At roughly the same time that Senate Democrats were readying themselves to cave to their Republican colleagues on Sunday — effectively ending the weekslong government shutdown without any real concessions on health care policy — President Donald Trump was getting booed by the crowd at an NFL game between the Washington Commanders and the Detroit Lions.
Trump, the first sitting president to attend a regular-season NFL game since Jimmy Carter in 1978, wants the Commanders to name their planned new stadium in his honor, as a tribute to his time in office. He probably arrived at the game thinking the fans would cheer him. Instead, he faced the jeers of thousands of angry people.
You could imagine, if this were a film, an editor cutting between the two moments; the surrender of Senate Democrats back to back with the weakness of an unpopular president. You might even say, in fact, that it was a little too on the nose — a contrast too apt to be believed. Less than a week after winning landslide victories in bellwether races in Virginia and New Jersey, Democrats ceded their political advantage to a man who is as unpopular as a president can be in the current era.
To extend a little fairness to Senate Democrats — and not just the eight defectors — you can see some of the logic of their position. They are in the minority, which in the modern Congress means they have little, if any, power, influence or authority. Yes, they have made great use of the shutdown as a political tactic, but as far as policy goes, they’re still as far away from concessions on the central issue of the confrontation — health care, taking the form of “Obamacare” subsidies — as they were at the start of this drama.
In fact, the Republican Party has shown it won’t budge on anything it actually cares about — and it cares about its program of austerity and retrenchment. Both the White House and congressional Republicans were willing to starve families or leave them bankrupt with unaffordable health care costs rather than open the government on terms the Democratic Party as a whole might accept.