It’s hard even for Trump to simultaneously say, I am like the uncontested unitary leader of the American government. And then also, I’m just a wittle baby. I’m just a wittle guy. And the Democrats aren’t playing ball with us. So, I’m never going to do that voice again. On Tuesday — we’re recording this on a Wednesday — Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans in Congress were unable to come to an agreement on a spending bill to keep the government operational. And as a result, we’re in another shutdown. And the power struggles that got us here, the strategies to consider are really important to understand whatever ultimately becomes of this. So let’s just start very, very high level. Michelle and Jamelle, what’s your very quick, top level immediate reaction? Michelle, do you want to go first? Well, I think Democrats had no choice but to shut down the government. I do think that their messaging has been weak and incoherent, and I don’t have super high hopes for them actually accomplishing anything significant. Yeah, I have a similar view of Democratic messaging that the relentless focus on health care here, I think, ends up being more harmful than helpful. I think the ideal position for approaching these budget negotiations was simply to say, listen, all this year, the administration has been refusing to respect congressional appropriations, has been unilaterally cutting programs, redirecting funds, spending mysterious sums of money. And we’re simply not going to agree to a budget deal that preserves the administration’s ability to do that, we will agree to a budget deal that will include some guarantees or mechanisms that can prevent the administration from doing that. That’s simple, easy to understand. No government money for a president who doesn’t obey the law. And it puts the onus on the Republicans who run the government, who have the White House, who have been looking the other way on this stuff, but turning this into a negotiation over health care subsidies, in addition to feeling just small ball and non-reactive to what people actually care about. Not to say that people don’t care about health care, but what I mean. Like, people are — their blood is hot about these other things. And Democrats are like, let’s talk about health care instead. And so I don’t know how this all plays out, but I do think that Democrats took what has always been not a great hand. They are in the minority. And they played it quite badly, which is maybe the story of the modern Democratic Party. So, Michelle, you said no choice. I was very interested in that. You said no choice. Because it seems to me that this is obviously a choice. It’s a strategic choice to try to as Jamelle was saying, accomplish something concrete on assuring spending guarantees. Or you’ve got the health subsidy issue and the Affordable Care Act. Why are you saying no choice here. Well, I think that look, we have a president who is completely lawless. We are in a freefall towards authoritarianism. You have a Democratic Party electorate that is absolutely furious at their leaders. I mean, I cannot overstate the amount of anger there is towards Chuck Schumer in particular, something that I think is very different than this. And other shutdowns is the complete refusal of Republicans to negotiate or make even the barest concessions. I mean, this was not the case with say the Newt Gingrich shut down during the Clinton years. Clinton was never saying my offer is fuck you. Excuse me. I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear on this. And so, so given this set of circumstances, I mean, I think that the. O.K, I guess, yes, you always have a choice. But the choice here was between total capitulation and public acknowledgment of complete powerlessness or using the tiny bit of leverage you actually have. And to me, that’s not really any choice at all. So we’re definitely going to circle back to the political strategy here. But let’s pull back a little bit and talk about why you shut down the government. We’ve seen a number of them recently. There were three under Trump’s two administrations. So why is this happening. Why do we keep going back to this particular tactic when I’m not sure that looking back, I can point to a concrete thing that a single shutdown has really accomplished. I think part of this, I put this I think that part of the recurring of the shutdown as a political tactic actually has less to do with particular tactical or strategic decisions or visions of the respective parties. But just the extent to which Congress no longer operates by anything that looks like regular order. Like it doesn’t operate according to what I think people may imagine Congress operates. Oh, well, at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the fiscal year, they like to pass a budget. Et cetera. Et cetera. They pass individual bills to deal with particular issues. Et cetera. Et cetera. Like, none of that happens. Congress runs on these continuing resolutions for the most part. There’s basically no capacity. It seems to right a traditional kind of budget and pass it into law. And to the extent that there’s any law making capability anymore, it is centered around these reconciliation bills, which end up being these omnibus fiscal bills that are mostly written by leadership and then tossed onto the floor. And so the deterioration of Congress’s capacity to actually engage in traditional lawmaking. I think