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Notes -
One thing I haven’t heard brought up in all this shutdown talk is I that I think I remember Janet Yellen talking about needing to enact extraordinary methods about two weeks ago to stall a federal shutdown due to the debt ceiling. https://apnews.com/article/treasury-debt-limit-janet-yellen-7e598f2811d75ad5159f9338f7cdce16
So okay yeah Jan 27th. Hypothesis here, trump anticipates the dems using this as a way to hit him in the face with a metaphorical shovel, something along the lines of “republicans won’t agree to any reasonable deal and they’re the reason and this is bad” so preemptively chooses to do effectively a shutdown but on his own terms. Now the conversation isn’t republicans hit debt ceiling and can’t broker a deal but republicans have shut down these wasteful programs. Arguably the best management of the narrative I’ve seen from them in the last 20 years.
None of this is a comment on whether this or that program being shutdown is good or bad, simply that from that narrative, it’s arguably going great, and so far we haven’t hit the debt ceiling. Maybe I’ll eat my words in a few days but still so far I haven’t been hearing much about the debt ceiling being a problem since he started cutting these programs.
Government shutdowns are politically problematic because they cause government services voters care about to pause. Having this kind of narrative doesn't really help with that. The median voter's not super smart, and not super plugged into politics, but one consequence of that is they won't fall for this like 'this is good because covid' when prices o up, or conversely 'this is good because we're cutting woke government waste' when services start freezing.
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