It goes without saying that President Donald Trump’s second term in office is more ostentatiously dictatorial than the first. As the administration ticks boxes off its Project 2025 punch list and allows Elon Musk to shred the civil service, the White House clearly feels unbound by any of the traditional constraints on the chief executive. It’s subjecting every branch of government, not to mention vital institutions throughout society, to relentless stress tests—with worrying success. But no target is proving as nerveless as the minority party in Washington.
Like velociraptors testing the bars, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have systematically identified where the weaknesses in the opposition can be found, and this week they netted their biggest prey yet: Nine Democratic senators (and whatever Angus King is) who voted to pass a destructive budget bill that tacitly endorses Trump and Musk’s ongoing decimation of the civil service and gives them a freer hand to carry it out. I am sorry to say that it is now incumbent on you, the voters, to use whatever means are at your disposal to end these senators’ careers.
Would it be histrionic to say that Trump has turned these ten senators? Perhaps so. But it’s worth noting that Republicans now think that this is the case, and they intend to act on it accordingly. As NBC News’ Sahil Kapur reported Friday night, “Two Republican senators told me … this vote shows they can execute the same strategy again—cut Democrats out of the negotiations on a gov’t funding bill, pass it through the House, and expect Senate Dems to back down and not filibuster it.” Suffice it to say, Trump has ten senators over the barrel—and one of them is Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader.
Regardless of whether or not these senators have gone full Vichy, the more obvious thing to say about them is that they are cowards, and thus unfit to serve in office. It’s bad enough that they surrendered their ability to credibly criticize the president’s slash-and-burn campaign against our civic fabric. What’s more galling is that they did so despite the fact that their greatest fear going into the vote—that the public would somehow hold them, the party out of power, responsible for a government shutdown—wasn’t going to materialize: A Quinnipiac poll from midweek revealed that only 32 percent of respondents would blame Democrats for a shutdown, against 54 percent blaming either congressional Republicans or Trump himself. In other words, these ten senators forced the rest of the Democratic caucus to fold on a winning hand.
And if the cowardice isn’t enough to disquality these senators, consider the stupidity. Why was anyone in the Democratic caucus afraid of a future government shutdown? The government, for all intents and purposes, is at this very moment shut down. Masses of civil service employees have been cashiered, key systems have been seized, the ability to freely spend money has been suspended, and Musk’s goons are going from department to department ripping the wires of the walls. There are still people drawing paychecks, and a thin and thready pulse is still beating somewhere in the administrative state, but there’s no telling how much longer this will be the case.
The Democrats who voted with Trump have badly misapprehended a situation that anyone with intelligence could have divined: There is no substantive difference between a government shutdown and what Republicans are already doing and intend to do in the future. The only thing that’s changed is that the GOP can now claim to have bipartisan assent for their wave of mutilation. This is the sort of thing for which the phrase “penny wise and pound foolish” was invented.
It’s time for voters to usher these lawmakers into a new career. This will unfortunately be slow going. Only three of the terrible ten—Dick Durbin, Gary Peters, and Jeanne Shaheen—are up for re-election this year and I strongly suspect that at least the latter two are likely to retire. Five more will face voters in 2028: Schumer, John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, Brian Schatz, and Catherine Cortez Masto. The terms of King and Kirsten Gillibrand aren’t up until 2030.
While it’s never too soon to prepare to support these senators’ primary opponents (or perhaps prepare to become one of them), this is admittedly a depressingly long timeline. Still, there is an avenue for immediate satisfaction: The entire House of Representatives is up for election next year and there are plenty of quisling cousins to these senators among the lower house’s ranks who might serve as fitting targets for your wrath. If you’re a fan of nice round numbers, there’s an ideal symmetry to be found in the ten representatives who voted with Republicans to censure Al Green, after the Texas Democrat stood up to Trump’s bullying at his joint address to Congress earlier this month.
For the rest of these rogue senators, you will simply have to find some way to pass the time until you have the chance to vote them out of office. But consider the fact that while these lawmakers may have safe seats, that doesn’t mean they have to enjoy their remaining days in office. There are going to be plenty of opportunities to shower public opprobrium on these wayward congresscritters. Schumer, for example, is about to head out on a book tour and I’m sure he’d love it if you brought the same energy to those events as voters are bringing to Republican town halls.
It hasn’t gone unremarked upon that the anger of Democratic voters of all stripes is growing by the day. As Anne Caprara, the chief of staff to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, warned earlier this week, “The fight going on in the Democratic Party right now is not between hard left, left, and moderate. It’s between those who want to fight and those who want to cave. And Team Fight stretches across all ideological aspects of the Party. Misread this at your own peril.” Ten ostensibly anti-Trump senators failed to follow this advice. They did so in the belief that you’re like they are—your anger is all for show, your convictions are lacking, and you don’t have the stomach to follow through on your beliefs and protestations. They sincerely believe that you will, at some point, quietly acquiecse to the status quo; forgive and forget. It’s now up to you to prove them wrong.
