Dems swing at Trump, hit themselves

Rahm Emanuel gave the world a simple truth about politics when he wrote, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Obama the Goof was pretty good at it. In Trump’s second presidency, has mastered this. He used emergencies to shut down the border, lay heavy tariffs on trade cheats and to turn DC into a clean capital worthy of hosting world leaders at the White House.

Trump now is using the government shutdown to do what people thought he could never do—shut down the government. I know. It’s amazingly simple and yet Democrats couldn’t see it coming.

Charley the Clueless Schumer and his cardboard cutout of Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, were the perfect foils. Rather than risk the ire of AOC, brother lover Ilhan and Swivelhead Jasmine, Schumer let Trump shut the government down.

Oh yes, Chuck and Hakeem tried to act big by demanding an audience with the president. Trump said fine. They went to the White House with a list of the demands and left empty handed without even the list.

As a bonus, Trump mocked their press conference and their sole issue: giving free health care to illegal aliens, three-quarters of whom are Hispanic.

The shutdown became reality on Wednesday and it finally dawned on the lefty press that Donald John Trump owned the Democrats. Republicans are going to the mats just as they did in Trump’s first presidency when there was a five-week shutdown.

The difference is this time they are going to the mats for their president, not against.

National Review reported, “Democrats have said they will support a continuing resolution to fund the government through November 21 only if Republicans include legislative language to permanently extend temporary Obamacare subsidies. Democrats drafted their own continuing resolution, which would repeal significant parts of President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

In other words, Democrats want Trump to surrender his entire agenda. Only Rand Paul waved the white flag as the rest of the party rallied behind the party’s leader.

NR said that the Congressional Budget Office estimated the first presidency cost the economy $3 billion in five weeks. That means a 50-week shutdown would cost $30 billion—chump change in a 30 trillion dollar economy. And that’s using the partisan CBO numbers.

As the shutdown turned into another nothingburger, it dawned on the press corps that Democrats blew it.

Politico reported:

Agencies central to Trump’s agenda are shielding certain programs by declaring the federal employees who work on them essential or sheltering them under already approved funding streams—designations that will allow them to keep running through the funding lapse.

That means offices tasked with immigration enforcement and tariff negotiations, two hallmarks of Trump’s presidency, will retain significantly more staff than they have in prior shutdowns, according to a Politico analysis of agency documents submitted to the White House in recent days and interviews with current and former administration officials. That’s even as hundreds of thousands of federal workers are sent home, hampering a variety of government functions including some routine food safety inspections, Social Security benefit verifications and the publication of employment numbers by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I don’t see how the shutdown affects Social Security which is self-funded and sitting on a $2.7 trillion surplus. But how will we live without BLS’s made-up numbers?

That after sifting through agency documents and interviewing all these officials, past and present, that was the worst Politico could come up with—the loss of food inspections, benefits verifications and statistics.

That’s it.

The government spends $6 trillion and shutting it down to its bare essentials loses you three tiny things?

Newt Gingrich told Politico, “Rahm Emanuel should be proud of the Trump team because they’re prepared to say, ‘Every day this is shut, we will find ways to pay for everything we want. We’ll find ways to eliminate everything you want. And we’ll do it legally.’ ”

NASA will continue to prepare a moon launch. The Interior Department will continue to lease land to oil drillers. Thousands of government workers will be laid off permanently.

Politico also said:

“The last person that wants to shut down is us,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Now, with that being said, we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible — that are bad for them and irreversible by them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out. Cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”

While the party controlling Washington typically suffers politically during a shutdown, polling shows significant peril for Democrats: A new New York Times-Siena College poll found that 65% of respondents, including 43% of Democrats, think Democrats shouldn’t allow a government shutdown, even if their demands aren’t met.

As the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles like to say, Trump has reversed the polarity.

The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached record highs. But the press had to do what it does best—spin to win for the Democrats.

The drama queens at AP went into overdrive:

Plunged into a government shutdown, the U.S. is confronting a fresh cycle of uncertainty after President Donald Trump and Congress failed to strike an agreement to keep government programs and services running by Wednesday’s deadline.

Roughly 750,000 federal workers are expected to be furloughed, some potentially fired by Trump’s Republican administration. Many offices will be shuttered, perhaps permanently, as Trump vows to “do things that are irreversible, that are bad” as retribution. His deportation agenda is expected to run full speed ahead, while education, environmental and other services sputter. The economic fallout is expected to ripple nationwide.

Oh no! A free people were plunged into a government shutdown. Our three-word reaction is Don’t Save Us.

In another story, AP was positively delusional: “Democrats embrace a shutdown fight in a rare moment of unity against Trump.”

Rare moment? Democrats have voted against every Cabinet member forcing JD Vance to break a tie over Pete Hegseth’s nomination.

Democrats are so enraged by Trump’s very existence that they refused to stand for a 12-year-old with cancer at the last State of the Union address.

AP and the rest of the press corps are acting as if without the federal government, people will live in pup tents and mill along city boulevards like zombies. I have news for the reporters, people already are and have for more than a decade with a fully operational federal government.

Paragraph 15 said, “The Medicare and Medicaid health care programs are expected to continue, though staffing shortages could mean delays for some services. The Pentagon would still function. And most employees will stay on the job at the Department of Homeland Security.”

Social Security checks will be directly deposited. You still have to make your third quarterly payment to the IRS this month. National parks will remain open. Airports too.

The shutdown does nothing but show just how little government we really need. Thank you, Democrats, for knocking yourselves out—literally—to show this to the American people.

Democrats are in no hurry to surrender. In two weeks they will host billionaire donors at wineries in Napa Valley. The billionaires will give them money and marching orders. Both groups are out of touch so expect those orders to be don’t cave. I hope so.

By the way, Pelosi has many family members in the wine industry. They are her Napa kin.

Obama has his minions hoping that the courts will thwart Trump’s move to deliver permanent layoffs using this crisis. Unexplained is how a judge can allow a president to spend money without congressional authorization, but district court justices nowadays are unbound by the law, precedent or the Constitution, aren’t they?

The shutdown is a battle over Utah and 13 Democrat states who want to bill Uncle Sam for health care for illegal aliens, who have replaced black people at the top of the Democrat totem pole.

Democrats thought they could bully Trump. He is making them pay by kicking many Democrat operatives off the payroll permanently. For once, Democrats have delivered a knockout punch—right into their own smug mugs.

As Howard Cosell might say, “Down goes Schumer! Down goes Schumer! Down goes Schumer!”