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Stocks rose premarket — after entering a correction yesterday — as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer opted not to block an emergency funding bill last night. That made it likely that the U.S. government won’t shut down this Saturday, easing some of the uncertainty faced by investors.

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Is This a Crisis or Not?

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 03 › is-this-a-crisis-or-not › 682034

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“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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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.

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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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Elissa Slotkin Didn’t Want Your Speech Advice

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 03 › elissa-slotkin-democratic-resistance › 681933

Right around the time that Donald Trump was arriving at the U.S. Capitol to address a joint session of Congress—the longest such speech, it would turn out, in the history of the presidency—Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Michigan senator tasked with delivering the Democratic Party’s rebuttal, was telling me all the things she wouldn’t be talking about.

“You’ve gotta say this! You’ve gotta say that!” Slotkin said, mimicking the outside voices that began bombarding her office moments after her selection was announced last week. “I’m not gonna make my speech a Christmas tree of every single issue of the Democratic Party,” the senator added, shaking her head, “because that’s what helped get us in this position in the first place.”

I have known Slotkin since 2018, when she first ran for Congress as an ex-CIA officer attempting to flip a safe Republican seat in southeast Michigan. Having covered her rise in the years since—including embedding with her operation during the 2020 campaign—I knew she possessed fundamental, long-festering concerns about the Democratic Party’s brand. Slotkin feared that, to the extent that Democrats stood for anything in the eyes of the electorate, it was a blur of abstract, ideologically charged activism that was hopelessly detached from kitchen-table concerns.  

Last November, even as she won her own race for Michigan’s open Senate seat, Slotkin’s worst-case scenario came to pass. Trump reclaimed the White House—this time with wholly subservient Republican majorities in Congress—and Democrats were heading deep into a cold, dark political wilderness. A fight over the future of the party was imminent; when Slotkin, barely six weeks on the job, was chosen to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s prime-time address, it seemed likely that the first shots would soon be fired. This is how I came to be chatting with Slotkin yesterday, in the hours before the biggest moment of her political career.

A week earlier, when she was summoned to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, Slotkin wondered whether she was in trouble. She is one of several freshmen in the Democratic caucus who came over from the House, where intra-party politics are a comparative blood sport, and she thought maybe she’d already ruffled some feathers. If she had, Schumer approved: He wanted Slotkin to speak for the party in prime time. She recalls feeling stunned, then honored, and finally somewhat mortified. “It’s typically thought of,” she told me, “as a cursed speech.” Slotkin asked for the day to think it over before ultimately accepting Schumer’s offer.

Escaping quickly thereafter to her family’s farm in Holly, Michigan, the senator holed up with a few trusted staffers to begin preparations. Two decisions needed to be made: substance and setting. Slotkin had no shortage of metaphor-rich locations from which she could stage the event: her farm, representing everyman roots; nearby Detroit, with its diversity and manufacturing iconography; the Canadian border, to underscore the chaos being unleashed by Trump’s new tariffs. But the senator never truly entertained any of these possibilities. To her, the questions of substance and setting were one and the same. Slotkin wanted to showcase a message that was built to do one thing—win tough elections—and that meant going to a place where she’d done just that.

Driving the main drag of Wyandotte, Michigan (population: 24,057), yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice the bait shops and dive bars and white dudes with tattoos on their necks. This place would appear, to the typical Democratic consultant parachuting into its downtown, like a lost cause. One of several manufacturing villages clustered along the Detroit River just south of the city, Wyandotte is the kind of place—working class, culturally conservative, racially homogenous—that has turned new shades of red in the Trump era. And yet, this past November, both Trump and Slotkin won here: Each of the candidates carried seven of the city’s 10 precincts, a rare example of ticket splitting in one of the nation’s premier battleground states.

Slotkin’s formula has never been a secret. Her campaign for Senate last year—essentially a scaled-up version of her three heavily contested and tactically celebrated campaigns for the House—was built around one organizing theme: the middle class. Everything she talks about, be it health-care costs or the January 6 insurrection, comes back to the economic security of everyday Americans. Slotkin argues that the surest way to heal the country—to defuse identitarian struggles, pacify the culture wars, uncoil our hypertense politics—is by restoring the confidence of working families. When people feel assured of their financial welfare and of their children’s future, she insists, they become far less receptive to the type of strongman demagoguery that thrives on scapegoats and feasts on anxiety.

[Anne Applebaum: The Democrats’ patriotic vanguard]

This approach sets Slotkin apart from many of her fellow Democrats, though the difference is better measured by degree than kind. She is quite familiar—as a woman, as a Jew, as the daughter of a woman who came out late in life as a lesbian—with the plight of certain constituencies within her party’s coalition. It’s simply a matter of emphasis: Slotkin sees electoral success as the path to addressing America’s injustices, not the other way around.

This is what brought her to a sleepy event space in Wyandotte (the owners, fearing political retaliation, requested that I not reveal the name of the business). It’s also what brought Slotkin to reject all of the suggestions she received about her speech: that she should use it to take up the cause of USAID workers, of undocumented immigrants, of the transgender community, of the environment, of the Education Department, and so on. The problem isn’t with any of these particular causes, she said; the problem is that everyone seemed focused more on the people she might name in her remarks and less on the people who would be at home listening to them.

