Shutdowns, Stunts, and Shootings

While Trump turns Portland, Quantico, and the budget into stage sets, real America reels from violence and a flotilla sails toward Gaza in silence.

Good morning! If you’re looking for signs of functional governance, you won’t find them in Washington today. What you’ll find instead is shutdown brinkmanship, military cosplay, lawsuits to stop federalized troops, mass shootings in churches, humanitarian flotillas sailing under NATO escort, immigrant truck drivers turned into villains, and Democrats trying, just barely, to remember what a spine looks like.

The government runs out of money at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, and Donald Trump is treating it less like a crisis than a game of chicken played with the entire federal workforce strapped to the hood. He’s invited Schumer, Jeffries, Thune, and Johnson to the White House for a Monday meeting, though nobody expects an actual deal to emerge. Republicans want a seven-week stopgap with no concessions, Democrats are insisting on billions in healthcare funding, and Trump wants the optics of looking like a dealmaker while his budget director, Russ Vought, quietly orders agencies to draft firing lists of career employees to purge during a shutdown. Not furloughs, permanent cuts. It’s hostage-taking with pink slips attached.

Democrats, for once, aren’t acting like deer in the headlights. Schumer learned his lesson after caving to Republicans in March and catching hell from his own base. Now he and Hakeem Jeffries are linking arms and declaring unity. This time the pitch is “anti-feckless Democrats”: we’re not rolling over again, we’re holding the line. Polling shows voters in swing states are more likely to blame Republicans, so Democrats are betting they can finally stop being the party of collapse-in-advance. Whether that lasts longer than one budget cycle is another matter, but at least for today they’re trying on a backbone for size.

The problem, of course, is that holding the line in one budget fight doesn’t erase decades of timidity. Imagine what might happen if Democrats actually ran more candidates like Saikat Chakrabarti, the activist-turned-strategist who helped launch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign and co-founded Justice Democrats. Now he’s looking to primary Nancy Pelosi in her own San Francisco district, a move that perfectly encapsulates his politics: unapologetically progressive, willing to challenge entrenched power directly, and unafraid of ruffling the party’s most gilded feathers.

Chakrabarti’s platform is the antithesis of consultant-class incrementalism. He champions a Green New Deal to confront climate collapse and inequality, Medicare for All, a living wage, and aggressive checks on corporate dominance. In short, he’s everything the Democratic establishment has spent years running away from, bold, combative, and clear about who the enemy is.

Candidates in that mold wouldn’t just defend ACA subsidies at the margins. They’d articulate a structural agenda that makes politics worth joining again, not just tolerating. Liberals like me might even find ourselves pulled back into the fold, not because Democrats finally mustered a temporary backbone, but because they offered a real vision for transformation.

Candidates in that mold wouldn’t just defend subsidies at the margins, they’d articulate a bold, structural agenda that gives liberals and leftists a reason to fight for something instead of merely against Trump. Progressives like me might even consider joining the party instead of just mocking it from the sidelines, if it stopped being a holding pen for half-measures and started looking like a vehicle for real transformation.

While the budget countdown ticks, Trump is busy trying to turn the rest of the country into his personal soundstage. Over the weekend, he ordered 200 members of the Oregon National Guard into federal service for 60 days to “protect ICE” in Portland. Governor Tina Kotek and Attorney General Dan Rayfield promptly sued him, calling the move unlawful and absurd. They pointed out the obvious: protests in Portland are small, peaceful, and not exactly the “rebellion” Trump invoked to justify seizing control of the Guard. The deployment isn’t about public safety, it’s about optics, another episode in the endless authoritarian docuseries Trump is filming across America.

The cynicism is about to peak at Quantico, where nearly 800 generals and admirals have been ordered to drop everything and fly in for what’s billed as a high-level conference but looks suspiciously like a mass photo shoot. Pete Hegseth, who once played soldier on Fox & Friends, will now get to play it in front of actual generals. He envisions himself as the star of the show, choreographing pushups, strutting like a field marshal, and basking in the sight of polished brass saluting on command. The footage will then be cut into glossy propaganda reels, think Palantir’s war-as-Hollywood ads, except this time the extras are the real top brass of the U.S. military. Trump’s last-minute decision to attend only raises the stakes, turning the whole thing into the military-cinematic complex. You can take the man out of the Fox studio, but you can’t take the studio out of the man.

And one has to wonder what the real point of these glossy reels is supposed to be. Hegseth isn’t hauling 800 generals into Quantico just for vanity shots; he’s stockpiling propaganda. These clips will be cut, polished, and deployed as part of a homegrown psy-ops campaign, not against foreign adversaries, but against the American electorate. Think campaign ads where the camera lingers on saluting brass as Hegseth struts in the foreground, cut together with Trump promising “strength” and “discipline.” It’s not about readiness, it’s about hypnosis, flooding the zone with imagery designed to blur the line between the U.S. military and Trump’s political machine. Palantir sold war as Hollywood fantasy; Hegseth is trying to sell himself as the director of America’s next season.

In Michigan, this weekend brought something that wasn’t scripted. A 40-year-old Iraq War veteran rammed his truck into a church in Grand Blanc Township during Sunday services, opened fire, and set the building ablaze. At least four people are dead, eight more wounded, and investigators are still piecing together motive. The church itself was reduced to rubble. But this massacre isn’t alone. In North Carolina, a shooter opened fire from a boat at a bar on the waterfront, killing three and wounding five, leaving stunned patrons scrambling for cover.

These concurrent tragedies demand attention precisely because they are the kind of violence that doesn’t lend itself to staged optics. While Trump organizes generals into tableaux, rolls out mass troop deployments in Oregon, and threatens pink-slip purges in a looming shutdown, real communities are reeling. They aren’t scenes for a campaign reel; they’re places where people live and die. The contrast couldn’t be sharper: one’s theater, the other’s trauma.

And beyond our borders, there’s a story you won’t see on CNN. The Global Sumud Flotilla, more than 50 ships from 44 countries, has been at sea for 29 days carrying aid to Gaza. They’re now about 300 nautical miles out, expecting to arrive within 24 hours. Previous flotillas were attacked or boarded by Israel well before reaching shore, but this time Spain, Italy, and Turkey have dispatched naval escorts. Activists on board say the mission is simple: create a humanitarian corridor for a starving population. They know they could be intercepted, but they’re sailing anyway. Compare that to Washington, where Trump is staging photo-ops with generals and threatening government employees with pink slips, and you see the moral void at the center of American politics.

Not that the void is limited to foreign policy. Back home, the Department of Transportation rolled out a new nativist scare tactic: declaring a “national emergency” over states issuing commercial driver’s licenses to non-citizens. The FMCSA claimed, without evidence, that immigrant truck drivers are causing a wave of fatal crashes, and vowed sweeping federal intervention. It was like writing a Fox News chyron in real time: immigrants behind the wheel, your family in danger, only Donald Trump can save you. The scapegoat changes daily, the script never does.

Release the damn Epstein files!

So that’s your Monday morning panorama: a president staging generals like extras in a war movie, ordering troops into Oregon to crush protests that barely exist, threatening to shut down the government while purging civil servants, and turning immigrant truck drivers into the latest boogeyman, all while volunteers in a flotilla risk interception to deliver food to starving Gazans, and parishioners in Michigan bury their dead. Democrats, finally, are standing their ground, though one suspects it has less to do with newfound principle than fear of their own base revolting. Still, if they keep it up, and if they actually start nominating candidates cut from the Chakrabarti cloth, they might become something more than the anti-feckless party. They might even become worth joining.