actually just creates the scenario. It creates these deadlines by which if a continuing resolution isn’t passed, the government doesn’t get funded. And then that becomes the terrain for a bunch of gamesmanship and maneuvering and tactical, nonsense or whatever. But, I think if you had a Congress that was functional. If you had a Congress that looked like the Congress that existed in pick a random year in the 20th century, 1954, you wouldn’t see this kind of thing. Maybe you can throw in partisan polarization, ideological polarization, the extent to which there no longer is a kind of flexible middle within Congress. But I would really zero in on the collapse of Congress’s capacity to do anything, which honestly, is downstream, I would argue, is downstream of the kind of hard nosed congressional politics that emerge with Gingrich in the late 80s and 90s and continue on into the 2000 up to the present. Michelle, a lot of what Jamelle says resonates with me. I mean, this I’ve been banging the drum of Congress not working for a really long time. I think the oldest person on this podcast by a bit. So I’m going to pull the old man card and say, I remember back in my day, you could have a situation where a closely divided Senate, for example, could result in an 80-20 compromise where you would actually have the different factions get together a reach across the aisle on areas of common interest, and reach a compromise solution. Is this where we are, Michelle? Is this just what it looks like to say Congress is doing something in a dysfunctional era. Is this just what it looks like for Congress to do something. Yeah I don’t even know if it’s so much that it’s like Congress is doing something. I think it’s more that what it looks like for Democrats to with their very, very weak hand, say, we are not going to be complicit in this administration’s kind of rapid dismantling of American liberal democracy. And the problem, of course, is that that’s not their message, that’s not their rationale. And I think part of the problem with the way Democrats have approached this is that the I think people can feel the gap between their rationale, which feels kind of consultant brained and focused. Focus grouped and what people say in private and what’s truly motivating both the voters, but a lot of the politicians themselves. I mean, I think it’s important not to minimize the impact of these coming price hikes for health care. They’re going to be like devastating and shattering for a lot of people. So there’s an argument that shutting down the government over this kind of raises the salience, so that when people get the notice that their health insurance is going way up, they can connect it to what’s happening in Washington. I think that makes sense. But at the same time, it’s alighting the issues. And so, yes, I mean, to me, I kind take it for granted that Congress doesn’t function anymore. And hasn’t for a long time. But I think we’re a step beyond that, this is a little bit different than what we’ve gotten used to over the last few years, where a creaky and increasingly dysfunctional system kind of chugs along, breaking down from time to time. This is, kind of rapid disassembly of the American project. And there’s no precedent for how you behave in this situation. So let’s talk a little bit about the impact here. Because the impact really matters. It matters on a human level. It’s going to matter on a political level. So it strikes me. And looking at this and looking at the debate over health care, that I’m getting a little bit of deja Vu around the big beautiful bill, because the big, beautiful bill had this classic Republican extension of tax cuts and really partially, very partially paid for by Medicaid cuts, which seemed like, what would seem like a classic Republican kind of policy proposal. However, we don’t have the classical Republican Party. The Republican Party is becoming much more working class educated voters are moving more towards the Democrats. So, in fact, Medicaid cuts are going to impact more Republicans than they used to. Is there a scenario here where the Republicans are actually not reading their own room, in a sense that their own base is becoming, as it’s becoming more working class, that playing games, say, with health care subsidies or Medicaid cuts or financing tax cuts, in part through Medicaid cuts, for example. That’s just not something that’s going to be a successful for the Republicans anymore. Is that shift underway or is that right. Or is the loyalty here the baseline partisan loyalty just so great. It’s just not going to matter. Part of the irony of all of this is that the Democrats are basically begging the Republicans to let the Democrats save them from the political consequences of their own ideology. I mean, I think it goes without saying that huge spikes in insurance is going to be pretty bad for Republicans. And so the Democrats big ask in all of this is something that substantively is obviously the right thing to do, but actually politically is shooting themselves in the foot if they win. Yeah just to comment on that real quick. This is where I feel like I do sound terrible, because it’s stipulating this is bad for people. And we’ve discussed this before, David. I’m kind of on this let what’s that line from Rocky 4. If he dies, he dies. Like if this is what happens if it’s what happens because he voted for Republicans and this is the consequence. And if