“There are a lot of people, including in this town, who will never scream on the internet, who will never go to a rally, who will never get involved in partisan politics, but just want their government to run,” Slotkin said. “I’m speaking to them—not to just the hardcore base of the party. And if they wanted someone to speak to the hardcore base of the party, they picked the wrong gal.”

There would be no performative shout-outs, no box-checking patronage. As the envoy for a party that has long operated as a syndicate of identity-based advocacy groups, Slotkin wanted to try something different. Charged with countering 100 minutes of Trump’s trademark fanfaronade, the senator aimed to use the fewest words possible to speak to the largest number of Americans she could. Slotkin would talk, for just 10 minutes, about bringing prices down, holding American values up, and remaining civically engaged.

[David A. Graham: The Democrats’ disjointed rebellion]

None of this would seem a revolutionary approach to rhetoric. Still, it was fraught with risk all the same: Democrats “have been on their heels since the election,” Slotkin told me, and the party faithful have been agitating since January 20 for someone, anyone, to stand up to Trump. The announcement of Slotkin had already been met with grumbling from progressives online; anything short of oratorical firebolts would confirm the complacent, feckless approach of the D.C. governing class.

Slotkin viewed the stakes somewhat differently: This speech could, at least symbolically, commence a new chapter of Democratic Party opposition to a president whose success is inextricable from the tone-deaf ineptitude of Democratic Party opposition. If her team’s resistance to Trump’s first term was marked by hysteria and hashtags—all the land acknowledgments and pronoun policing and intersectionality initiatives—Slotkin saw on Tuesday night the opportunity to set a different tone.

Naturally, not everyone was thrilled with what they heard. “Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, capturing some of the criticism online. “Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party, because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.”

[Tom Nichols: Democrats are acting too normal]

I suspect that Slotkin might cringe at being lumped in with “Democrats in general.” In truth, I’ve noticed a certain unease she feels with her partisan identity. She struggles to mask her contempt for far-left organizations; she has little patience for colleagues who, she once told me, run Very Online campaigns in safely blue districts that blind them to the reality of what it takes to earn a ticket split from Republicans.

Watching Tuesday evening as she rehearsed in front of staffers, I noticed that only once did she identify herself as a Democrat—in the final line of the speech. As we spoke a few minutes later, in a cramped corridor just beyond the set, I asked whether that was intentional.  

“I think, at least in this part of the world, there’s real skepticism about Democrats. That they’re weak—” she paused, perhaps noticing her usage of the third-person plural.

Slotkin continued: “That we’re too careful … That we’re …” She trailed off.

“Weird?” I asked.

Weird,” she confirmed. Slotkin rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m just trying to be the opposite of that. You know, my campaign motto was ‘Team Normal.’ And I think that’s still what I’m trying to do. And I think that that represents a bigger part of the country than people actually know.”

The president’s speech would not begin for nearly an hour, but already I could detect a certain angst in Slotkin’s voice. It had nothing to do with her own speech; she had run through it half a dozen times that day, pausing and tinkering and restarting until she knew it was fully cooked. Instead, like a family member preemptively contrite for what their relatives might say or do at the Thanksgiving table, Slotkin betrayed an apprehension about how her fellow Democrats might respond to Trump.

As it turned out, she was right to worry. Between all the awkward and impotent demonstrations—Representative Al Green of Texas angrily waving his cane at the president; some pink-clad lawmakers protesting silently with popsicle-stick signs; others staging a disordered walkout during the speech—verdicts were rendered about the party’s pitiable state before its messenger could even say her piece.

Not that Slotkin paid that verdict much mind. After her speech, the senator and her team were headed down the street to a Teamster bar, and Slotkin told me the highest praise they hoped to hear from the owner and his patrons was: “That sounded pretty normal.”

Perceptions of her party were never going to shift in one night. Slotkin came into Tuesday accepting, if not explicitly addressing, the realities of the brutal two-front war in which she is now a high-profile combatant: opposing Trump’s executive and legislative blitzkrieg while simultaneously battling with other Democrats who have their own visions for returning the party to power.

Slotkin insists that she isn’t “one of the 100 people” preparing to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2028. She was chosen to speak Tuesday night for a more compelling reason: She wins, time after time, in places where other members of her party simply cannot. If they want to model her success at the ballot box, Slotkin told me, they should stop ignoring half the country.

“It doesn’t win elections to just speak to the base of the party,” Slotkin said. “If it did, Kamala Harris would be president.”

The Democrats’ ‘No We Can’t’ Strategy

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 03 › the-democrats-disjointed-rebellion › 681932

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

For a few years, Democrats were so regimented that one could almost forget Will Rogers’s well-worn quip that he was not a member of any organized political party but rather a Democrat. After Hillary Clinton’s ignominious loss in 2016, the congressional team of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer quickly took charge. They were mostly able to keep a fractious coalition together through Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term. Democrats won the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020. At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, despite noisy complaints about the inconstancy of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the party managed to enact a huge legislative agenda.

