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“We will win!” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chanted at a rally last month protesting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service infiltrating Treasury Department payments systems. If Democrats want to win, though, they’ll have to fight first, and they don’t seem totally ready for that.

Schumer says that his caucus will refuse to vote for a short-term funding bill that would prevent the government from shutting down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. (In the House, all but one Democrat—Jared Golden of Maine—voted against the funding patch, but Republicans were unexpectedly united and passed the bill.) But no one seems to completely believe that Democrats will keep up their unified opposition. Politico reports that Democrats may instead settle for a symbolic vote on a shorter-term bill that they know they’ll lose: A White House official told the publication, “They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it. They’re totally screwed.”

Democratic leaders have been insisting that the nation is facing a serious crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg demolition of the executive branch and rule of law. But they have also complained that they have few paths to stop Trump. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have?” Now Senate Democrats have leverage, and what they do with it will show whether they mean what they say.

This is a strange situation for Democrats: As the party that likes to keep government running, even entertaining the idea of a shutdown is novel. But they have reasons related to both policy and politics to take a hard line here. First, if they’re concerned with protecting government services that are essential for citizens, they need to find some way to slow Trump down, because he’s using his power to slash them already. If the government shuts down, some services will be briefly cut. If Democrats keep the government open, some services will be cut—perhaps permanently. The deadline gives them a chance to demand that the White House agree to limitations on DOGE or other Trump cuts in exchange for funding the government. (Complicating the calculus, the White House recently deleted guidance from its website on how a shutdown would work.)

Even if Congress passes the GOP’s short-term funding patch, there’s no guarantee that the administration will comply. Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have argued that the president should be able to impound funds—in other words, to treat congressional appropriations as a ceiling rather than a requirement, and thus be able to cut funding for whatever they don’t like. (This is plainly illegal, but Vought and others believe that the law that bans it is unconstitutional, and they hope to challenge it in the courts.) This means that simply continuing to fund the government doesn’t guarantee that key programs will stay running, and that extracting concessions from the White House now is crucial.

Cautious Democrats worry that the party will be blamed if the government closes. But blamed by whom? Republicans have taken the political hit for previous shutdowns, because the GOP has openly clamored for them. Maybe Democrats would take the hit if they refused to help Republicans, and maybe they wouldn’t; voters surely understand that Democrats are the party of government. But in standing up to Trump’s GOP, they’d be taking the side of most of the public. One new CNN poll found that 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest mark of his career; another found that 55 percent believe that the cuts to federal programs, which Democrats want to stop, will hurt the economy.

Regardless of how independents and Republicans would react, the consequences of not putting up a fight now would be catastrophic for Democratic-voter morale. During Trump’s first two months in office, party leaders have seemed flat-footed and meek, subscribing to what I’ve called a “No We Can’t” strategy. Polling shows that approval of the party and its leaders among Democrats is awful, and the idea of a liberal Tea Party—furious about the Trump administration but nearly as disgusted with Democratic leaders—suddenly seems plausible.

Few Democrats envy the chaos and disorder of the post-2010 Republican Party, but they’ve also seen GOP leaders take risks while their own party avoids them. That’s gotten Republicans control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, while Democrats have little to show for their gingerly approach. If Democratic leaders abdicate the chance to take charge now, many in the voting rank and file may not give them another chance.

The biggest risk for Democrats is that they’ll try to take a hostage by shutting down the government and discover that they are the hostage: Trump continues to do whatever he wants, and they end up folding in a few days, having obtained no concessions. That’s how most shutdowns end. As a matter of policy, however, this wouldn’t change anything. As a matter of politics, Democrats would at least get caught trying.

And if Democrats do take a hit with voters as a whole, so what? If they keep their political standing but lose all of the substantive battles, they won’t have much use for that standing. The longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, last seen misjudging the 2024 election, now says his party should just get out of Trump’s way. “It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he wrote in The New York Times last month. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”

Carville might be right that this would be an effective electoral strategy; Trump seems determined to make unpopular cuts and tie himself ever closer to the ever-more-unpopular Elon Musk, and the more voters see of Trump, the less they tend to like him. But playing dead makes sense only if one’s opponent is making garden-variety bad policy moves. This is different: Democratic leaders have said that the nation faces a historic crisis prompted by unprecedented and unconstitutional actions from the president. Did they really mean it?

