “blue states being blue states,” they’re probably going to be fine with echoing your insistences that it’s the Democrats fault that the Republican-run government isn’t delivering.
Not sure that will play well in general, though. For example, there are millions of people in red states and districts with Republican legislators who rely on supplemental nutrition assistance programs (SNAP) from the federal government — assistance that Trump has said he doesn’t want to provide during the shutdown. But according to YouGov polling three-quarters of Americans, including 6 in 10 Republicans, think he should.
Again, even before SNAP was halted and before the flight cancellations, Americans thought Trump and Republicans were doing a poor job of handling the shutdown. YouGov shows how quickly perceptions of Trump and the GOP’s performance have been slipping.
What’s interesting about this moment is that it marks one of the first points at which Trump’s upending of traditional practice becomes immediately tangible. He imposed (and removed and re-imposed) tariffs that drove up costs for Americans, but that has been slow to effect the broader economy and plucks money out of Americans’ pockets relatively discreetly. He slashed foreign aid and research spending but those, too, had non-immediate repercussions for most people. But the shutdown — which he himself says his party can end — is obvious and instant and increasingly so. There’s no wondering when the other shoe will drop. It’s wondering how many shoes will drop and who they’ll crush.
The pain is expanding. Trump and his party have ownership over it. At some point, the president might want to spend less time thinking about the ballroom or the arch or his extravagant parties or the bathroom renovation or gilding the Oval Office or ducking out to play golf and figure out how to actually run the federal infrastructure that he was elected to run.
Photo: The president shows gold things in a gold room to bored people. (White House/Flickr)