Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

October 25, 2025 (Saturday)

Yesterday the Trump administration said it would not use any of the approximately $6 billion the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) holds in reserve to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The government shutdown means that states have run out of funds to distribute to the more than 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.

Roll Call’s Olivia M. Bridges notes that this position contradicts the shutdown plan the USDA released in late September. Then, it said: “Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”

Yesterday’s USDA memo also says that any states that tap their own resources to provide food benefits will not be reimbursed.

Today, in yet another violation of the Hatch Act that prohibits the use of government resources for partisan ends, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service website reads: “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”

It appears the administration is using those Americans who depend on food assistance as pawns to put more pressure on Democrats to cave to Trump’s will. Today, Annie Karni of the New York Times reported that Trump has joked, “I’m the speaker and the president,” and Trump ally Steven Bannon calls Congress “the state Duma,” a reference to Russia’s rubber-stamp assembly.

With Republicans refusing to negotiate with Democrats in the normal way, with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) keeping the House out of session, and with Trump leaving for Asia for a week, Republicans are clearly making the calculation that Democrats who refused to give up their demand for the extension of the premium tax credit to stop dramatic hikes in the cost of healthcare premiums will cave when America falls into a hunger crisis. 

What are we doing here, folks?

The nation’s nutrition program was once the symbol of government brokering between different interests to benefit everyone. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, one of the first crises he had to meet was the collapse of agricultural prices, which had been falling since the end of World War I and fell off a cliff after the stock market crash of October 1929. Farmers reacted to falling prices by increasing production, driving prices even lower.

In summer 1933, the government tried to raise prices by creating artificial scarcity. They paid farmers to plow their crops under and bought and slaughtered six million piglets, turning the carcasses into salt pork, lard, industrial grease, and fertilizer. The outcry over the slaughter of the pigs was immediate, and the escape of some intrepid animals into the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, and Chicago, Illinois, increased the protest at both the slaughter and the waste of food when Americans were going hungry.  

So in fall 1933 the administration set up the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, designed to raise commodity prices by buying surplus production and distributing that surplus through local charities. In a story about the history of nutrition assistance programs, journalist Matthew Algeo noted that in January 1934, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation bought 234,600 hogs. This time, their meat went to hungry Americans.

But that fall, when officials from the FSRC announced they were planning to open a “goods exchange” or “commissary” outside Nashville, Tennessee, to distribute food directly to those who needed it, grocers protested that the government was infringing on private business and directly competing with them. 

The next year, the agency became the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation and began to distribute surplus food to schools to be used in school lunch programs. Needy students would not otherwise be able to afford food, so providing it for them did not compete with grocers. In 1937, Congress placed that agency within the Department of Agriculture. 

To get food into the hands of Americans more generally, officials at the Department of Agriculture came up with the idea of “food stamps.” As Algeo explains, eligible recipients bought orange-colored stamps that could be redeemed for any food except alcohol, drugs, or food consumed on the premises. With the orange stamps, a buyer received blue stamps worth half the value of the orange stamps purchased. The blue stamps could be redeemed only for foods the government said were surplus: butter, flour, beans, and citrus fruits, for example. 

Any grocery store could redeem the stamps, and grocers could then exchange all the stamps—orange and blue—for face value at any bank. The Treasury would pay back the banks. 

It was a complicated system, but when the government launched it in May 1939 in Rochester, New York, it was a roaring success. By early December, Algeo notes, the government had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of orange stamps. That meant another half-million dollars’ worth of the blue stamps had been distributed, thus pumping a half a million dollars directly into the 1,200 grocery stores in Rochester, and from there into the local economy. 

The program spread quickly. In the four years it existed, nearly 20 million Americans received benefits from it at a cost to the government of $262 million. With the economic boom caused by World War II, the government ended the program in 1943.  

In 1959, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to restart a food stamp program, but it was not until 1961, after seeing the poverty in West Virginia during his campaign, that President John F. Kennedy announced a new program. Since then, the program has gone through several iterations, most notably when the Food Stamp Act of 1977 eliminated the requirement that beneficiaries purchase stamps, a requirement that had kept many of the nation’s neediest families from participating. 

In 1990 the USDA began to replace stamps with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, and in 2008, Congress renamed the program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In July 2025 the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut about $186 billion from SNAP programs, and then in September 2025 the USDA announced it would no longer produce reports on food insecurity in the U.S., calling them “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies” that “do nothing more than fear monger.”

While a great deal has changed in nutrition support programs in the past sixty years, what has not changed is the importance of food assistance programs to retailers, and thus to local economies. In 2020, Ed Bolen and Elizabeth Wolkomir of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that about 8% of the food U.S. families buy is funded by SNAP. In fiscal year 2019, that amounted to about $56 billion. Beneficiaries spent SNAP dollars at about 248,000 retailers. While about 80% of that money went to superstores or supermarkets—in 2025, Walmart alone captured about 25% of that money—the rest of it went to small businesses. Bolen and Wolkomir note that about 80% of stores that accept SNAP are small enterprises. SNAP benefits are an important part of revenue for those smaller businesses, especially in poorer areas, where they generate significant additional economic activity.

Not only will the loss of SNAP create more hunger in the richest country on earth, it will also rip a hole in local economies just as people’s health insurance premiums skyrocket.  

And yet, at the same time the Department of Agriculture says it cannot spend its $6 billion in reserves to address the $8 billion needed for SNAP in November, the administration easily found $20 billion to prop up right-wing Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina. 

