The Ezra Klein Show - If Democrats Have a Better Plan, I’d Like to Hear It

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

In a few weeks the government’s funding will run out. If Democrats vote for a new spending bill, they will be funding Trump’s autocratic takeover. What should they do?Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis column read was produced by our executive producer, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with mixing by Aman Sahota. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Thank you. In about three weeks, the government's funding will run out. Democrats will face a choice, join Republicans to fund a government that Trump is turning into a tool of authoritarian takeover and vengeance or shut the government down. Democrats faced a version of this choice six months ago. This was back in March. Doge was chainsawing its way through the government. civil servants were being fired en masse.

Government grants and payments were being choked off and reworked into tools of political power and punishment. Trump was signing executive orders demanding the investigation, I would say the persecution of his enemies. He had announced shocking tariffs on Mexico and Canada. We were in the full muzzle velocity stage of the presidency. And Democrats at that moment seemed completely overwhelmed and outmatched. I kept hearing people say they lacked a message,

but that's not what they lacked. What they lacked was power. They didn't have power. They didn't have the House or the Senate. But they did have one sliver of leverage. In order to fund the government, Senate Republicans needed Democratic votes. Not just one or two votes.

They needed at least seven Democrats to reach that magic 60-vote threshold in the Senate. House Democrats wanted their Senate colleagues to hold those votes back. They wanted a shutdown. But Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, didn't. He voted for the funding bill and he encouraged a crucial number of his colleagues

to do the same. The bill passed. To many Democrats, this seemed completely insane. Just to see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk, I think it is a huge slap in the face and I think that there's a wide sense of betrayal. I myself don't give away anything for nothing. I think that's what happened the other day.

This was Democrats' first real opportunity to fight back against Donald Trump, and what had they done? They'd folded immediately. What were they good for? I'm afraid that it may be time for the Senate Democrats to pick new leadership as we move forward.

I think it was an act of strength, of courage, and I knew that most people wouldn't agree with me. During this period, this early schism in democratic strategy, I was talking to people on all sides of it, to Schumer, to House leadership, to Senate leadership to members of Congress with different theories of what should be done. And if I'm being honest, I didn't think this was an easy call, that there was one right answer. The House's argument, Hakeem Jeffrey's argument, was that a shutdown creates a crisis.

A crisis creates attention, and attention gives Democrats the chance to make their case to the American people. Schumer's argument was threefold. First, Trump was being stopped in the courts. There were dozens of cases playing out against him, and he was losing again and again and again. Shut down the government, and you might eventually shut down the courts, freeing him from that constraint. Second, Doge was trying to gut the executive branch. When the government falls into a funding crisis, the executive gets more authority to decide where the money the government does have goes. In that chaos, Doge could go farther and faster.

After all, it is Democrats who want the government to work. It was Trump and Doge looking for every opportunity to dismantle it. A shutdown in this telling wasn't leverage against Donald Trump. It was leverage against the Democrats' own priorities against the government they were trying to protect. Third, the market was already quaking at the threat of Trump's tariffs. Trump had promised a strong economy and low prices, and instead he was creating chaos. If Democrats triggered a shutdown at that exact moment, at the moment Trump was creating an economic crisis, they would confuse who was to blame for all the turbulence.

Was it Trump and his tariffs or Democrats in their shutdown? It's the first rule of politics. When your opponent is drowning, Don't throw them a lifeline. And to these three arguments, I thought there was a fourth. Democrats had not prepared for a shutdown. They had not explained to themselves or to the public why they would be shutting the government down

or what they wanted to achieve. They had no strategy. They had no message. They didn't have any clear demands. The one demand I did hear them discussing was that the spending bill needed more bipartisan negotiation. It was just unbearably lame and off-key. And so if you had forced me to choose,

choose at that moment, I thought Schumer was probably right. It wasn't the time for a shutdown, in part because Democrats weren't prepared to win one. But that bill that passed back in March funding the government, it runs out at the end of this month. And so now we're facing the question again. Should Senate Democrats partner with Senate Republicans to fund this government? I don't see how they can. Not a single argument Schumer made then is valid now. First, Trump is not losing in the courts, not anymore. The Supreme Court has weighed in again and again on his behalf.

Instead of reprimanding Trump for his executive order unilaterally erasing the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to all born here, the Supreme Court reprimanded the lower courts for imposing a national freeze on that order in the way they did. The Supreme Court is showing Trump extraordinary deference on the way he is exercised. power. On a recent episode, I asked the law professor Kate Shaw, what powers the recent set a Supreme Court decision seemed to grant Trump that Barack Obama or Joe Biden just didn't think they had? Here's her answer. I mean, I think refused to spend money appropriated by Congress, remove heads of independent agencies protected by statute from summary firing, fire civil servants without cause, dismantle federal agencies.