you don’t want this consequence, don’t vote for Republicans. And I think that part of what’s been broken in American politics is a feedback mechanism that the choices voters make, do not reliably result in feedback that helps them understand the choices that they make. And properly contextualize them. So looking at the Republican side, a Republican voter receiving Medicaid may not necessarily understand that as the same Medicaid that a Black voter in New York receives they may see that as two different things. Setting that aside, which I do think is part of a factor here. The extent to which a Democrats do work to soften the blow of these sorts of Republican cuts. And so you kind allow voters to have their cake and eat it, too. You have the extent to which people don’t rebel. Republican voters even seem to see Trump as is something distinct from a Republican, and their allegiance to him is more cult of personality ish than it is ordinary political leader based relationship. And so they continue to give him extremely high ratings, even if he is doing things or supporting things that actively harm them. And so the president and Republicans looking at the president aren’t getting the right feedback mechanism either. They’re doing unpopular things, but it’s not really diminishing intra party standing. And so there’s no reason for them to not do those unpopular things. And then the collapse of the Democratic Party in so many places where Republicans have incumbent, incumbent offices means that there isn’t necessarily the kind of political competition that might do the work show reminding Republicans that the composition of their electorate has changed and that these things might harm them. And so it’s just like there’s no there’s no feedback happening. And so they can these premiums can spike. The Medicaid cuts are going to go in. And it’s actually to my mind, indeterminate whether or not it’s going to have the kind of political impact. I think Democrats might like. And I think the only way it will is through, active political action, political education, you might say. That’s very staid way of putting it. You could say demagoguery around the issue in order to show voters what is happening. And I think part of that probably does have to involve a willingness to not be the responsible adults. And I’ll wrap this up by saying that I think a real Democratic Party political problem is so many of the party’s leaders, their identities are wrapped up in this idea that they are the responsible adults of American politics. And so it’s up to them to do what’s right in every circumstance. And I’m not sure that’s true I’ve seen a pattern for about Oh, 10 years now involving Donald Trump, where I imagine that a rock falls into a pond and it causes a giant splash, and then the rock gets away with blaming the water for the splash. This is the way Trump he’s like a force of chaos. He jumps into American politics. He generates a giant amount of radiating collateral damage, and then is very good at blaming everything else for the damage that he creates. And this is one of the things that I’m concerned about with the shutdown strategy. If you’re talking about a strategy to oppose Donald Trump, I think it’s pretty clear that a supermajority of Americans don’t want a government shutdown. It’s not clear to me at all that same supermajority would then migrate towards holding Trump responsible for a shutdown, as opposed to the Democrats, especially as the pain continues to radiate out from here. Some of the consequences, there’s going to be disruptions of services. There’s going to be possible delays in Social Security applications. You’re going to have situations, for example, where air traffic controllers keep working, but they don’t get paid. You also might have a situation where Trump uses whatever legal ambiguities are created by a shutdown situation to engage in permanent reductions in force in the federal government that will further impact the provision of federal services. So there is going to be pain. And the question though, to me is this a situation where you’ve got the base leading the party astray and it’s pushing the party into a confrontation that, whatever it merits is the three of us talk about it is just going to land like a thud with the American people. First of all, I think that everything you just said about the drawbacks of a shutdown and the pain of a shutdown and the political risks of a shutdown, I basically agree with. I mean, I just think that we’re in a situation where there were no good options. There are no good options. When your country is in the midst of an authoritarian transformation, you don’t have good options by definition. And so I guess I would turn it back to you. Do you if you have a president who already has no intention of abiding by any budget deal that is duly passed by Congress, if you have a president that is completely unconstrained by all the levers of government and a Congress that has been completely supine, do you just say if you’re a Democrat O.K, we are going to sign on and fund this without demands or preconditions? I mean, my own position is in the abstract if you’re talking about a negotiation between two sophisticated parties at arm’s length, but there is no negotiation. Yeah and one of them absolutely, positively, I cannot trust to abide by any agreement. And that circumstance, I’m not entering into an agreement with that person. But that’s not