What are we doing here?

October 28, 2025 (Tuesday)

In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.” 

Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing they alone truly knew what was best for the country. 

Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon—one of the richest men in America—cut taxes on the wealthy to spur investment in industry. He also gave rebates and tax abatements: between 1921 and 1929 he returned $3.5 billion to wealthy men. 

At the same time, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and consultant, expanded his department to fifteen thousand employees with a budget of more than 37 million dollars, working as a liaison between businessmen and the government and helping businesses to avoid antitrust lawsuits. He urged European countries to buy American.

Their policies seemed to work brilliantly. Between 1925 and 1926, more than twenty-two thousand new manufacturing companies formed. Industrial production took off. Business profits rose, and if wages didn’t rise much, they didn’t fall, either. 

And oh, the changes the new economy brought! By 1929, more than two thirds of American homes had electricity, which brought first electric lights, then refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, and radios. Consumers rushed to buy them, along with ready-made clothing, beauty products, and cars, all of which the new advertising industry, which grew out of the government propaganda campaigns of World War I, promised would bring them glamor, sophistication, romance, and power. 

In the Roaring Twenties, it seemed that government and business had finally figured out how to combine government promotion with the efficiency of an industrial economy to benefit everyone. Business was booming, standards of living were rising, and Americans were finding the time to read, learn, invent, and improve. In 1928, Republicans tapped Hoover for president. He promised that continuing the policies of the last eight years would bring the U.S. “in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” He won with a whopping 58.2% of the vote.

With Hoover in the White House, Americans wanted in on the inevitable growth of the economy. They invested in industries producing steel, coal, and consumer goods, and in utilities and transportation. Stock prices rose. And rose, and rose. By 1929 the rush to buy stocks had become a rush to speculate in the stock market. Prices that in spring 1928 had seemed too high to be real were laughably low by fall. Radio had been at 94½ in March 1928; by September 1929 it was 101 but had split so often that the holdings from 1928 were actually worth 505. And so it went, down the stock lists. 

Those with less money to burn could get into the market by buying on margin, putting down 10 or 20 percent of the cost of a stock and borrowing the rest from a broker with the promise that the loans would be paid off by the anticipated increase in the stock’s value. 

Those excited by the scene dismissed those who warned that stock prices were a bubble as ignorant, anti-American naysayers. “Be a bull on America!” boosters urged. “Never sell the United States short!”

October 24, a Thursday, was the beginning of the end. Heavy trading in the morning slowed the ticker tape that recorded trades. Brokers fearful of being caught sold more and more heavily. When the tape finally caught up after 7:00 that night, it showed that an astonishing 12,894,650 shares had changed hands. By afternoon, bankers managed to shore up the market, which regained the ground it had lost in the morning. But those dreadful early hours had wiped out hundreds of thousands of small investors. 
 
The market seemed to recover on Friday and Saturday. But then, on Monday, October 28, prices slid far in heavy trading. And then, on October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down. 

When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion. 

Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields. 

By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

Republican leaders blamed poor Americans for the Great Depression, saying they drained the economy because they refused to work hard enough. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Mellon told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” 

But the problem was not poor workers. The rising standards of living that had gotten so much attention in the new magazines of the 1920s mainly benefited white, middle-class, urban Americans. Farm prices crashed after WWI, leaving rural Americans falling behind, while workers’ wages did not rise along with production. The new economy of the 1920s benefited too few Americans to be sustainable.  

Hoover tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country…is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But he rejected public works programs to provide jobs, saying that such projects were a “soak the rich” scheme that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.

By 1932, Americans were ready to try a new approach. They turned to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.

Under Roosevelt, Democrats protected workers’ rights, provided government jobs, regulated business and banking, and began to chip away at racial segregation. New Deal agencies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings. 

They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where by 1939 they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden—and abroad.

October 30, 2025 (Thursday)

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) continues to try to pin the upcoming catastrophic lapse in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding on the Democrats. But with the U.S. Department of Agriculture sitting on $6 billion in funds Congress appropriated for just such an event, the Treasury finding $20 billion to prop up Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina, Johnson refusing to bring the House into regular session to negotiate an end to the government shutdown, and President Donald J. Trump demanding $230 million in damages from the American taxpayer, bulldozing the East Wing of the White House to build a gold-plated ballroom that will dwarf the existing White House, and traveling to Asia, where South Korean leadership courted him by giving him a gold crown and serving him brownies topped with edible gold, blaming any funding shortfall on Democrats is a hard sell. 

According to a Washington Post–ABC survey, more Americans blame Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown than blame Democrats by a margin of 45 to 33, and Trump’s approval rating continues to move downward, with the presidential approval average reported by Fifty Plus One at 41.3% approval and 55.1% disapproval, a –14 split. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted on October 24 that polls show Americans now trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy well. 

Trump ran in 2024 with a promise to bring down inflation, which was then close to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2.0%; now core inflation is at 3%, having gone up every month since April. Halloween candy—on people’s minds today—is at 9.8% inflation and costs 44% more than it did in 2019. Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell sure sounded like he was describing stagflation—a condition when the economy stagnates despite inflation—when he said yesterday: "In the near term, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside, and risks to employment to the downside, a challenging situation.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said today that while the stock market has done well this year, a better economy is going to “start flowing through to working Americans next year.”