But I mean, fundamentally, they didn't think they had the power to disregard statutes passed by Congress and the text of the Constitution. And I don't want to fetishize text. Also, just the practices under the Constitution. They didn't think they had the power to do things like treat the presidency as an office that permits its occupant

to use the power of the state to reward friends and punish enemies and engage in self-dealing and enrichment. Like, that is a preliminary list, but I think it's a long one. Those powers Democrats were afraid of Trump getting, he's got them. Schumer's argument in March was that the courts were stopping Trump, let them work. What we can say in September is it no.

John Roberts is not going to do your work for you. He is not going to stop Donald Trump. Second, the scale of Doge's assault on the government has shrunk. Trump and Elon Musk went through a very messy and very public breakup. But the real reason it didn't continue, I think, is that now it's Trump appointees running these agencies. They don't want their own agencies wrecked. They don't want to be blamed for the failures that might result. They need staff. And either way, the Supreme Court has already given Trump vast power to reshape the federal workforce in the way he chooses. He doesn't need

a shutdown to do it. Third, the markets have settled into whatever this new normal is, at least for now. Trump's tariffs are unpopular, but with damage they've done to him politically, they've already done or they're only going to do over time as price increases squeeze Americans. We are not in a recession. The economy is not in chaos. Democrats cannot stand back and hope the markets are going to do their work for them. But something else has changed to. We are no longer in the muzzle velocity stage of this presidency, where Donald Trump is trying things and seeing what sticks. We are in the authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency. I want to be very clear about what I'm saying here.

Donald Trump is corrupting the government. He is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets, and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under mafia rule, get the trash picked up by cement. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the mafia's power and wealth. This is what Donald Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.

Just in the last few months, we've watched Trump fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn't like the jobs data. We watched him fire the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, after the agency suggested that the administration's strike on Iran only set their nuclear program back by a couple of months. we watched Trump muse about firing Jerome Powell because he wanted interest rates lower.

Powell, of course, being the chair of the Federal Reserve. And now we're watching Trump try to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, unalleged mortgage fraud. We've watched Trump sick his government on Senator Adam Schiff, and Attorney General Tish James of New York. Again, allegations of mortgage fraud. I'm going to note here that this is not coming after the Trump administration has run some exhaustive review

on the mortgage documents of every person. person serving in the executive branch. They just so deeply care about mortgage fidelity. This is just what authoritarian governments do. They have a lot of information, and you look hard enough, and everyone has done something wrong. And even if they have it, you can cause them a lot of trouble by just saying they have. We've watched Trump's FBI rage on Bolton's house.

Bolton, who Trump hates because Bolton became a critic of his, after serving in his first administration. We've watched Trump threatened to investigate critical. Christi, the former New Jersey governor, after Christie criticized Trump on television, we watched the Trump administration forced the resignation of a series of Republican prosecutors because they would not drop their case against New York mayor Eric Adams. And the Trump administration seemed to have decided it'd be more convenient to have Adams in their pocket than defending himself in court. We've watched Trump suggest the FCC should pull the broadcast licenses for

NBC and ABC, Trump has an enemies list, and he's using the power of the federal government to punish and harass his foes. We've watched the Trump family invest heavily in crypto, starting its own coins and companies, and then use their political power and fame to hoover in investment. We've watched over the past few years, as Assadi and the Qataris and the Emirates have made huge investments, billions of dollars in Trump family businesses and crypto coins. We're watching countries from India to Vietnam to Qatar, race to build Trump golf courses and towers. In March, Forbes estimated that Trump's worth had more than doubled to more than

$5 billion just over the past year. It pays to be king, Forbes wrote. It pays to be king. We've watched Trump deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles. and then to Washington, D.C., with more cities expected come under federal military occupation soon. We've watched masked ice agents conducting raids all over the country, refusing to reveal their faces,

badge numbers, or warrants. We've watched Trump systematically purge the government of inspector generals, of jags, of military officers, of federal prosecutors, anyone who seems like they might stand in the way of his corruption or his accumulation or exercise, of power.

It is an astonishing fact that the January 6th riotists have been pardoned, and dozens of the Justice Department lawyers who prosecuted them have been fired. You often hear this line. This is how authoritarianism happens. No, this is authoritarianism happening. Look at Donald Trump. Trump, in his Oval Office festooned with gold, his masked agents roaming the streets. Listen to these cabinet meetings where his appointees compete to lavish him with the kind of praise

that would have made Fidel Castro blush. Here's Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East. There's only one thing I wish for that that noble committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel Award was ever. talked about to receive that reward. Tell me that is not what authoritarianism looks and sounds like. And so the question is, what are Democrats going to do about it? What can they do about it?

I was talking with a Democratic senator, I respect, and he asked me a good question. Everything I say about what Trump is doing might be true. Everything I say about the kind of emergency this is might be right. but is a government shut down an answer? Or is it just a desire for emotional catharsis that might be self-defeating? Sometimes the best strategy is restraint. I think the case for a shutdown is this.

A shutdown is an intentional event. It's an effort to turn the diffuse crisis of Trump's corrupting the government into an acute crisis that the media, that the public will pay attention to. Right now, Democrats have no power, so no one cares what they have to say.