the overall calculus. If I’m in a situation where I’m in an impossible I’m in an impossible negotiation situation. I’m in the right. But I have real concern that the consequence of my stand is actually going to harm my cause more than it helps my cause. That’s a consideration that would give me pause if I am I aware of a supermajority not wanting the very policy that I’m pushing that would be something that would give me pause. And I don’t offer that to say that there is that the Democrats are clearly wrong here. I offer that to reaffirm what I think is a theme that both of you all are saying, which is sometimes there are not good options. There’s just not a clear forward path short of winning elections. I mean, we’re all talking about this as if it’s the Democrats that did it, the Democrats that shut down the government. But of course, Republicans control every branch of government, and Republicans are free to do away with the filibuster and go ahead and pass this thing, right. I mean, Republicans have all of the power here. And yet so much of the discussion. And this is, I think, a meta problem, maybe for not just the Democrats, but for of understanding of politics, where and this is something Jamelle talks about all the time, that we always act as if only Democrats have agency. And so part of the messaging has to be if Republicans want our help, they have to come to the table. And if they don’t, they run the government. And they are free to pass a budget on their own. Yeah and I’ll say that I think this could get back to this the broken mechanisms of political accountability in American politics right now. I think part of the problem is that I’m not sure that Donald Trump perceives that he’s very unpopular, somewhat lost. I feel like in a lot of conversations around what’s happening, it’s just the objective fact that Donald Trump is very unpopular. But it’s not clear to me that Trump perceives that whatsoever, or that the people around him perceive that whatsoever, that I think they see themselves as operating according to some kind of definitive mandate from the electorate, from the people, singular, undivided, unchanging. I think that you take these exact political circumstances and just insert a president who wasn’t so convinced of their essential popularity, and you would have a negotiation, because that President would recognize it. Like I’m actually in a weak position right now. You can tie this as well to the president’s penchant for authoritarianism, right? His desire to run the government in an autocratic manner. He just doesn’t perceive himself as needing Congress. And so negotiations to Congress are just not a skill that he really has. I have a slightly different sense of that Trump political dynamic, I completely agree. He’s a man who acts like he just won, he was Reagan in ‘84 or Nixon in ‘72 one of these 49 state mandates. And he acts as if he got some kind of mandate like that when he’s boasting, when he’s speaking, but in an interesting way. He governs as if the only thing he has to be is more popular than the Democrats, that he governs, in a way, often that I see it as intentionally designed to provoke Democrats or in some cases not Democrats, people on the far, far left into actions that are even less popular than his. So, for example, I think it’s a pretty obvious to me when you watch the conduct of ice in these cities, that ice is being very deliberately, physically provocative. It is being very physically aggressive. It is spoiling for the kind of fight where you see masked protesters throwing things at federal buildings or lighting cars on fire or things like that. And so my question is this a similar situation where in essence, what he’s doing is, on the one hand, empirically unpopular with most Americans. I don’t think most Americans like the aggression of the immigration enforcement, but with this kind of diabolically shrewd aim towards provoking opponents into an even less popular response with the notion that he doesn’t have to outrun the bear, he just has to outrun the Democrats. So I buy that maybe is Trump’s theory of the case. And I think it maybe works in election years when the public kind of forgets Donald Trump. But I’ll know that in during his first term, this didn’t work right. Like this isn’t working now. To you use immigration as an example. The main effect of this ice reign of terror is to polarize Americans against ICE and against the Trump administration on an issue that he is supposed to be strong on. So I’m not sure that this works. I think that trying to provoke a more unpopular response can be effective if your opponent does give you that more unpopular response. But here, it’s not clear to me. It’s hard even for Trump to simultaneously say I am like the uncontested unitary leader of the American government. And then also I’m just a wittle baby. I’m just a widow guy, and the Democrats aren’t playing ball with us. So I’m never going to do that voice again. I don’t think that you can do both at the same time. I don’t think he’s successfully doing both at the same time. So Jamelle and Michelle, you both seem to say right at the get go that you’re not sure that the Democrats are handling the messaging correctly here, that they’re not reaching the American people with their best and strongest arguments. That seems to be a persistent problem with the Democrats, that there are a number of major moments that they can sometimes seem