Keep the shutdown going
By 
Trumpism and the Republican party — one and the same thing at this point — is a radical reactionary movement with strong authoritarian and fascist tendencies. It needs to be smashed, humiliated, extirpated, and generally subjected to a Carthaginian solution.
That’s an ambitious political program, true, but the government shutdown represents a golden opportunity for the Democratic party to screw its courage to the sticking place, and deal a massive blow to the Trumpist party and its increasingly demented and erratic leader.
When it comes to politics, most people, including most voters, are inattentive simpletons, and in the era of the imperial presidency their tendency is to simply blame what is happening on the president. We saw last year how inflation — a worldwide post-Covid phenomenon that Joe Biden’s policies had exactly nothing to do with — was treated by American voters as if Biden had personally autopenned an executive order requiring the price of eggs to double.
Donald Trump is an incompetent moron, but the government is shut down because of the politics of the filibuster, which most voters are as interested in grasping as they are in reading Finnegans Wake in Sanskrit. What they know, as last night’s electoral results strongly suggest, is that the Government Isn’t Working and that this is Donald Trump’s fault. Trump of course has made his own less than fastidious bed in this regard, what with his constant peacocking about how the power and the glory are his now and forever.
Very soon, commercial airline traffic is going to start getting disrupted in a serious way, medical insurance rates are going to skyrocket, tariff-driven inflation will start to really kick in, and the inattentive and idiotic public will blame all this on Trump — much of which actually is his fault — because that’s the way things work in the Instagram age.
All of which is to say that the Democrats should use the shutdown to grab Trump by his tiny shriveled balls and make him scream, until his fundamental weakness and incompetence is the ruling narrative in even a media environment wired to make this malignant clown look good if at all possible. Make the Republicans make much bigger concessions than the original ask, and if they won’t then oh well too bad. And if this leads to a unilateral elimination of the filibuster then all the better.
When your opponent is of a choleric disposition, irritate him, as some philosopher of the New Jersey marshes once said.