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, in a rambling and disjointed speech in Japan, Trump told U.S. military personnel that he is federalizing National Guard troops and sending them into Democratic-led cities “because we’re going to have safe cities.” In the same speech, Trump repeatedly attacked former president Joe Biden and insisted yet again that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. (It was not.)

When asked by a reporter later to clarify his remarks, Trump referred back to the Insurrection Act, saying that if he invoked it, “I’d be allowed to do whatever I want. But we haven’t chosen to do that because we’re…doing very well without it. But I’d be allowed to do that, you understand that. And the courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved. And I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I can send anybody I wanted.”  

In fact, a president can invoke the accurately named Insurrection Act only in times of insurrection or rebellion. Neither of those conditions exists. 

But the administration is working hard to create the impression that they do. Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the videos the Department of Homeland Security has been publishing to demonstrate the administration’s triumph over crime in U.S. cities as its agents work “day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals” have been doctored. They do not represent current actions, but rather are a hash of video from different states and different times. 

When the reporters asked the White House about the misleading footage, spokesperson Abigail Jackson told them that “the Trump administration will continue to highlight the many successes of the president’s agenda through engaging content and banger memes on social media.”

There are signs the administration is not just trying to give the impression that Americans are rioting, but is trying to push them to do so. 

Aaron Glantz of The Guardian reported yesterday that on October 8, Major General Ronald Burkett, who directs the Pentagon’s National Guard bureau, ordered the National Guard in all the states, U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia to form “quick reaction forces” trained in “riot control.” Most states are required to train 500 National Guard personnel, for a total nationwide of 23,500. The forces are supposed to be in place by January 1, 2026.

In his order, Burkett relied on an executive order Trump signed on August 25, calling on the secretary of defense to “immediately begin ensuring that each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order,” and “ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.”

In August the administration planned for two groups of 300 troops to be stationed in Alabama and Arizona as a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force.” Now that number is 23,500, and the troops will be in every state and territory.

The establishment of a domestic quick reaction force to quell civil disturbances at a time when there are no civil disturbances that can’t be handled easily by existing law enforcement suggests the administration is expecting those conditions to change.

That expectation might have something to do with Monday’s story from Anna Giaritelli of the Washington Examiner that the White House is reassigning ICE field officers and replacing them with officers from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Greg Wehner and Bill Melugin of Fox News reported that the shift will affect at least eight cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Portland, Philadelphia, El Paso, and New Orleans. 

White House officials, presumably led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who has said the administration intends to carry out “a minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day, are frustrated by the current pace of about 900 a day. So those officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, special government employee and Noem advisor Corey Lewandowski, and Greg Bovino, a Border Patrol sector chief who has been overseeing the agency’s operations in Los Angeles and Chicago, have decided to ramp up those deportations by replacing ICE officials with far more aggressive CBP leaders. 

Tripling arrests will likely bring pushback.  

Michael Scherer, Missy Ryan, and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic reported today that political appointees Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have moved onto military bases. 

The designs of the anti-immigrant leaders in the administration dovetail with Trump’s political designs. Trump has talked a lot about serving a third term in the presidency, most recently talking about it to reporters on Air Force One earlier this week. The Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution prohibits a third term, but Trump ally Stephen Bannon told The Economist last week that “Trump is going to be president in ‘28 and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” Bannon claimed, “There’s many different alternatives” to get around the Twenty-Second Amendment. Trump keeps “Trump 2028” campaign hats on bookshelves outside the Oval Office.

Janessa Goldbeck, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Vet Voice Foundation, told Guardian reporter Glantz that Burkett’s recent order shows “an attempt by the president to normalize a national, militarized police force.” Such a force has not just military but also electoral power: it could be used in Democratic-led states to suppress voting. In a worst-case scenario, Goldbeck said, “the president could declare a state of emergency and say that elections are rigged and use allegations of voter fraud to seize the ballots of secure voting centers.”

Today, Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles has “initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew” over his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and participation in activities surrounding Epstein. Andrew will be stripped even of his title of “prince” and will be forced to leave the home he has shared for more than 20 years with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, at Royal Lodge, a 30-room mansion located in Windsor Great Park. The palace said: “These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him.”

Today Jim Acosta reported that survivors of Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise have written a letter to Speaker Johnson demanding that Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) be sworn into office. Voters elected Grijalva on September 23, but Johnson has steadfastly refused to swear her in. Grijalva has said she will provide the last signature necessary on a discharge petition to force a vote on the public release of the Epstein files, an outcome that threatens to expose how and why Trump was named in those files. 

The survivors write that Johnson’s “continued refusal to seat her is an unacceptable breach of democratic norms and a disservice to the American people. Even more concerning to us as survivors, this delay appears to be a deliberate attempt to block her participation in the discharge petition that would force a vote to unseal the Epstein/Maxwell files. The American public has a right to transparency and accountability, and we, as survivors, deserve justice. Any attempt to obstruct a vote on this matter—by manipulating House procedure or denying elected members their seats—is a direct affront to that right and adds insult to our trauma.”

November 2, 2025 (Sunday)

Last Monday, October 27, right-wing personality Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes for more than two hours, mainstreaming the podcaster whose praise for Hitler, vows to kill Jews, denial of the Holocaust, and apparently gleeful embrace of racism and sexism has, in the past, led establishment Republicans to avoid him. 

When Fuentes had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in a gathering with then-former president Donald J. Trump in 2022, Republican officials condemned the meeting. Then Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “There is no room in the Republican Party for anti-semitism or white supremacy.” Amid the blowback, Trump suggested the meeting had been accidental, with Fuentes attending as a guest of rapper Ye, and the dinner being “quick and uneventful.”