That seems a long time ago now. The party was able to force Biden out of the 2024 race, but much too late. After Trump’s win, Democrats did a great deal of hand-wringing about what went wrong, but they don’t seem to have learned much. Their inability to find their footing was on painful display during last night’s non–State of the Union address. Not only could Democrats not figure out an effective response to Trump’s speech; they couldn’t even settle on one or two ineffective responses.

First-term Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan got the unenviable duty of giving the official Democratic Party response, and delivered a workmanlike, solid speech that, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote, nonetheless “failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics” and thus felt a little irrelevant.

Ahead of Trump’s speech, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned his caucus not to become the story. It didn’t work. This morning, the bible of Washington conventional wisdom, Politico Playbook, declared that “the reaction in the chamber was the story.”

A few Democrats decided to skip the speech altogether, but not enough for the boycott to be apparent in footage or images from the House chamber. Dozens of women in Congress wore pink as some sort of protest, but the message was so vague as to be illegible as anything other than generic protest. Other members brandished little signs—I saw them variously mocked as church fans, auction paddles, or table-tennis paddles—with text including “FALSE,” “MUSK STEALS,” and “SAVE MEDICAID.” (They at least opted against brandishing egg cartons as a comment on inflation.) A group of Democrats invited laid-off federal workers to join them, but without the microphone, they didn’t have much way to draw attention to their guests. Representative Jasmine Crockett posted a lip-synch to “Not Like Us,” for some reason. The scene-stealer was Representative Al Green, a veteran showman who got himself ejected for heckling Trump a few minutes in.

None of this matters a great deal in the specifics. The State of the Union (and its off-year sibling) don’t tend to have much lasting political or policy import. But the image of Democrats sitting glumly in the chamber—a mostly passive audience for Trump, neither supporting him nor meaningfully resisting him—felt like a metaphor for their broader messaging struggle. If Green’s act, complete with a cane waved at the president, was a bit buffoonish, at least he looked like he cared.

My social-media feeds were flooded last night, as they have been over the past few weeks, with progressives wincing, groaning, and gnashing their teeth about Democratic fecklessness. This is not merely an online phenomenon, as MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem recently reported. Only one in five voters approves of the party’s leadership, and they’re underwater even among Democrats (40 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove).

Part of the problem may be that Democrats respond to each new crisis slowly. Jeffries seems to be eyeing the coming budget battle as his moment to flex power. Republicans are unlikely to be able to pass a bill that satisfies both far-right lawmakers and vulnerable moderates, which means they will need House Democrats’ help to pass a bill. As a matter of tactics, Jeffries may be right, but it’s a very old-school, procedural approach to a moment that Democrats are simultaneously trying to convince voters is chaotic and unprecedented.

During his speech last night, Trump claimed a historic electoral mandate, despite one of the narrowest wins in recent memory. Democratic leaders speak like they have accepted that as true. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.”

Even insofar as Jeffries is technically right, Democrats’ best leverage is in motivating the roughly half of the country that voted against Trump. “No We Can’t” is a bad way to do that. That’s one reason that, as I wrote last week, the odds of a progressive equivalent to the Tea Party—a large grassroots movement that furiously opposes Republicans but also has little use for the Democratic establishment—are higher than ever.

If anything good comes from last night’s speech, perhaps it will be the hastening of the end of the State of the Union, a bloated, obsolete ritual. The president is required under the Constitution to report to Congress annually, but that has taken the form of a speech only since 1913. When I was a kid, the State of the Union felt majestic: a moment of comity and decorum, where the president and Congress sat on a mostly equal footing and the focus was on policy.

Those days are long gone. Hectoring—both by and directed at—the president is now standard. In a funny hot-mic moment before Trump started last night, Vice President J. D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson were caught joking about how hard it is to sit through a long speech on the dais. “The hardest thing was doing it during Biden, when the speech was a stupid campaign speech,” Johnson said.

This is an ironic remark, given the strident, partisan speech that followed, but he’s not wrong: The State of the Union has become just another political rally. Several Supreme Court justices have already concluded that it’s not productive, seemly, or fun to be there, and they skip. Picking a low point of Trump’s speech last night is challenging—elevating himself above George Washington? Telling a debunked lie about Social Security beneficiaries? Reprised threats against Greenland and Panama?—but some of the most uncomfortable moments were a showdown between Trump and Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom he called “Pocahontas,” as well as Trump’s repeated, needless attacks on Biden.

It’s hard to think of any reason most Democrats would want to attend Trump’s State of the Union next year, where they will surely be browbeaten and used as partisan props but are unlikely to learn anything new about his policy agenda. That would be a much stronger and clearer message than anything Democrats tried this year. But then again, we haven’t seen the party unite much around its best interests lately.

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Democrats are acting too normal. Democrats wonder where their leaders are.

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Donald Trump paused auto tariffs for Mexico and Canada for a month, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. A divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s foreign-aid freeze, kicking the issue back to lower courts. The Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine in an effort to pressure Ukraine’s government to cooperate with America’s plans for peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Coaching Is the New ‘Asking Your Friends for Help’

By Olga Khazan

These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience.

Read the full article.

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