Related:

The conversation Democrats need to have The Democrats’ “No We Can’t” strategy

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Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain. Tesla needs a better story. Musk’s Madisonian insight—and its troubling consequences Radio Atlantic: Gaza is struggling to keep clean water flowing.

Today’s News

A federal judge ordered six federal agencies to reinstate the probationary employees they fired last month. He criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the mass layoffs, calling it a “sham.” The White House withdrew Dave Weldon’s nomination to be the director of the CDC. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to limit the scope of lower-court orders that largely blocked Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. If the Supreme Court rules in the administration’s favor, some restrictions on birthright citizenship could take effect.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Throughout The Atlantic’s history, writers have interrogated their marriages (and divorces), Serena Dai writes: “By putting themselves in control of what others hear, they try to make meaning of the life they’ve chosen.”

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Kryssia Campos / Getty; Mimi Haddon / Getty; Tooga / Getty.

Academia Needs to Stick Up for Itself

By Nicholas B. Dirks

The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

Read the full article.

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US President Donald Trump has welcomed NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to Washington amid concerns over his pivot towards Russia. The pair discussed Greenland, with Trump again advocating US annexation for security reasons.

President Trump's diplomatic drive puts pressure on Kyiv and Moscow.

It’s been a bad month for the stock market. But it’s been a terrible month—in fact, a terrible year—for Tesla. Even after rebounding since Monday, perhaps with some help from Donald Trump’s South Lawn salesmanship, Tesla’s stock price is down almost 40 percent since January 1.

Some of that drop is down to concrete issues with Tesla’s core car business: Sales last year fell for the first time in more than a decade, and Wall Street analysts are now estimating that they will have fallen again in the most recent quarter. Tesla is facing fierce price competition in China, where its year-over-year sales fell by 49 percent in February, and steeply declining sales in Western Europe. Although the company has promised that it will be rolling out new, more affordable models later this year, details have been sparse at best.

The most important driver of Tesla’s share slump, however, can be summed up in two words: Elon Musk. Tesla has always been a “story stock,” which is to say the sort of investment whose price depends less on a company’s economic fundamentals and more on a story of what its future will be. Tesla’s problem right now is that the hero, and narrator, of its story has gone AWOL.

Investor expectations of what Tesla is going to achieve have certainly changed over time. In the past, investors were focused on Tesla’s potential to corner the global electric-vehicle market. Today, that ambition has receded, as competition—particularly from China—has intensified. Instead, investors now envision the company dominating the future market for self-driving cars and AI robotics. But the throughline of the Tesla story has always remained the same: the idea of Musk’s genius and ability to guide the company into the future. “It is almost impossible to separate Tesla, the company, from Musk,” the finance professor Aswath Damodaran has written previously. “What you believe about one will drive what you believe about the other.” And it’s because investors have bought into Musk’s over-the-top visions of Tesla’s future that, even now, the company’s shares trade at an outrageous price-to-earnings ratio, and its market cap is greater than that of the next nine biggest car companies combined.

The problem for Tesla at the moment is that investors’ faith in Musk has been shaken. His political activities—not only his work for the Trump administration but also his public support of the far-right AfD party in Germany—have led to a backlash against Tesla that certainly seems to have depressed sales in the United States and Europe. His mercurial social-media habits and goofy displays such as waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference are not reassuring to major investors. The reverse: A new Morgan Stanley investor survey found that 85 percent of respondents think that Musk’s political involvement is having “a negative or extremely negative impact on Tesla’s business fundamentals.”

Aside from all the noise, the simple reality is that Tesla now seems to be far down on the list of Musk’s priorities, behind DOGE, SpaceX, his new AI venture, and X. Musk is running a government agency, serving as the CEO of three companies, funding political campaigns, threatening politicians with potential primaries, and posting nonstop on social media. In the most literal sense, he just isn’t showing that much interest in building cars any more. Since the beginning of the year, he has offered no real vision of how Tesla will deal with challenges such as the global rise of highly competitive EV manufacturers such as China’s BYD. In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, he conceded that he was having “great difficulty” running all of his enterprises; about the best he could offer investors was a quote from a Monty Python movie: “Always look on the bright side of life.” Musk’s seeming indifference to the car business has become so noticeable that in a note to investors this week, the Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives—arguably the biggest Tesla bull on Wall Street—criticized him for “showing no attention to Tesla during this turbulent time.”