Fuentes emerged as a right-wing provocateur in 2016 during a brief stint as a student at Boston University but fell out of establishment channels after appearing at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” 

Sidelined, Fuentes launched his own independent show, where he attracted a fanbase known as “Groypers” who ferociously opposed established right-wing politics. As Ali Brand noted on Friday in The Atlantic, in 2021, Fuentes said he wanted to drag the Republican Party “kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party.”

Fuentes took on Charlie Kirk, who established Turning Point USA in 2012 as a vehicle to attract young people to right-wing politics, encouraging his supporters to troll Kirk’s events. As Will Sommer reported last Thursday in The Bulwark, just days before Kirk was murdered in September, Fuentes taunted him, saying: “I took your baby, Turning Point USA, and I f*cked it. And I’ve been f*cking it. And that’s why it’s filled with groypers…. We already own you,” he said. “We own this movement.” By the end of October, Fuentes had about a million followers on X. 

Certainly, neo-Nazi voices are becoming more obvious in the MAGA party. Last month, Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram between leaders of the hard-line pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and cheered slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

Also last month, the White House was forced to withdraw Trump’s nomination for Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him after the publication of texts in which Ingrassia said he has “a Nazi streak in me.” 

Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed the Young Republicans’ chat as “stupid” jokes made by “kids,” although the eight members of the chat whose ages could be ascertained were 24 to 35 and included a Vermont state senator, chief of staff for a member of the New York Assembly, a staffer in the Kansas attorney general’s office, and an official at the U.S. Small Business Administration. 

Carlson seems to think momentum is behind Fuentes. He has given Fuentes access to his own 16.7 million followers on X and posted a photograph of himself with his arm around Fuentes, both of them beaming.  

The platforming of a white nationalist by a MAGA influencer who used to be mainstream started a fight on the right. 

The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, posted a video defending Carlson’s interview from “the venomous coalition attacking him.” Activists founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank in 1973 in response to the 1971 Powell Memo calling for the establishment of “conservative” institutions to stand against the liberal ones dominating society. Heritage policies became central to the political thought of the Reagan Revolution and went on to shape the foreign policy of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, remaining a powerful force in Republican policy through Trump’s first term. 

When Roberts took over the leadership of Heritage in 2021, he dedicated it to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Roberts says he looks to modern Hungary under authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as “not just a [italic] model for conservative statecraft but the [italic] model.” He brought Heritage and the Orban-linked Danube Institute into a formal partnership. The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán showed in Project 2025, which Heritage led, to map out a future right-wing presidency that guts the civil service and fills it with loyalists; attacks immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals; takes over businesses for friends and family; and moves the country away from the rules-based international order. 

After Roberts put out his video, former Senate Republican leader McConnell commented on social media: “The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends. Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats. But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”

Senior analyst for tax policy at the Heritage Foundation Preston Brashers simply posted an image of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting depicting “Freedom of Speech”—a man in a flannel shirt and a Navy bomber jacket standing to speak at a meeting—with the caption “NAZIS ARE BAD.”   

When Roberts’s chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus reposted a missive suggesting that those unhappy with Roberts’s video should resign, Brashers retorted that “most of us have been at Heritage a lot longer than he has. But if losing my job at Heritage is the consequence of posting “NAZIS ARE BAD”, it’s a consequence I’m prepared to face.” 

The modern Republican Party was always an uneasy marriage between business interests who wanted tax cuts and deregulation, represented by lawmakers like McConnell, and the racist Dixiecrats and religious traditionalists who wanted to get rid of equal rights for racial minorities and women. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Republican operative Grover Norquist explained in 1985, “but these groups can provide the votes.” 

But while business got its tax cuts and deregulation over the years, the base voters of the party—especially the evangelicals who had come to see ending abortion as their key demand—did not see the country reorganized in the racial and gender hierarchies they craved. Trump promised to deliver that for them. When establishment Republicans fell away from Trump after the August 2017 Unite the Right rally—after Congress had passed and Trump had signed the 2017 tax cuts into law—Trump turned to the base, using the threat of their wrath to keep the establishment figures in line. 

Now members of that base are strong enough to tie the party itself to Nazism, a line establishment figures like McConnell, who is 83 and retiring from the Senate in 2027, finally seem unwilling to cross. 

But there is greater instability behind this fight than the split in today’s Republican Party. What held the Republican coalition together was a call for an end to the New Deal government put in place by both Democrats and Republicans after the Great Crash of 1929. But while wealthier Americans were happy to get their side of the bargain, many Republican voters seem less happy with theirs. They seem to have believed that government programs helped only minorities and what talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh called “feminazis,” but the extreme cuts to the federal government first under billionaire Elon Musk and then under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought have hammered all Americans.

And now those cuts are hitting healthcare and food. Premiums for next year’s healthcare insurance plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace are skyrocketing, and because of the way subsidies expanded under President Joe Biden, the hardest-hit states will be those that voted for Trump. Democrats in Congress are refusing to sign on to a continuing resolution to end a government shutdown unless the Republicans will work with them to extend the premium tax credits, but Trump is refusing to talk to Democrats about it. 

