Above photo: President Donald Trump speaks to the press aboard Air Force One after a trip to Florida on Sunday, November 2, 2025. Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian.
First Trump and Musk take a chainsaw to their ranks, then the Democrats, in effect, lock out those who still have jobs. Approximately 100,000 government employees have lost their jobs since Trump took over. If that wasn’t bad enough, now the Democrats, trying to show that they really aren’t wimps, have shut down the government. Seven hundred and thirty thousand public sector employees are working without pay while another 670,000 have been furloughed. Working people of all shades, shapes, and sizes are suffering collateral damage.
Everett Kelley, the president of American Federation of Government Employees, has had enough. He is calling on the Democrats to fall on their swords and put AFGE’s members back to work:
“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight. It’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship.”
This is quite a change for a union that leans strongly towards the Democrats. Before the shutdown AFGE called on the Republicans to negotiate so that the subsidies for Obamacare could be reinstated to prevent drastic premium increases. The ACA prices are now out, and without the subsidies the increases are dramatic and for many too high to get coverage, yet Kelley is speaking out.
But wait, isn’t the union now spouting Trump’s talking point that places the blame on the Democrats for the shutdown? It’s the Republicans who started the fight calling for a clean continuing resolution, and negotiations later. Isn’t the real problem that Republicans chose not to renew the Obamacare premium subsidies in Trump’s One Big Bill? And does anyone believe that the Republicans will negotiate in good faith once the Democrats give up their shutdown leverage?
You can be sure that this union president would not have issued that statement unless he was receiving enormous pressure from the workers he represents. These workers don’t care who’s at fault. While there will be many other victims during this shutdown, it is furloughed workers and those not being paid now who have been personally paying the price for the shutdown since day one. Sticking with the Democrats’ line in the sand now rings hollow to these workers, especially to the thousands of lower-income janitors, food service workers, maintenance people, who are not getting paid.
Meanwhile, Democratic strategists are gambling that the bet will pay off – that Trump and the Republicans will cave before these workers forever abandon the Democrats. They seem certain that these workers, as well as the rest of the country, will eventually blame Trump and not the Democrats.
I’m skeptical. I don’t see any reason for Trump to give in. He’s getting exactly what he wants – a free hand to diminish or eliminate government programs that the Democrats have created over the past decades? Won’t he continue to find ways to keep the military, and ICE funded, thanks to his rich friends? How does the shutdown tame his autocratic moves? It doesn’t.
And it’s not at all clear that the shutdown is hurting the Republicans chances to retain the House of Representatives next year. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows 35 percent of voters approve of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job, while only 19 percent approve of the Democrats. The Republicans have actually improved their standing by a net 5 percent since a similar poll in July.
Very smart progressive analysts tell me that the Democrats are making the right move — that after Schumer caved last time around and took so much heat from his base, he had to show some backbone. Further, I’m told that this shutdown is the only practical way, apart from the slow-moving courts, the Democrats have to counter Trump’s authoritarian actions. I’m asked, “What would you have the Democrats do instead?”
Frankly, I don’t have an answer because of what the Democrats already did and didn’t do to get us into this mess. They did not stop Biden from running again, until he blew up spectacularly in the June 2024 debate. They anointed Kamela Harris as a candidate, without any democratic process, even though she was one of the least popular Democratic primary contenders in 2020. They’ve run away from working people for decades. Their options now are limited, and while they suffer from historically low approval ratings, I doubt the shutdown will help their cause.
I’ve received some criticism from readers that I’m way too hard on the Democrats while not tearing enough into the autocratic Trump. That’s true. The anti-Trump forces seem perfectly capable of making their “No Kings” case without me chiming in. But there are not enough voices slamming the Democrats in behalf of the working-class, and not enough who are willing to discuss building something new.
It should be obvious to all that Trump is no friend of working people. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act clearly rewarded the rich at the expense of everyone else. Billions of dollars less in health care aid funded billions of dollars more in tax cuts for the wealthy. And his attacks on public sector workers have been merciless. Plus, it’s not at all clear that his tariffs and the higher prices they bring will actually protect jobs.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, they are not filling the breach. They aren’t gaining ground among working people in general, and definitely not among government employees.
The fact that neither party now represents the interest of working people is precisely why we need to seriously consider starting a new party for and of working people. That’s why 57 percent of the voters of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin said they were in favor of a new political organization, independent of the two parties, that supported a progressive populist economic agenda.
It’s time to stop pretending that the Democratic Party can be reformed without a significant challenge from a new working-class political organization. At the very least, let’s get a discussion going about how to get that off the ground. Working people, the survey emphatically shows, would welcome it.
