The Government Shutdown Is Based on a 16-Year-Old Lie

Late Monday, with the deadline for a government shutdown just two days off, congressional leaders met with President Donald Trump to try to reach some workable consensus to move ahead on a continuing resolution to fund the government. The sticking point remained Democrats’ insistence on restoring critical tax credits under the Affordable Care Act—a pending loss of benefits created under the provisions of the GOP’s massive tax-and-spending bill. In pushing to extend these benefits, Democrats weren’t just looking to protect the pocketbooks of working Americans already contending with spiraling costs^[3]; they were trying to make the case that extending the benefits also promoted the interests of Republicans claiming a robust working-class base. Senate majority leader Charles Schumer announced after the meeting that the president “seemed to understand for the first time the magnitude of this crisis.”

If so, he sure had a funny way of showing it. Later that evening, Trump posted an AI video meant to show Schumer and his House counterpart, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, giving a press conference. In it, Schumer is synced to a fake voice saying that his party has “no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bullshit” and is now desperately hoping that “if we give all these illegal aliens healthcare, we might be able to get them on our side and vote for us”—until, that is, they learn to speak English and come to realize that Democrats are just “woke pieces of shit.” Driving the point home in a racist flourish, the video shows Jeffries sporting a giant sombrero and a false mustache as mariachi music plays in the background. (In the euphemistic prose stylings of the Trump-appeasing Washington Post^[4], the stupid and hateful outburst of bigotry becomes this: “a fake video…with Schumer saying things about benefits for immigrants that he hadn’t actually said and Jeffries wearing a sombrero he hadn’t been wearing.”)

Thus is the American government grinding to a halt on the strength of nothing more than MAGA-branded trolling. The video Trump posted was vulgar and childish, but it was completely in line with the talking points of Republican lawmakers refusing to consider Democratic demands. Undocumented workers aren’t qualified to receive ACA or Medicaid benefits, any more than they can receive subventions from Social Security or Medicare—another pet fabrication of the MAGA right. But no matter: The bogus claim that the ACA extensions were giveaways to undocumented immigrants caromed through the MAGAsphere all during the week leading up to Trump’s meeting; Utah Senator Mike Lee^[5], Vice President JD Vance^[6], and House Speaker Mike Johnson^[7] have taken up the baseless charge with gusto, since they all know full well that the Medicaid and ACA cuts in their party’s spending bill will be fueling a brutal spike in insurance costs. And as Trump’s video post shows, the president seconds all this demagoguery—just with more explicit racism.

As with most features of the Trump agenda, this is nothing new on the American right. Indeed, the phony benefits claim fueled Tea Party animus against the original passage of the ACA—along with kindred pieces of urban legend like “government death panels.” The political proof of concept behind this particular big lie came when GOP Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina^[8] stood up and shouted, “You lie!” (oh, the irony!) during former President Barack Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, as Obama was explaining that the benefits in his proposed healthcare reform package would “not apply to those who are in the country illegally.” As Beltway pundits chided Wilson for his breach of decorum and prophesied his political death, he cruised to reelection on a massive fundraising haul, and has gone right on bilking credulous right-wingers for outrage cash through the present day; if you’re looking for the spiritual godfather of the Trumpist gospel of trolling through anti-governance (and vice versa), Wilson has to be a top-tier candidate.

It’s fitting, then, that his lie about the ACA, which is now old enough to have a learner’s permit, is the Trumpified GOP’s only threadbare rationale for allowing a shutdown to proceed. In reality, a time-limited extension of health coverage under the ACA would be a boon to Republicans in centrist-leaning districts^[9], who will already be hard-pressed to defend the Trump-Vought war on basic services, income supports, and entire government departments, alongside the MAGA right’s devolution into overt fascism^[10]. But again, these are political calculations that rarely detain the dedicated ideological troller—any more than the consideration that putting the vast nonessential majority of the nearly 3 million-member federal workforce, 80 percent of which is located outside metropolitan Washington^[11], on indefinite furlough will wreak considerable havoc on an already shaky US labor market^[12], with just-released September jobs number showing more losses^[13]. (MAGA-ratchiks are no doubt relieved to be learning that the Labor Department has announced that a shutdown will delay the release of jobs data^[14].)

MAGA dogmatism on the phony immigrant stampede to claim health benefits is more than an overheated reverie of the right’s collective lizard brain (though it is certainly also that); it’s a way of signaling that all government business is a trick foisted on a long-traduced-and-abandoned Real America. The tacit promise in all MAGA propaganda is that Trump is reversing the polarity of the trick, so as to restore Real Americans to their pride of place. That’s been the through line in the White House’s cross-agency blitz of social media posts about how mass deportations and ICE raids are shoring up a white American Heimat^[15]. It’s the reason the Labor Department sported a giant Mussolini-style banner of Trump’s face as a workers’ protector on Labor Day (while on its own social media feeds, it had to make do with AI-generated images of American workers^[16]). It’s also why the Department of Housing and Urban Development—now under fire for its failure to uphold basic antidiscrimination protections^[17] under the Federal Housing Act—posted a notice on its website^[18] the day before the shutdown began blaming “the Radical Left” who “are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.” Lest this somehow come across as overly subtle, Trump also instructed all federal agencies to issue agitprop mass e-mails^[19] blaming the shutdown on Democratic extremism.

Depending on how long and punishing the shutdown proves to be, it could signal a moment when the authors of MAGA propaganda have become much too high on their own supply. The conventional Beltway wisdom has always been that the party instigating a government shutdown is the one that pays the price come the next election cycle. But that wasn’t the case over the 2018–19 shutdown, which at 35 days was the nation’s longest—the Republican losses in 2020 were not even notionally attributable to Trump’s tantrum over funding the border wall, which was then the GOP’s shutdown casus belli. (That now all-but-forgotten episode also gives the extravagant lie to the Republicans’ heavy-breathing claims that Democrats are holding the government hostage over their demands—health coverage is at least a real thing, as opposed to a 450-mile long monument to a real-estate nepo baby’s vanity that’s mostly produced environmental damage^[20].)

A Morning Consult poll released over the weekend found that 45 percent of respondents said Republicans would be blamed for a shutdown, with just 32 percent holding Democrats responsible. That 13 percent margin actually increases to 17 percent among independent voters. Remarkably, Republican voters were more likely to blame their party for a shutdown^[21] than Democrats were. Meanwhile, the Kaiser Foundation, in a survey conducted over the summer, found that 77 percent of voters want the ACA credits to continue, compared to just 22 percent saying they should be phased out. Democratic leadership remains, as always, worryingly irresolute and feckless, but these political trend lines appear to be giving them at least a plausible simulacrum of a backbone^[22]. After all, without a credulous public or a cringing opponent to badger, most trolls just wind up sulking beneath a bridge.

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