The administration has been pressuring Democrats to agree to the Republicans’ terms for a continuing resolution by refusing to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. On Friday, federal judge John McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the government to use the emergency funds to provide SNAP benefits. Trump promptly took to social media. Bashing the Democrats, he said he would ask the court for direction as to how the government could fund SNAP legally. 

On Saturday, Judge McConnell ordered the administration to use reserve funds for at least a partial payment this week and quoted back at him Trump’s social media post claiming “it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding” once McConnell provided more clarity. Meanwhile, economics journalist Catherine Rampell reported today that the administration has told grocery stores that they cannot offer discounts to customers affected by the lapse of SNAP. 

That the Republicans are feeling the pressure of voters’ anger shows in the repeated statements of both Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that they will produce a health plan better than the ACA just as soon as Democrats agree to the continuing resolution. On Air Force One Friday, Trump told reporters that it’s “largely Democrats” who use SNAP, and today Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who oversees SNAP, told the Fox News Channel that Democrats support SNAP because they want to give handouts to undocumented immigrants. Trump “will not tolerate waste, fraud, or abuse while hardworking Americans go hungry,” she posted on social media.   

Perhaps it is Trump’s Great Gatsby party of Friday night that has me thinking about the 1920s. Or perhaps it’s the Republicans’ Nazi talk. 

The United States had a strong Nazi movement in the 1930s, strong enough that more than 20,000 people attended a Nazi “Pro American” rally at Madison Square Garden in commemoration of George Washington’s birthday in 1939. But it had an even stronger Ku Klux Klan movement in the 1920s, which burned like wildfire in the early years of the century. 

After the horrors of World War I, an influenza pandemic, the visible rise of organized crime to get around the prohibition of alcohol, and the ongoing racial and ethnic changes to the country, KKK members across the countryside rallied to an “Americanism” that rejected international involvement, blamed the changes in the country on immigrants and Black Americans, and promised “reform.” Numbering about five million, KKK members swung elections, usually to the Democrats in the South and to the Republicans in the North. “We know we’re the balance of power in the state,” the grand dragon of the Illinois KKK said in 1924, “We can control state elections and get what we want from state government.”

But in 1925, powerful Indiana Klan leader D.C. Stephenson was convicted of raping and murdering Madge Oberholtzer. When the governor, whose election the Klan had supported, refused to pardon him, Stephenson began to name accomplices in the corrupt web of state politics, making it clear that the championing of traditional values had been a con. 

Membership in the Klan plummeted, but its anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-New York City sentiments were still strong enough in 1928 to sink Democratic candidate Al Smith. “We now face the darkest hour in American history,” Ku Klux Klan forces wrote when Smith won the Democratic nomination. They called him the “Antichrist” and burned crosses in the fields of Oklahoma when he crossed the state line. Smith won only 40.8% of the vote to Republican Herbert Hoover’s 58.2%.

But then, the next year, the bottom fell out of the 1920s economy of rich and poor that F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered in The Great Gatsby. By 1930, some Americans were on their way to embracing Nazism. But others turned away. As they dealt with economic ruin, rural white Americans had left the KKK, whose membership fell to about 30,000. And in 1932, voters elected Al Smith’s campaign manager, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his own landslide as he focused on a new kind of economy, giving him 57.4% of the vote to Hoover’s 39.6%.

November 4, 2025 (Tuesday)

So much for obeying a court order, even if begrudgingly and with manufactured delay. At 8:00 this morning, President Donald Trump announced that “SNAP BENEFITS…will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!” 

U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the Rhode Island District ordered the administration to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for 43 million Americans at least partially by using a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. The judge also suggested using a different reserve to fund SNAP fully. But the administration is using the hunger of Americans to pressure Democrats to agree to send healthcare premiums skyrocketing, so it dragged its heels as deeply as possible to delay the payments. It said it would fund SNAP only at 50% and that the money could take “weeks or months” to go out. 

Trump’s social media account announced that the White House intends to ignore the court’s order, but hours later White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the administration is fully complying with the court order.”  

Myah Ward, Alex Gangitano, and Dasha Burns of Politico reported last Friday that Trump expected the Democrats to fold and accept Republican terms to reopen the government no more than ten days into a shutdown. His frustration that they are not doing as he expected is showing, especially as more Americans blame Trump and MAGA Republicans for the shutdown than blame Democrats. Last week, Trump demanded that Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota end the Senate filibuster, enabling the Republicans to pass the House Republicans' continuing resolution with a simple majority vote. This was a nonstarter, since the filibuster has become central since 2009 to the ability of Republicans to block most Democratic legislation. 

So Trump is railing at the Democrats—“It’s their fault. Everything is their fault,” he told reporters last week—and ratcheting up pain on the American people. 

Adding to the administration’s pressure is Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has been hitting the media to insist that the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault. Today he warned that another week of the shutdown could lead to “mass chaos” that would force him to close some of the nation’s airspace. Air traffic controllers are federal employees and thus have been working without paychecks. Many are calling in sick or not showing up for work, forcing significant flight delays and cancellations. 

Today the administration sent notices to federal employees suggesting that furloughed staff won’t be paid when the shutdown ends. Hannah Natanson, Jacob Bogage, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post note that a 2019 law guarantees they will. 

Just a reminder: What the Senate Democrats are insisting on before agreeing to a continuing resolution is the extension of the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance marketplace. The Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their July budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—although they extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Without the credits, millions of people will be unable to afford healthcare insurance and will go uncovered, and coverage costs will skyrocket for millions more.

