Why would Trump get involved? He gets to harass immigrants and build his pretty little ballroom while SCOTUS levels an all out assault on civilized society. There's nothing about the government being open that actually does anything for him.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 10:48 AM
Per NBC, “Democrats call on ‘disengaged’ Trump to get involved to end shutdown”:
As the government shutdown crosses the three-week mark, Democrats are increasingly calling on President Donald Trump to get more involved in finding a solution.
And some Republicans acknowledge that Trump has been disengaged and say it wouldn’t hurt if he got more involved.
“Hakeem and I reached out to the president today and urged him to sit down and negotiate with us to resolve the health care crisis, address it and end the Trump shutdown,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters Tuesday, referring to his House counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries of New York. “We urged him to meet with us, and we said we’ll set up an appointment with him any time, any place before he leaves.”
And as Republican senators ate cheeseburgers at a private lunch meeting with Trump on Tuesday, there was little discussion of the shutdown, several of them said afterward.
“He mentioned it briefly, but my sense is that nothing’s changed,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “We’ll talk about all the issues the Democrats want to talk about once the government reopens.”
That has been the GOP strategy all along — to hold firm on its short-term funding bill and expect Democrats to back off their demands to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. It hasn’t worked, with the Senate voting 11 times to reject the bill that passed the Republican-led House version and seeing no votes changing by even one senator.
Trump has met only once with Schumer and Jeffries, on Sept. 29 — two days before the shutdown began — and it didn’t go well. He reacted hours later by taunting the two Democrats with an artificial intelligence-generated post that put words in Schumer’s mouth and a sombrero on Jeffries’ head…
One observation is I don't believe the GOP really is quite pricing in how damaging politically building a gigantic ballroom and Trump paying himself 250m in the open is when people are visibly hurting economically.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 10:33 AM
The fundamental assessment of the Trump team is that their core base is unshakable and they can make things as bad as they want and keep them as long as they're being trolly and racist enough.
They're correct on the merits, but they're wrong about the size and distribution.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 10:41 AM
One thing about the all stick, no carrot presidency is, like I discussed, the foundational piece of this is it wants to be transformational politics, so it's just sticks all the way down.
But the Trump team thinks that, for his voters, the sticks all the way down IS the carrot.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 10:45 AM
This works if Trump's base is 45% of the electorate.
It does not work if Trump's base (which we know) is more like 30-35% of the electorate and the rest are squishy voters.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 10:42 AM