to appear, that they’re fumbling. They seem kind of misaligned, certainly, with the evolution and changes of the online attention economy. Where are the Democrats on just reaching the American people. Why, in your view, do they fumble this matter. And why is it that it seems as if the Republicans in some ways are Lapping them on this attention economy. Is it as simple as. Well, control of the algorithms on some of the major social media platforms has shifted, and it emphasizes certain kinds of content. And de-emphasizes other, or is it far more sophisticated and far more in from a longer term worrying than something like that. So I think that that’s I mean, look, I don’t think that you can separate the algorithms, especially something like x, but also increasingly Facebook. I mean, I don’t use Facebook personally, but I have a professional page where I post my articles and what I’m being Fed on that page. What’s showing up is just like the most base right wing slop. And so if that’s what the algorithm is giving someone like me, I can only imagine what it’s giving other people. But then the other piece of it and the piece that’s kind of easier to fix in the short term, is that Democrats have the wrong leaders. Chuck Schumer might be a good dealmaker. He might be the right Senate Majority Leader in a Kamala Harris presidency when they’re trying to craft legislation. But he’s very, very wrong for this moment. He’s like, he’s a bad communicator. He clearly doesn’t understand or at least know how to operate in this informational ecosystem. He’s very focused on winning the morning in D.C. or in the Beltway media. He’s attached to a set of norms and procedures and assumptions about the way politics operate, none of which are still in effect. And he’s just kind of not a wartime consigliere. And so, these other things are these other things are long term problems. This is an easy one. It’s not easy, but it can be fixed. If people have the will, it can be fixed in relatively short order. Yeah I had he he’s not a wartime consiglieri on the tip of my tongue the entire time you were speaking. So I’m going to reference another piece of media that people watching this. At the very least may which is from The Wire season 4, when Marlo Stanfield says to the security guard, you want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. And I think Democrats, Democratic leaders, want it to be one way. They want it to be a way where we’re engaged in normal congressional politics, where Donald Trump is maybe an extreme version of a normal Republican president, but something close to a normal Republican president that we’re are operating in familiar territory. The map is clear. There is no fog of war. But that’s just not the case. This is not where we are. We are in a time that demands political creativity and a willingness to take risk, a willingness to pick fights. The algorithm is powerful, but it’s possible to game the attention economy. But it does require one to challenge the terrain, not fight on Republican ground the entire time. And that’s just not a skill set that anyone in Democratic Party leadership has been selected for. They’ve been selected for consensus. They’ve been selected for binding together a large and often fractious party. They’re not selected for articulating a set of principles, not backing down from them. And picking fights around them. And until that changes, I think that Democrats are going to have a hard time responding to these conditions. And part of the problem is that this is self-perpetuating. The people who have been selected for traits that are not good for this moment are themselves in charge of selecting candidates or recruiting candidates, and are demonstrably hostile, or at least skeptical of people who don’t take that approach, who are more conflict driven, who do see the value in picking fights and establishing principles. That’s what fights do. Fights help you establish for the public. This is what I stand for. This is what I won’t back down from. And that’s just people don’t know that about Democrats. I mean, I think that people might think that Democrats are too far to the left. They might have all these other complaints. But there’s also a fundamental thing that people say about Democrats, which is that they don’t know what they stand for. Are you just are you just an elaborate set of institutions to elect a handful of ambitious people, or is there something actually is there a vision for the country that you actually have. Is there a picture of what you want this place to be. And I don’t think Chuck Schumer can answer that question. I don’t think Hakeem Jeffries can answer that question. I would bet that there’s maybe a handful of Democrats in Congress who can answer that question. And one of them. I think there’s more than that. I think there’s more than that. You’re more O.K. I mean, I think we’re in total agreement about the leadership, but I definitely I talk to Democrats all the time who I feel like can articulate that if they were given the platform to do so. Yeah, I would just say as the former Republican conservative voice on the podcast, my perception of Democrats has never been that. They don’t know what they stand for and don’t know how to fight that. That would not be a common conservative assessment of Democrats, that in many ways, it would be somewhat of the opposite, that Democrats might be a little bit too narrow ideologically that