Seventy-eight percent of Americans want those tax credits extended. That includes 59% of Republicans. Only 22% don’t want them extended. 

So Trump is refusing even to negotiate with Democrats to end the shutdown when almost 80% of Americans want what the Democrats are demanding. 

Trump says the Democrats should back down. “It’s so easily solved,” he told reporters. “All they have to do is say, ‘Let’s go. Let’s open up our country.’” While this course would entrench Trump further as an autocrat who can dictate to the country, the true easy solution seems to be for the Republicans simply to agree to a policy that a solid majority of their own constituents—as well as more than three quarters of the country—want. 

This fight is bonkers, but it reflects Trump’s determination to assert his power over the country. That determination showed today in an Axios story by Marc Caputo, Stef W. Kight, and Stephen Neukam. They quoted a Trump advisor as saying that if Senate Republicans don’t pass the continuing resolution without the Democrats by nuking the filibuster, Trump “will make their lives a living hell.” “He will call them at three o'clock in the morning. He will blow them up in their districts. He will call them un-American. He will call them old creatures of a dying institution. Believe you me, he's going to make their lives just hell.”  

Today was Election Day, with crucial elections on the ballots across the country. 

In New Jersey, someone emailed bomb threats to precincts this morning. Election officials directed voters to other polling places. 

With an approval rating under 40%, Trump spent the day panic-tweeting to suggest the elections are “rigged,” just as he did in 2020. He posted that should New York City voters choose Democrat Zohran Mamdani as mayor, “[i]it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home.”

California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.” 

Mail-in voting does not shut out Republicans. It makes voting accessible. Asked about Trump’s statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today: “It's absolutely true that…there's fraud in California's elections. It’s just a fact.” The fact is, there is no evidence of any such thing.

It seems likely that the administration was preparing to declare a vote in favor of Proposition 50 fraudulent. 

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken. 

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this). 

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate. 

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students. 

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate. 

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor. 

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held [Republican] dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three [Republican] Uber drivers. Just everything.”

Trump posted on social media: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”

But in fact, today voters resoundingly rejected Trump and Trumpism, and tomorrow, politics will be a whole different game.

November 6, 2025 (Thursday)

“None of this is complicated,” political data specialist Tom Bonier wrote yesterday about Tuesday’s dramatic Democratic victories around the country. “The [Republicans] ran on affordability in 2024. They gave sanctimonious lectures on cable news on election night about how the ‘silent working class majority’ had spoken. Then they governed as reckless authoritarians, punishing the working class.” 

For nine months now, officials in the Trump administration have pushed their extremist policies with the insistence that his election gave him a mandate, although more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024 than voted for him. Tuesday’s elections stripped away that veneer to reveal just how unpopular their policies really are.

Aside from the health of the country, this poses a dramatic political problem for the Republicans. The midterm elections are in slightly less than a year, and Tuesday’s vote, which suggests the 2024 MAGA coalition has crumbled, may spell bad news for the mid-decade gerrymandering Republicans have pushed in states they control, like Texas. Republican lawmakers created the new Republican-leaning districts by moving Republican voters into Democratic-leaning districts, thus weakening formerly safe Republican districts. That could backfire in a blue-wave election.

First thing Wednesday morning, on the day the government shutdown became the longest shutdown in history, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to President Donald J. Trump to “demand a bipartisan meeting of legislative leaders to end the [Republican] shutdown of the federal government and decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis.” They assured him that “Democrats stand ready to meet with you face to face, anytime and anyplace,” and concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.” 

Trump had a different approach to Tuesday’s news. He met with Republican senators before the cameras and admitted that the shutdown had badly hurt the Republicans. But rather than moving to compromise—as all previous presidents have done to end shutdowns—he reiterated his crusade to make sure Democrats can never again hold power. He demanded that Republican senators end the filibuster and, as soon as they do, promptly end mail-in voting and require prohibitive voter ID. “If we do what I’m saying,” he told the senators, Democrats will “most likely never obtain power because we will have passed every single thing that you can imagine.”

Former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stopped Bloomberg News Senate reporter Steven Dennis in the hallway to say: “We’re not going to do that.” 

Throughout the day, Trump continued to flood social media with more than 30 social media posts and choppy videos in which, standing in a dark room behind a podium and slurring his speech, he appeared to read from his social media posts, touting his accomplishments, railing against former president Barack Obama, threatening Nigeria with war, and pleading with Republican senators to end the filibuster.

Jenna Amatulli of The Guardian noted that “[t]he bizarre series of posts could raise further questions on Trump’s mental acuity.” More questions arose yesterday after Trump spoke before the America Business Forum saying: "For generations Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa. I mean, if you take a look at what's going on in parts of South Africa. Look at South Africa, what's going on. Look at South America, what's going on. You know, I’m not going there. We have a G20 meeting in South Africa."

Trump seems to be flailing in other ways, too. One takeaway from Tuesday’s vote was that Americans are frustrated at the rising costs of living and slowing job market, and Republicans are suddenly pivoting to claim they are good stewards of the economy. But it’s a hard sell.

One of Trump’s posts yesterday tried to make the point that the economy has improved under his guidance. He posted that “Walmart just announced that Prices for a Thanksgiving Dinner is [sic] now down 25% since under Sleepy/Crooked Joe Biden, in 2024. AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!” 

But readers noted that Walmart’s 2024 Thanksgiving meal contained 21 items while the 2025 list includes only 15, and that most of the brand name items listed in the 2024 meal were replaced with Walmart brand items in 2025. 