A shutdown would make people listen. But then, Democrats would have to actually win the argument. They would need to have an argument. They would need a clear set of demands that kept them on the right side of public opinion and dramatized what is happening to the country right now. In my head, the argument is something like this. Donald Trump won the election.

he is the legitimate president. His government should be funded so long as it is acting the way the government is supposed to, serving the people being held accountable. But there are red lines that cannot be crossed. ICE can conduct legitimate deportations, but it can't be masked men, roaming the streets,

refusing to identify themselves or their authority. The Trump family cannot be hoovering in money and investments from the countries that depend on us and fear our power and our sanctions. There have to be inspectors general and JAGs and career prosecutors watching to make sure the government is being run on behalf of the people rather than on behalf of the Trump family.

Democrats would have to pick a small set of policies, policies that represent the larger set of problems, and stick to them. They'd have to choose those policies wisely. They would have to hold the line even when it got tough. And right now, Democrats have not picked those policies. They've not settled on that message. There's an ongoing debate inside the party

on whether they should talk about Trump's corruption and authoritarianism at all or instead just say that armed troops in D.C. are a distraction from the price of groceries and health care. And look, the reality is that Democrats' best issue is health care. Trump has looted Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for him and his friends, and Democrats should never let the voters forget it. But I don't think it's impossible to turn these two realities into one story.

John Ossif, the senator from Georgia, did a pretty good job of it back in July. And that corruption is why they just defunded nursing homes to cut taxes for the rich. Corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescriptions. So Trump promised to attack a broken system. I get it. Ripe target. But here's the thing, he's a crook. and a con man, and he wants to be a king.

Yes, the system really is rig, but Trump's not unrigging it. He's re-rigging it for himself. I think that argument works, but I am, to be clear, on the side of this debate that says Democrats cannot pretend this is a normal Republican administration and a normal political moment. They cannot ignore masked men in streets, armed troops in the cities, billions of of money going into the Trump family's pockets, an administration that spins off multiple scandals in a week

that would have consumed other presidencies for years. If Democrats cannot make an issue out of all that, then they're screwed, and so are we. And you know what? We might be. Even if Democrats could agree on a message, do they have the messengers? Have Akeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer distinguished themselves this year as able to win an argument?

Are they going to hold the line as national parks close down as federal employees are furloughed? If checks stop going out the door, if flights are delayed because air traffic controllers aren't getting paid, I don't know that they will. It is absolutely the case that Democrats could lose a shutdown. But whatever they're doing right now, it's not called winning. According to Gallup, the Democratic Party is polling at 34%. lower than Donald Trump, lower than the Republican Party. The lowest level in the decades the Gallup has been asking the question.

What's happening here is the Democrats are so unpopular because of their own side is losing faith in them. Before the election, 87% of Republicans approved of the Republican Party and 92% of Democrats approved of the Democratic Party. Since then, Republican approval of their own party has jumped to 91%. and democratic approval of their party has fallen to 73%. That matters. When you're thinking about the midterms, enthusiasm matters, trust matters. Democrats don't just need people to want them to win. They need people willing to help them win, come out to make them win.

And that's where things are getting tricky. One flashing warning sign is fundraising. Democrats are failing to raise money. The Democratic National Committee under Ken Martin has just been a decision. Astor. At the end of June, the DNC had $15 million on hand as compared to the RNC's $80 million, and it's just been consumed with infighting. And why would you approve of or donate to the Democratic Party right now? If you're frightened or appalled by what is happening, what are Democrats offering you? The political scientist Russell Hardin made an argument I've been thinking about a lot.

Power is a coordination problem. Donald Trump can't do much on his own. He's not going to go door to door. and enforce his agenda. The advantage he has is a power to create coordination. He can send clear signals. He's a lot of megaphone. He can wield stronger punishments and rewards. The secret of society is people do what others do. Each law firm that bent the need of Trump made it harder for the next firm to say no. The universities had failed to Trump created the same problem. That's why it mattered when Harvard fought back. Everyone in society, every person, every institution is a note of coordination. And so if you look at Democrats in Congress right now, the signal they're sending is to not take any risks.

Everything is normal. Just wait for the election and hope for the best. I think both that strategy, but also sending that signal is a mistake. The 26 midterms are 14 months away. The machinery of the state is being organized to entrench Republican power through redistricting, to control information, to punish and harass enemies, to create a masked paramilitary force roaming the streets and carrying out Trump's commands. Do you just let that roll forward and hope for the best?

I'm not going to tell you, I am sure Democrats should shut down the government. I'm not. But Democrats can't just fund a government that Trump is corrupting into a tool of authority. authoritarian takeover. They are supposed to be the opposition party. That would be complicity. I am not a political strategist. I hope somebody has better ideas than I do. But it's been about six months since Schumer decided that it wasn't the time for a fight. Then either he nor the country was ready. Democratic leaders have had six months to come up with a plan. If there's a better a plan than a shutdown, great. But if the plan is still nothing, act normal and hope for the

best, then Democrats need new leaders.