Friday Talking Points -- Democrats Holding Firm, For Now [View all]

Normally, on a Friday following the end of a month, we would all be talking about the new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics right about now. We can't do that today, because the report didn't appear on schedule. This was due to the government being shut down, of course.

Economists who closely watch such things (and track them using their own data) weren't expecting the numbers to be very good:

Hopefully, the official numbers will eventually be released, when the shutdown ends. And for the time being, they can probably still be trusted. Donald Trump threw a tantrum earlier this year when a bad jobs report was released and fired the head of the B.L.S., but his pick to run the bureau had to be confirmed by the Senate, so the acting head is now still a B.L.S. employee with experience who essentially got a temporary promotion to the top spot. And there was some other good news on this front this week, as Trump decided to pull his initial nominee from consideration, likely after Republican senators balked at confirming him due to his lack of experience (to say nothing of his ideological bias).

But of course this is all a sideshow to the main political story of the week, which was the shutdown itself. Senate Democrats, after being roundly criticized earlier this year for allowing Republicans to pass a continuing resolution to keep funding the government without getting anything in return, are showing some fight this time around. Unlike back then, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is digging in his heels and is in complete agreement with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (who had argued for a shutdown in the earlier confrontation). They worked together to create a strategy and they have been uniting their Democratic caucuses to an admirable degree in the standoff.

The stakes they chose -- the line in the sand for them -- was healthcare. Specifically, preventing people from losing their healthcare due to Republicans slashing funding for it. This is pretty solid ground for Democrats, as it is an issue that the public trusts Democrats a whole lot more than Republicans (for obvious reasons). Their initial demand had two big parts to it: extending higher Obamacare subsidies past the first of January (when they will expire, if Congress does nothing), and reversing the Republican plan to slash Medicaid spending by a trillion dollars (which was passed in their big, ugly GOP budget bill earlier this year).

These are both reasonable things to demand, since achieving these goals would mean 15 million Americans will not be kicked off Medicaid, and people who buy health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges won't see their premiums go up by 75 or 100 percent (or even more) when the new year dawns.

There are some who are second-guessing this strategy, bemoaning the fact that Democrats didn't pick a different set of issues to fight for. Trump is trampling on the Constitution in all kinds of seriously offensive and dangerous ways, they say, so Democrats should have fought back on some of it. However, doing so would have seriously lessened the chances of any kind of successful outcome, since it is virtually impossible to picture Democrats getting some sort of bill passed reining in Trump's dictatorial impulses through both Republican-controlled chambers of Congress. Even if that impossibility somehow came to pass, there is precisely zero chance that Trump would either sign such a bill or abide by it. It would be a losing battle for Democrats all around.

Instead, they chose an issue that even some Republicans will likely wind up supporting. The massive premium hikes due next year have been worrying vulnerable Republicans in swing districts, because they know that voters who see their health insurance rates go through the roof may very well blame them at the ballot box next November in the midterm elections. These Republicans have already proposed fixing the problem in some vague way, but without coming to any agreement on how to go about doing so or producing any legislative language or bill. With the clock ticking and insurance companies about to set new rates (at the beginning of November), there is a real urgency to tackle the issue now.

Personally, though, we think reversing the Medicaid cuts is going to be too big an ask, at least at this point. It would mean adding a trillion dollars of spending, instead of a few hundred billion, for one. And the Medicaid cuts are not as immediate, since they were designed to all take place after the midterm elections.

As with any shutdown crisis, the blame game is the important thing to the politicians. So far, it appears Democrats are winning with the public. The Washington Post released a poll showing that while 30 percent of the public blames "Democrats in Congress" for the shutdown, a much higher 47 percent lays the blame at the feet of "Trump and Republicans in Congress."

The Republicans are kind of all over the map on their spin on the shutdown. The White House has gone full-on racist (no surprise there) by just flat-out lying. JD Vance is claiming that Democrats have shut the government down to demand that "$1 trillion" be spent giving "free health care" to "illegal aliens." This is laughably wrong -- it's not even on the same planet as the truth. Undocumented immigrants are barred from being enrolled in Medicaid or signing up for insurance through Obamacare, and what the Democrats are fighting for would not change that in any way at all, period.

But the Vance and Trump simply don't care. They are not just lying about the issue, they are also putting out A.I.-generated deepfake videos that can only be described as offensive and racist, showing Hakeem Jeffries in a giant cartoon sombrero with a cartoon moustache (and mariachi music playing in the background, for good measure). When called on this, Vance excused it by saying Trump was just "joking" and "we're having a good time." Vance then doubled down on the racism:



So what's next, JD? A new cartoon of Jeffries as Little Black Sambo? The only thing believable in that statement is: "I honestly don't even know" what "racist" means. That much, we can believe.

For good measure, the White House put their racist caricatures on an endless loop playing on all the television screens in the White House press office.

Please remember, this is racism based on a complete lie.

But back to the shutdown. Trump is gleefully threatening to make the shutdown as painful as possible -- for Democrats only. He is threatening to fire massive amounts of federal workers, while cancelling funding for projects in blue states. Various branches of the government seem to be blatantly violating (or at least openly defying) the Hatch Act by changing their websites and/or email boilerplate to specifically blame "Radical Left Democrats" for the shutdown.

So far, at least, Trump's threats of massive layoffs have not materialized. This could be due to pushback from the people running the agencies of the federal government, or it could be a legal hurdle that is standing in their way (offering severance pay to an employee while firing them is not authorized during a shutdown, since it counts as new spending). Either way, the threats have shrunk (the current threat is only to fire 16,000 people, which is way down from what the initial threats were).

As with all government shutdowns, the longer it goes on the more people are going to feel it, as checks don't go out and money doesn't get spent and people sit at home rather than going to work. Then question, as always, is which side is going to blink first. So far, Democrats are strongly sticking together, and are actually (for once) doing a pretty good job of explaining their position to the public. But as things stand right now, it would only take five Democrats in the Senate to cave to allow the Republicans to end the shutdown on their terms, so we will see. Week Two is going to be a lot more intense than this week, one way or another -- that seems like a pretty safe bet.

One group that is already hurting from all this (and the Trump trade war) is farmers. Half of the Department of Agriculture is on furlough right now, which has meant farmers cannot talk to anyone right in the middle of harvest season. We should mention that we wrote about the plight of farmers under Trump's policies yesterday, if anyone's interested in more details.

In non-shutdown news, the week began by Trump and his telegenic secretary of Defense giving purely political speeches to an unprecedented gathering (called with no warning, just a few days prior) of 800 of the top generals and admirals in the U.S. armed forces. They were yanked in without explanation from their posts around the globe, all so Pete Hegseth could lecture them on grooming standards and call them fat. You just can't make this stuff up, folks.

Trump got wind of the event and shoehorned a speech of his own into it, which was partly just his standard grievance-list ramble, but also ventured into dangerous territory, as he informed the nation's top brass that United States cities should be considered "training ground" for our troops now. He spoke of an "enemy within" the country, which included "civil disturbances." He went on: "That's a war too. It's a war from within.... We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military." Again, we wrote about this at more length when it happened.

We're also now (according to Trump) officially "at war" with drug cartels. If true (legally-speaking), this would mean that any cartel member could be shot on sight by any member of the U.S. military. To hammer the point home, Trump released video of a fourth known boat being blown to smithereens without warning on the open seas.

One judge issued a ruling this week that was notable, because it so scathingly ripped into what Trump and his henchmen have been doing to foreign college students who are not 100 percent pro-Israel. This includes tactics that can only be described as something you'd expect in a dictatorship, as the Washington Post exposed this week. But back to the judge -- here is what he had to say in his ruling:



This week, even the Pope chimed in by condemning the Trump administration's "inhuman" treatment of immigrants.

But back to legal news -- there was one ray of hope from the Supreme Court this week, as they allowed the Federal Reserve board member to keep her seat until her case that she was wrongfully terminated by Trump is heard (which likely won't happen until next year).

Let's see... what else is going on... Bad Bunny was announced as the halftime performer for the Super Bowl, which caused a whole bunch of MAGA heads to explode in fury.

Donald Trump apparently got taken in by a fake (A.I.-generated) clip of him promising: "Every American will soon receive their own MedBed card." We admit we had to look this up, as we had never heard of it before, but apparently it originated as a QAnon conspiracy theory: "MedBeds" are supposed to be alien (as in "extraterrestrial," instead of how Republicans use that term) technology that can keep Americans alive forever and cure all diseases, and (for good measure) immediately grow back amputated limbs and stuff! Woo hoo! Currently this technology is only being used by the elite, which is why promising "MedBed cards for all" would be big news.

If it weren't so ridiculously laughable, that is. In fact, it was so embarrassing that Trump even deleted the post later that day -- something he almost never does.

And we close on a cheerful note -- three instances of Trump being mercilessly mocked. The first was on the world stage, at a summit of world leaders:



For the record, Albanian and Azerbaijan are over a thousand miles apart. So: no, they weren't at war with each other.

Secondly, some good news has come from the government shutdown -- the "best friends" statue of Donald Trump holding hands with Jeffrey Epstein is back on the National Mall! Even though they had a permit for the art installation, the statue was rudely torn down almost immediately (in the middle of the night) by the cops. Well, the artists finally got the statues back and reapplied for a permit. Because of a loophole in the rules, permits that are stamped as being turned in are automatically granted after 24 hours if they are not explicitly denied by the U.S. Park Service. Because everyone was furloughed, the permit was not denied, so the artists reinstalled the statues on the National Mall. Truly a clever use of the vagaries of a shutdown!

And finally, we mark the passing of primatologist Jane Goodall this week, by doing our bit to make one particular interview with her (from three years ago) go viral.

In it, Goodall is asked to compare video clips of Donald Trump to "chimpanzee aggressive tactics." Goodall responds after watching the clips that she saw "the same sort of behavior as a male chimpanzee will show when he is competing for dominance with another.... They're upright, they swagger, they project themselves as really more large and aggressive than they may actually be in order to intimidate their rivals."

