This is a body blow
Even as the stock market was once again dropping by hundreds of points yesterday, a federal judge delivered an even bigger blow – in fact a body blow – to Donald Trump. The judge reinstated thousands of employees from twelve different federal agencies who had recently been laid off by Elon Musk. Trump and Musk have been losing nearly all of these kinds of rulings thus far. But this was the big one. It undid a huge chunk of what Trump and Musk have managed to do thus far.
This latest ruling, like every other ruling, will be appealed. But Trump and Musk have also been losing nearly every appeals court ruling that’s come down thus far, and they’ve even lost the one Supreme Court ruling that’s come down on the matter. That’s partly because what they’re doing is so illegal. It’s also because they’re going about it in such incompetent fashion, they’re making it very easy for the courts to keep overturning them, and very difficult for even a sympathetic judge to side with them.
It’s now fair to say that the Trump-Musk cyber garbage truck is firmly stuck in the mud. Their efforts keep being undone. Moreover, fewer and fewer Americans are siding with them. Trump’s approval rating is low and dropping. Musk’s is even lower. And Trump’s handling of the economy is being panned by both the public and Wall Street, given the dual bad news of a collapsing consumer confidence index and a collapsing stock market.
This is why – and this is where I’m going to say something that at least some of you are going to disagree with – things had to go the way they went last night in the Senate. Trump is firmly on the ropes. His political muscle is dwindling. His popularity is bottoming out. It’s going to keep getting worse for him. And as it does, it’s going to get easier to find ways to thwart him.
In fact just about the only thing that could rescue Trump at this point would be if there were a government shutdown. Suddenly Trump would no longer be getting 100% of the (negative) headlines that he’s getting now. Instead the media would have an excuse to “both sides” things, and the general public would mistakenly conclude that the shutdown was the Democrats’ fault. After all, the Democrats refused to provide the votes to keep the government open. That sentiment would take the heat off Trump, allow his approval rating to climb, and thus give him the kind of unchecked power he’s seeking.
That’s why the shutdown couldn’t happen. More to the point, everyone knew it couldn’t happen. These House and Senate Republican leaders are far from the brightest their party has seen. But they’re not complete morons. The Republicans set this up specifically to try to bait the Democrats into allowing a shutdown to happen, so that the Republicans and a complicit media could then blame the shutdown on the Democrats. And it wouldn’t stop there. All these ghastly governmental problems that Trump and Musk are causing with their inept layoffs, from planes falling out of the sky to courthouses not being able to open their doors? The Democrats could incorrectly get blamed for that as well. After all, the general public isn’t going to take the time to differentiate between the damage done by Musk’s whackjob moves and the damage done by a government shutdown. It would all just get blamed on the Democrats, like it always does.
If anything, the Democrats outfoxed the Republicans by letting them have the ugly budget cuts that they were going to find a way to make happen anyway, without giving the Republicans the gift of a government shutdown first. Now the Republicans have to own this idiotic budget and the damage it’ll do. It was going to happen one way or the other. But now the public will clearly understand who deserves the blame.
I know this isn’t what some of you want to hear. And I get why. But on a day when Donald Trump and Elon Musk took their biggest bodyblow yet, I’m glad we didn’t get baited into handing them a lifeline in the form of a government shutdown. This is their mess. Let them own it. Most of what they try to do will be overturned in court anyway. Let them keep digging themselves a deeper hole. We’ll keep fighting to stop them.