The appearance at the White House with Trump on Tuesday for what was effectively a car commercial seemed like an implicit recognition by Musk that he needs to change his ways (or at least pretend to do so). As Trump posed in a Tesla Model S that he said he was buying, Musk promised that the company would double its U.S. production over the next two years. Neither man has a great record of keeping promises, but the event was a sign that Musk was doing something to stop the bleeding. Some investors, at least, liked the story: By market close yesterday, Tesla’s stock was up more than 10 percent from its Monday low.

Whether that will be enough to make up for the losses of the past four months is another question. Tesla investors are used to volatility; since 2018, the company’s stock price has fallen 40 percent or more on eight different occasions. And story stocks can bounce back quickly if they can recapture investors’ attention and belief. But that will require Musk to demonstrate more conviction and interest in the way he talks about, and runs, Tesla. Right now, he looks like a storyteller who’s lost the plot.

Warning comes after EU announced retaliatory tariffs on $28bn of US goods in response to US levies on steel, aluminium.

Trump officials say Weldon - an ally of RFK Jr - did not have the Senate votes necessary to be confirmed.

Eric Trump is a senior executive in his father's business - the Trump Organisation - which owns golf resorts in Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire.

As President Donald Trump proceeds with his seemingly endless attacks on laws and democratic norms, the question for many has become: What will turn the tide? They may imagine that conditions are ripe for a major scandal—some transgression, previously hidden but then revealed, that is so outrageous, so beyond the pale, that it will rally even those across the political divide.

In the past, that is the work that scandal often did. Exposure of serious official misconduct, the lifeblood of scandals, would create openings for reform. As bad as these scandals were—and the underlying story was usually bad, sometimes very bad—scandals contained within them the germ of change. But today, old-fashioned scandals are harder and harder to come by.

Watergate is in many ways the textbook example of a scandal and its reforming potential. It had it all: covert and illegal actions by a president in contravention of laws and norms, the revelation of the scandalous activities, and, eventually, bipartisan agreement on corrective action and reform. Those reforms included extensive new regulation of money and politics, protection against the abuse of surveillance power to spy on American citizens, and authority for independent investigations of possible executive-branch criminal misconduct.

[Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump]

This cycle of scandal and bipartisan reform is hardly imaginable today. In the Trump administration, what might have been deemed scandalous at another time, in another presidency, is instead a governing program. The components of the program—“radical constitutional” claims about presidential power, White House direction of investigations against political opponents, the abandonment of constraints on profiting from the office—are openly avowed and openly pursued. What was hidden until exposed in the Richard Nixon years is proclaimed in these Trump years as a show of presidential resolve and as the vindication of an electoral mandate. Nixon had resigned and left his office before he told an interviewer that, by definition, no presidential action can violate the law. Trump expressed the same view—that no president can violate the law if he is striving to save the country—in the first weeks of his second term. He is redefining the presidency, resetting expectations of his office.

The death of scandal is a blow to the mechanisms for defending a democracy. More than periodically useful in uncovering corruption, scandal is an essential feature of liberal democracy. It is certainly, the sociologist John Thompson writes, “more common [in such systems] than in authoritarian regimes or in one-party states.” This is because, in democracies, scandal is possible only because there is intense electoral competition, a free press, and protections from reprisal for news organizations, the political opposition, and others that allege and often expose corruption in the government in power. But when democratic norms fray or collapse, scandal collapses with them. In this way, the collapse of scandal is both cause and effect of democratic decline: It makes reform less possible, and it indicates erosion of the conditions that made such revelations possible in the first place.

Trump is directly attacking those conditions. He is maintaining and in some instances escalating lawsuits against news organizations. He has fired inspectors general who serve as “watchdogs” in 17 executive-branch agencies. Trump has fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, whose responsibilities include enforcement of the whistleblower statutes, and replaced him with a former Republican member of Congress who is also the secretary of Veterans Affairs—effectively making it a part-time position. He is exploiting the fractured and polarized media environment to create alternative realities, rendering it very difficult for any sort of unified narrative of scandal to emerge and take hold. A sterling example is his redefinition of the January 6 assault on the Capitol as “a day of love,” complete with pardons for most of those convicted for their involvement.