they are too specific on what they stand for. I mean, there was a recent little kerfuffle I noticed online where our colleague was saying that it’s almost unthinkable to imagine, say, a Democrat winning Arkansas. In large part, I think, because it’s kind of unthinkable to think of the Democratic Party nominating an actually pro-life candidate in a state like Arkansas. Look, I think that there’s a popular conception of the Democratic Party, maybe that they are kind of very rigid on a handful of culture war issues. And we can that’s a separate argument that we probably shouldn’t get into at the end of the show. I have no problem with Democratic politicians taking heterodox positions that are responsive to their local communities. And I think that we should be recruiting Democrats from the communities that they embody. That’s very different, though, from a broader picture of the Democrats as being when I mean, look at Elissa Slotkin. When she says the perception of the Democrats are that they’re weak and woke. So you’re talking about the quote unquote woke part. But I think the weak part is just as important. The part where they can’t stand up to Donald Trump, they try to play these kind of little small, as Jamal said, small ball legislative games. But they don’t have a real cohesive vision for where they want to take the country. And how if you give them power, they’re going to improve your life. All right. On that note, recommendations. Jamelle, do you want to start with some recommendations? Sure. I just read — we’re well past the Katrina Hurricane Katrina anniversary. But in anticipation of it, I read a book that had been on my list for a long time, which is “Katrina: A History, 1915-2015” by I believe, Andy Horowitz is the author. And it’s just a wonderful history, not simply of New Orleans, but of Louisiana, of the Gulf Coast. And it’s thesis is looking at the natural disaster not as an act of God, but as the specific product of specific choices made to shape this landscape and the shape the people within that landscape. So highly recommend the book. It’s not especially long. It’s dense, but not especially long. And it offers, I think, a great perspective on the area and on thinking through America in the 20th century from the perspective of this singular event that was Hurricane Katrina, an event that New Orleans and Louisiana and the Gulf Coast is still 20 years later recovering from Michelle? I am going to strongly recommend — I know Jamelle, have you seen this “One Battle After Another” by — No I don’t — I don’t have time to go to the movie theaters anymore. Make time. Jamelle, make time. It’s a new film by Paul Thomas Anderson. It is. I mean, definitely the best movie I’ve seen this year. Actually probably the best movie I’ve seen in several years. Just, I mean, astonishing and magnificent and so politically germane, you wonder throughout the entire thing, could they have possibly made this if they started today. I mean, it almost seems unthinkable at a time when Hollywood is being so cowed in the entire culture, often seems so afraid to make this movie that is a really defiantly anti-fascist kind of epic. It’s based on Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” about these kind of former hippies and 60s militants who are kind of adrift in 1984, and it takes basically the skeleton that story, and it transports it into the present day. I felt like there was something so invigorating about this movie that addresses very directly kind of Trump’s America. The villain in this movie is he runs this military unit that seems a very elite unit of ice or something like that. And he’s obsessed with undocumented migration. He’s obsessed with racial purity. And so you see these kind of street battles that look, not maybe when it was made, they were supposed to be dystopian and futuristic, but now it just looks like outtakes from L.A. But to see this movie that addresses this moment, but with a fearlessness that increasingly doesn’t exist. I don’t know. It’s just I can’t say enough good things about this movie. I’m going to see it again. My wife and son saw it and have been raving about it ever since. They brought it up multiple times, so I’m definitely seeing that. But my contribution this week is I think long time listeners of the round table will know I’m your guide to streaming and I will never lead you astray. And I promise I’m not leading you astray again. The latest season of “Slow Horses” is out. Oh, I can’t wait. And it’s one of the only shows where I’m going to say that a 96 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating is underselling the show. That should be 100 percent It is an espionage thriller set in England starring Gary Oldman. And it is it’s a serious show in which you will laugh five times an episode, simply because the Gary Oldman character, who runs this misfit gang of MI5 rejects called the “Slow Horses,” who always end up saving the nation of the United Kingdom somehow. But they are this misfit gang that he runs in the most punitive and and cruel way possible. And it’s also just hilarious and and thrilling and marvelously acted. The supporting cast is fantastic. This is the fifth season since around 2022, so when you dive in won’t regret it. And you’ll have a lot of New shows coming. I love “Slow Horses.” All right. With that, let’s end it. Jamelle, Michelle, thank you so much. Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure.