You Can't Make A Deal With The Devil
You Can’t Make A Deal With The Devil: Why The End Of The Shutdown Was Always Inevitable
For weeks, we watched the same tired Washington theater play out. One side demanded concessions they should’ve fought for months ago; the other side was resolute. And caught in the middle were ordinary Americans—government employees missing paychecks, families watching as pantry items dwindled, everyone wondering when the federal lights would turn back on.
This wasn’t governance. It was blackmail in broad daylight.
In the end, eight Democrats sold out democracy, crossed over to the dark side, and bent the knee. Eight feckless Democrats, all of whom are not up for reelection, sided with Republicans to reopen the government, thus giving up all leverage to force the GOP back to the bargaining table to renegotiate healthcare subsidies to prevent millions of people’s healthcare premiums from skyrocketing.
“Our health care system is already broken, dysfunctional and cruel,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said last month. “85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. We spend twice as much per person on health care as any other major country, and yet our life expectancy is four years lower. Now, at a time when we should be guaranteeing health care as a human right, Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues are making a horrific situation even worse.”
For more than forty days, Democrats held the line, refusing to budge until Republicans agreed to lower health care costs. Then, in the dead of night, eight Democrats caved. I understand the outrage—the fury, the calls for the heads of those who appear to have sold out the country for the Republican “promise” of yet another hollow conversation about health care that will never happen.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Democrats were never going to win a government shutdown standoff with the Trump administration. They walked into the fight unarmed, fueled by the naïve belief that the weight of morality, public shame, or even mass human suffering would move the other side. They forgot who they were dealing with—a Trump administration that is, at its core, a heartless and morally bankrupt machine.
Currently, this administration allows for masked men to kidnap people off the street, literally ripping them from homes, schools, courthouses, anywhere where they believe the hunted have gathered, with impunity. The Trump administration isn’t just supportive of ICE; they revel in the victory. They post harassment and arrests all over social media. They make fun of the family’s pain. They even dressed up as ICE for Halloween.
This was never about policy; this was an actual hostage crisis, and the hostage taker was sitting in the Oval Office, chilling. Donald Trump doesn’t care if federal workers skip meals, if veterans go without benefits, if families are forced to choose between rent and groceries. This idea that at some point the optics of food lines, or the cries of federal workers who went over a month without a paycheck, would move some Republican inner empathetic compass is more proof that Democrats weren’t watching. Starving families can only be leveraged if both parties actually care what happens to the people should they never eat.
Because here’s the thing about hostage negotiations: they only work when the family cares about the person who’s been kidnapped.
After a lower court literally tried to force Trump to release funds designated to prevent families from going hungry, Trump refused and asked the Supreme Court to rule on the lower court’s decision. And then eight Democrats crossed the line.
Democrats had no leverage, but what scares me most is that they didn’t seem to know it. Since Trump has been in office, Democrats have held press conferences, called for bipartisan solutions, and shamed him on X, and he doesn’t care. Every day of the shutdown, Americans became collateral damage. Federal workers went unpaid. Meals disappeared. Public services halted. Families scrambled. And what was Trump doing? He was celebrating. He went on with renovations to the White House. He had a gala at Mar-a-Lago, which included a massive seafood bar, all the while knowing that some 42 million people depend on SNAP benefits, which they’d not seen in weeks.
This is why Democrats could never “beat” him. They were trying to play a fair game with someone who doesn’t believe in fairness. Their moral appeals, their economic warnings, their public outrage—they meant nothing to a man who sees human suffering as a strategy. The shutdown was not a standoff of ideas; it was a standoff of empathy versus indifference. And indifference was willing to go the distance.
The shutdown ended not because Democrats convinced him to care. It ended because the consequences became unavoidable, too visible to ignore. But let’s not mistake survival for victory. Millions of Americans were hurt while the man in the White House laughed at the scoreboard. This was not politics as usual. It was political cruelty weaponized. And the lesson is brutal: you cannot negotiate with a hostage taker, especially one who measures power by the suffering of those he was elected to govern.
You Can’t Make A Deal With The Devil: Why The End Of The Shutdown Was Always Inevitable was originally published on cassiuslife.com