The corrective power of scandal was already weakened during the first Trump term. In those years, Trump did not hide his pursuit of profit while in office, and he made efforts to control the Department of Justice for his own personal and political purposes—though nothing like what we are seeing today. These and other actions of the time ignited major controversies and led to two impeachments, but none entailed revelations of actions he was denying. He proclaimed “perfect” the call to the president of Ukraine at issue in the first impeachment, and in the second, his rally and video communications related to the attack on the Capital could not have been more public. After Trump left office, reforms to constrain his version of the presidency were proposed in abundance but went nowhere.

Even where scandal does not yield statutory reform, it can serve to reinvigorate weakened norms. An example that may now seem quaint is the furor over the George W. Bush administration’s midterm firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The firing was public; the motive was the stuff of scandal: It emerged that the White House had been deeply involved in the dismissals, acting on concerns that these law-enforcement officials were insufficiently committed to rooting out alleged Democratic Party voting “fraud.” The attorney general denied any questionable motivation and agreed that “it would be improper to remove a U.S. attorney to interfere with or influence a particular prosecution for partisan political gain.”

But the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility jointly took up the matter and concluded, “The Department’s removal of the U.S. Attorneys and the controversy it created severely damaged the credibility of the Department and raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecutive decisions.” The Office of the Inspector General further judged that there was “significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor” in the dismissals. It affirmed that department officials had a “responsibility to ensure that prosecutorial decisions would be based on the law, the evidence, and Department policy, rather than political pressure.” In part because of this scandal, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned.

This was not all. A special counsel was appointed to consider whether the firings involved any violations of criminal law. She concluded that no violations had occurred but that the law did prohibit some forms of political interference in law enforcement. And she roundly affirmed department “principles” against “undue sensitivity to politics.” The Obama administration advised Congress of these findings and put a strong emphasis on the point: Its attorney general was committed to “ensuring that partisan political considerations play no role in law enforcement decisions of the Department.”

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

There is little reason to imagine that we would see a “scandal” concerned with “undue sensitivity to politics” in this presidency. The norms at the center of the U.S.-attorney scandal are not honored even in the breach, because the breach has been transformed into policy. As the legal scholar (and my collaborator on the Substack newsletter Executive Functions) Jack Goldsmith has noted, the Trump White House’s proclaimed policy of avoiding “‘the appearance of improper political influence’ in law enforcement is doublespeak for the reality of heavy political influence in law enforcement, just as the Justice Department’s ‘Weaponization Working Group,’ which builds on Trump’s ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ executive order, is in reality a playbook to weaponize DOJ law enforcement like never before.” Officials appointed to high positions, including the U.S. attorney in D.C. and both the FBI’s director and its recently named deputy director, have appeared eager to investigate those who were involved in investigations of Donald Trump.

In this environment, there seems to be one potential opening for scandal on the old model: the role of Elon Musk. Some of the elements of scandal are present in this case of a businessman, situated both inside and outside the government, who has been provided with apparently massive but undefined authority. It’s never quite clear when Musk speaks for himself, for his businesses, or for the government. The administration has given varying accounts of his role in the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk himself has made the extraordinary claim that voters are at least an indirect source of his authority. Last month, he reposted on X: “Dems keep saying ‘No one elected Elon Musk.’ Yes we did. Elon was very visible with Trump and we elected Trump to utilize Elon.” Polls show that even among Republicans, Musk is a controversial figure. It is not impossible to imagine a reform at some point designed to impose limits, or at least greater accountability and transparency, on a president’s use of a private citizen to assume major government functions.

Perhaps the picture for reform even without the propulsive force of scandal will brighten if the administration fails to deliver on issues that bread-and-butter voters care most deeply about and they become less tolerant of “long live the king” presidential leadership. Monarchical ambition can founder on the price of eggs and bacon. It can also eventually run aground in conflict with a defining element of American political culture: distrust of government, a belief that it is, as the historian Garry Wills has written, a “necessary evil, one we must put up with while resenting the necessity.” Trump’s aggressive claim that the president is the law is altogether new, and coming fast at the electorate. Perhaps in this limited time, the voters are waiting and seeing. Trump and his allies may not appreciate that they are testing, and may not prevail over, America’s anti-government tradition. After all, they are the government now.

European alcohol stocks are sinking after President Donald Trump threatened to retaliate against a new tariff on American alcohol with his own massive duties.

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Mark Carney made the comments after Canada this week announced retaliatory tariffs worth 29.8 billion Canadian dollars (€19.1bn) on US imports.