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments concerning the legality of Trump’s tariff war, the centerpiece of his economic plan. Trump seemed to try to pressure the  Supreme Court to save his tariffs, posting that the case before the court “is, literally, LIFE OR DEATH for our Country.” 

But the Constitution gives power over tariffs to Congress alone. Three lower courts have found that Trump’s assumption of power to set tariffs through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives the president power to regulate international commerce after declaring an emergency in response to an external threat against the United States, is unconstitutional. 

As Chris Geidner of Law Dork explained, the Supreme Court justices seemed inclined to agree with the lower courts that Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional. Undermining Trump’s insistence that the tariffs are paid by foreign countries, in yesterday’s arguments the administration’s lawyer admitted that American consumers pay from 30% to 80% of the tariffs. 

Today Trump disagreed and changed the justification for the tariffs to national security, ground on which he likely expects the Supreme Court to support him. “No, I don’t agree,” he told a reporter. “I think that they might be paying something, but when you take the overall impact, the Americans are gaining tremendously. They're gaining through national security. Look, I'm ending war because of these tariffs. Americans would have to fight in some of these wars.”

Today brought more bad news for Americans living in Trump’s economy. A report today showed that in October, layoff announcements hit their highest level in more than 20 years. According to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a private firm that collects data on workplace reductions, Abha Bhattarai of the Washington Post reported, U.S. employers have announced 1.1 million layoffs so far in 2025. That number rivals job cuts during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. 

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced today that a shortage of air traffic controllers will force flight reductions at forty of the nation’s busiest airports starting tomorrow. This will affect both commercial and cargo traffic. Today airlines began to cancel hundreds of flights. The Federal Aviation Administration said that reductions will begin at 4% on Friday and go up until they hit 10% on November 14. 

The administration is tripping in court over its immigration policies, as well. 

On Monday, jury selection began in the trial of Sean Dunn, a former paralegal for the Department of Justice, charged with a misdemeanor for throwing a salami submarine sandwich “at point blank range” at a federal agent after a grand jury refused to authorize felony charges. As former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance noted, prosecuting this case while dismissing others—like the issue of border czar Tom Homan allegedly accepting $50,000 to steer contracts toward a certain firm—diminishes the public’s confidence in the Justice Department. 

The case also made the administration seem like a joke as a federal agent wearing a bulletproof vest tried to claim a sandwich that remained intact in its wrapper “exploded” against his chest. Punsters had a field day all week. This afternoon, the jury acquitted Dunn. 

“He beat the wrap,” one poster wrote.

Trump’s immigration policies were in court in Chicago today, too, where U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis issued a broad injunction to stop federal agents’ undisciplined use of tear gas, pepper balls, and other “less-lethal” crowd control measures. As Heather Cherone of WTTW reported, Ellis found that federal agents had violated protesters’ First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly while preventing the free exercise of religion by using force against clergy members. Ellis repeatedly called out federal agents for lying. 

And, in the District of Rhode Island, U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell found the administration had ignored his order to pay Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits this week. He accused the administration of withholding SNAP benefits “for political reasons” and called out Trump’s social media post saying SNAP would be funded only after the shutdown ends as “an intent to defy the court order.” McConnell ordered the administration to make full SNAP payments to the states by tomorrow for distribution to beneficiaries.

The Trump administration immediately appealed.

November 8, 2025 (Saturday)

A picture for tonight after a very long week. Or two. 

In addition to everything else, the time change always throws me for a loop.

Let's take the night off and pick it all back up tomorrow.

November 10, 2025 (Monday)

Last night, the Senate advanced a measure to end the government shutdown, which at 41 days today is the longest in U.S. history. 

Seven Democrats and one Independent voted with all but one Republican to advance a measure that funds the government through January 30 of next year. It includes funding for military construction and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and operations for the legislative branch, or Congress. Tucked within that last appropriation is a measure that allows the eight Republican senators whose phone logs were seized during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to sue the government for up to $500,000 apiece. 

The measure stops the administration's firings of public employees during the shutdown, reinstating them with full pay. States will be reimbursed for monies they spent covering for federal shortfalls during the shutdown. This means air traffic controllers, who have been working without pay for more than a month, will get paid again. 

The measure also funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), although it does not restore the cuts Republicans made to it in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”  

While the measure provides more funding for Indian health services, it does nothing to extend the premium tax credits for insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act healthcare marketplace. Without those credits, millions will lose their healthcare insurance and millions more will face skyrocketing premiums. Republicans did not extend the premium tax credits in their July budget reconciliation bill of July, although they did extend tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. 

Senate Democrats said they would not advance a measure to end the shutdown without a deal to extend the premium tax credits, but seven of them, along with one Independent, have now done so. Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has promised to bring to the Senate floor a bill to extend the premium tax credits before the end of the second week of December. It will be written by the Democrats.

In the 60–40 vote, Rand Paul (R-KY) did not join the rest of the Republican senators to advance the measure. Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Independent Angus King of Maine all voted with the Republicans to advance the measure.

Last night’s vote did not pass the bill, which still faces procedural hurdles in the Senate that the chamber is trying to clear tonight. If it passes the Senate, as seems likely, it will go to the House, which must either pass it, reject it, or amend it.

