Written by Surly1, Doomstead Diner
On Friday Jan. 25 Trump had signed a three-week stopgap bill to reopen those parts of the government shuttered through February 15. Democrats are happily spiking the ball in the end zone.
But as the reliable and prescient Dahlia Lithwick writes in Slate, the utterances of President Trump, Lara Trump, Wilbur Ross et al may have played as clueless out here in the cheap seats, but served to reinforce traditional Paul Ryan small government talking points, where every social calamity can be addressed via a bake sale or barn raising.
It’s too easy to say that the enduring lesson of the shutdown is simply that Trump and his plutocrat Cabinet are hilariously clueless about how most of us live. The real story is much more grim: They are also trying to other us against one another, positing government workers as unpatriotic if they decline to work for free, and lazy for being unwilling to put the president’s interests ahead of their own.
Government workers have bought a brief respite from further financial calamity for a few weeks, but there is nothing currently on the political horizon that indicates we won’t be right back here in three weeks. At least Trump won’t have to face the specter of plane delays in and out of Atlanta for the Super Bowl. (Had he interfered with the High Rollers getting their footbaw on, they’d have been burning crosses on the White House lawn on Monday.)
And nothing changes the central thesis of the original article: that the mass of Americans are two-three paychecks away from the economic abyss.
Read the original 22 January post here.
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