Requiescat In Pace.





We begin with an Honorable Mention this week for someone from the entertainment industry (and no, we do not mean Taylor Swift, sorry...). Here's the story, in case you missed it:



So far over 800 celebrities have signed on to the effort (as of this writing -- that number can be expected to continue growing), including such luminaries as: "Barbra Streisand, Billie Eilish, Ben Stiller, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Keaton, Natalie Portman, Pedro Pascal, Spike Lee and Whoopi Goldberg."

The original anti-McCarthy group included not only Jane's dad Henry but also stars such as: Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and Katharine Hepburn.

This is how you fight back against authoritarians, folks. We'll have more on this effort later, in the talking points part of the program.

We also should give Honorable Mention awards to both Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer for: being on the same page on the shutdown, formulating a strategy before the crisis actually hit, keeping most Democrats on board with this strategy, and for holding firm all week long. This is a noticeable improvement from what happened earlier this year, and it is a development that millions of Democratic voters have welcomed.

But our winner of this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week was Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren has been making the rounds of the news media, laying out the Democratic case and (more importantly) pushing back in the strongest possible way against the lies Republicans have been telling.

We're also going to make you wait until the talking points to see why Warren won this week's MIDOTW award, though (sorry).

For now, let's just say Warren is showing other Democrats exactly how they should be pushing back on the moosepoop Republicans have been desperately trying to shovel down the American public's throat.

[Congratulate Senator Elizabeth Warren on her Senate contact page, to let her know you appreciate her efforts.]





Sadly, in the votes that have taken place so far -- Senate Republicans trying to pass their bill to keep the government open without any of the Democratic demands -- there have been two Democratic senators and one Independent (who caucuses with the Democrats) who have already crossed the aisle.

Democrats John Fetterman and Catherine Cortez Masto both voted with the Republicans, as did Maine's Independent Angus King.

There's really not a whole lot else to say. The reason they all deserve the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award is pretty self-evident.

We should mention, as a footnote, that since Republican Rand Paul voted against the Republican bill (Paul always votes against continuing resolutions, as a general rule), this all means that Republicans still need to entice five more Democratic senators across the aisle (for those keeping score at home).

[Contact Senator John Fetterman on his Senate contact page, Senator Angus King on his Senate contact page, and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto on her Senate contact page, to let them know what you think of their actions.]




Volume 815 (10/3/25)

We're not going to do individual talking points this week, in part because Democrats are (so far) actually doing a pretty good job of explaining their position in the shutdown showdown to the public.

Instead, we wanted to highlight one Democrat for showing exactly how to call out Republicans during an interview, followed by a very dangerous development that didn't get anywhere near the attention it deserved and finishing with a bold call to action from Hollywood.

First, Elizabeth Warren shows Democrats how it should be done. During an interview with CBS yesterday, Warren absolutely "refused to put up with a single second of misinformation" when presented with the Republican argument that somehow Democrats were solely fighting for undocumented immigrants to get "free healthcare." Here's how it began:



The host tried again to spout Republican lies, but Warren wasn't having any of it:



This is the way to fight back against vicious lies: call them lies, immediately and forcefully. Don't use diplomatic language about "falsehoods" or "misrepresentations" or any of the other mealy-mouthed words that (sadly) journalists have adopted so they don't hurt any feelings on the Republican side. Call a lie a lie, instead. More Democrats should adopt this straightforward way of speaking, because it would certainly help them make their case.

And that's before you even get to the subject of the racist videos now being vomited up by the White House.

Speaking of things being vomited up by the White House, the attacks on free speech just keep getting worse. A new document was just rolled out, which is supposed to entice colleges to adopt conservative ideas with the carrot of increased funding. This is so counter to the concept of campuses being able to teach what they want without government interference it is downright disgusting. And it follows Trump extorting colleges across the country to squelch speech that he doesn't approve of, which is even worse. Academic freedom is a big part of free speech, whether Trump likes it or not.

But this wasn't even the worst or most dangerous assaults on free speech from the White House this week. Following up on declaring "Antifa" to be a terrorist organization (when it doesn't even exist as an organization), the White House released a new memo directing the whole federal government to combat what it calls "domestic terrorism" (which doesn't even exist, as a matter of U.S. law). This is a direct assault on any organization which funds any progressive or lefty causes, and is just stunning in how unconstitutional it is. It would tie any speech or funding from such organization with any lone-wolf shooter or protester the administration identifies. This is all an effort to destroy nonprofits that the president doesn't approve of, which is a chilling attack on free speech. Here are a few reactions to this memo:



Don't believe this? Read the memo for yourself and decide. It's pretty egregiously blatant in its anti-free-speech language.

Which brings us to our final item. With all this neo-McCarthyism happening, one group of Americans has decided to fight back, following in the footsteps of those who actually did stand up to Joe McCarthy and his Red Scare.

Jane Fonda's new effort launched this week with an open letter to all, explaining what the group is, where it came from, and what it intends to fight. It is a very strong statement and so we close today by reproducing their statement in full:






Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
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