If Trump signs the measure into law, the 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP payments will get relief. The two million federal workers who need paychecks will get them, and airlines should eventually get back to business as usual. These are no small things: aside from the individual human cost of the shutdown, the undermining of the federal government threatened to destroy it, and the administration’s cuts to air traffic were hitting cargo planes, adding yet another blow to the weakening economy just before the busiest shopping season of the year.

News of the terms of the deal to end the shutdown hit the country rather like a cue ball hitting a rack: lots of balls started to move in wildly different directions. 

The eight senators who voted with the Republicans appear to have lost any hope Trump would negotiate and, in that absence, decided they had to relieve the pain of the shutdown. As Dan Drezner noted in his Drezner’s World, Trump’s behavior during the shutdown made it clear he simply didn’t care how badly Americans got hurt. “He did not just refuse to negotiate,” Drezner noted. “During the shutdown month he also completely bulldozed the East Wing, cut SNAP benefits, witnessed producers passing on the cost of tariffs to consumers, announced curbs on air travel, and participated in a Great Gatsby–style party at Mar-a-Lago.”

Voters hated this, but Trump didn’t appear to care. Indeed, his administration was working to ratchet up the pain of lost SNAP payments and canceled flights, including not just passenger planes but cargo planes right before the shopping season in which many businesses make the income that keeps them afloat for the year. In the senators’ statements about why they voted with the Republicans, Drezner noted a pattern: the words “pain” and “hurt.” 

As Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark noted, the Democrats gave in to Republican plans with few concessions, but the shutdown hurt Trump’s popularity and the Democrats won a vote on the ACA subsidies, which is a terrible issue for the Republicans. Seventy-eight percent of Americans actually want such a measure to pass, meaning that a vote—even one only in the Senate—will help clarify for voters what’s at stake.

Another moving ball was the voters and organizers who turned out for Democrats last Tuesday and who had made it very clear they think it’s long overdue for the Democrats to stand up to Trump. Ezra Levin of Indivisible, which organized the No Kings rallies, described his reaction to the deal as “incandescent rage, incredible disappointment.” “What do we do to demand a better party, a party that actually fights back?” he asked. 

Democratic party leaders appeared to acknowledge that the momentum of the party is behind a fight against Trump and MAGA authoritarianism. The senators who voted with the Republicans are all either retiring, not up for election in 2026, or not running for another office, while Democrats who are in one of those categories were vocal about their anger over the vote. 

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted a video on social media warning: “Bullies gain power when righteous people yield to the face of their wrongdoing. I didn't want this shutdown. I want it to end, but not at any cost. And of course, I wish that there was a path to saving this democracy and saving people's health care that didn't involve pain. This shutdown hurt. It did. But unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to save this country, to save our democracy, without there being some difficult, hard moments along the way…. [T]here's no way to defend this,” he said. “And you are right to be angry about it. I’m angry about it.”

There are Republican balls in play, as well. 

President Donald J. Trump did not want the shutdown to end this way. He was trying to use the pain he was inflicting on the American people to force Republican senators to end the filibuster and pass a series of measures that would essentially have made him a dictator. The Republican senators were clear they didn’t want to do that. And now, they haven’t. They chose a way out of the shutdown fight that did not support Trump’s ambitions. After nine months in which they appeared to do his bidding, that’s an interesting development.

Trump does not appear to be giving up his position on hurting the country easily. Late last night, three judges from the First Circuit refused to stop the lower court order saying that the administration must pay SNAP benefits in full, and today, the administration went back to the Supreme Court to ask it to freeze those payments. 

Trump also posted an attack on air traffic controllers, saying to those who took time off during the shutdown “I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU. You didn’t step up to help the U.S.A. against the FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK that was only meant to hurt our Country. You will have a negative mark, at least in my mind, against your record. If you want to leave service in the near future, please do not hesitate to do so, with NO payment or severance of any kind! You will be quickly replaced by true Patriots, who will do a better job….” In fact, the country has a shortage of air traffic controllers. 

Trump called Democrats “the enemy” today, but told reporters he would abide by the deal, saying that “they haven’t changed anything.” But they have. 

And that’s yet another moving ball. If the Senate passes its measure and sends it to the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will have to bring the House into session to conduct work. He has had the chamber on hiatus since September 19, 2025, when the Republicans passed a continuing resolution that offered the Democrats nothing, and has kept members out of Washington, D.C., ever since. 

Bringing the House back into session will require Johnson to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ). Erum Salam of MSNBC reported that Johnson told Republicans on a conference call today that the “first order of business will be to administer the oath to Grijalva.” Grijalva says she will be the final signer on the discharge petition that will force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. Johnson and administration officials have worked hard to keep those files under wraps, especially since news broke that Trump is mentioned in them. 

And then, in the midst of all the drama last night, Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin posted a document on social media revealing that Trump had issued an extraordinarily broad pardon to “all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential Electors, whether or not recognized by any State or State official, in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election, as well as for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.” 

As Kyle Cheney of Politico noted, the pardons of those who tried to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump were largely symbolic because they had not been charged with federal crimes. What they do is suggest that he will protect those who try to cheat for him in the future, an interesting development considering the measure in the government-funding bill allowing senators to sue the government for accessing their phone logs during the events of January 6, 2021. 

The sweeping pardons also might be softening up the ground for a pardon or a commutation for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A whistleblower has provided documents to the House Judiciary Committee showing that Maxwell has asked for a commutation of her prison sentence.

And Trump’s popularity continues to drag. Last night he got soundly booed at a Washington Commanders football game.

Lots of balls moving around the table.