The decision by eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus to side with Republicans to advance a bill Sunday night to end the government shutdown drew heated condemnations from other members of the party and reopened longstanding divisions on how to best fight back against President Trump.
Democrats were coming off strong election wins last Tuesday, and many lawmakers and activists said the results showed that Senate Democrats should continue to hold the line on their demands for extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies. But the small group of defectors reasoned Sunday that the shutdown had caused too much pain and that the modest concessions from Republicans, including a pledge to hold a vote on healthcare, were enough.
“This agreement tonight is a win for the American people,” said Sen. Angus King (I., Maine), who caucuses with Democrats. He has voted repeatedly to fund the government and did so again Sunday night.
He said the deal would put people back to work, feed the hungry and give Democrats at least a chance to tackle expiring healthcare subsidies. “The shutdown wasn’t achieving its goal, and it was at the same time hurting a lot of people,” he said. “Now we have a path forward.”
But many Democrats saw it as throwing in the towel too soon and undercutting their fight to renew healthcare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of 2025 unless Congress acts. They said it also could alienate voters after the party worked for months to convince them that Democrats were willing to put up a fight. Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, but need 60 votes to advance most legislation.
The final vote in the Senate is expected soon, followed by a vote in the GOP-run House.
“Tonight, eight Democrats voted with Republicans,” said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats. “To my mind, this was a very, very bad vote,” he said. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said he was “proud of the majority of Senate Democrats who opposed this vote.”
Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, a state that Trump won in 2024, said the terms were too weak.
“A wink and a nod to deal with this healthcare crisis later—with no actual guarantees—is just not enough for me,” she said.
“America deserves better,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate.
Others had sharper words. Rep. Greg Casar (D., Texas), who leads the House’s progressive wing, said “accepting nothing but a pinkie promise from Republicans isn’t a compromise—it’s capitulation.”
One House Democrat said he wouldn’t even characterize the legislation that advanced as a deal because Democrats get so little out of it. “I feel like they took our first and second born child and got a Bundt cake in return,” he said after the vote.
Activists said the vote sent a terrible message.
“Caving now will teach Trump and Republicans that they can win any fight simply by threatening to cause terrible harm to regular people,” said Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of the progressive group Indivisible, on BlueSky.
The government keeps statistics on overall incomes relative to prices, and you can see that real median household income in the United States soared from 2014 to 2019, but fell during the pandemic and post-pandemic inflation. It rebounded strongly in 2023 and reached an all-time high in 2024.
We don’t yet have household income data from 2025, but we can look at median wages, which are also higher today than they were before Covid.1 Lots of people are struggling, of course, but looking at the country as a whole, incomes have risen faster than prices.
Median household income was at an all-time high (yes, accounting for inflation) in 2024 and inflation-adjusted wages continued to rise in 2025. We also know that more people are working rather than fewer.
I think you all know that I’m not here to be Donald Trump’s discourse lawyer, but if I were working at the National Economic Council or the Treasury Department, I’d be looking at these charts and feeling pretty annoyed with the American people.
They have literally never had it so good, but they’re furious about affordability. What’s going on?
I don’t know anyone who does economic policy for Trump, but I do know a bunch of people who did economic policy for Joe Biden, and they very much felt this way 12 to 18 months ago. They also learned to their chagrin that any effort to argue with the voters blew back on them immediately. When people feel they’re living through an affordability crisis, they really do not want to see your charts and graphs.
So now, in the interests of providing factual information to the public, burnishing my own bipartisan cred, and trying to tempt Trump into a politically suicidal effort to tell the voters they’re wrong, let’s look at one more chart. This is inflation-adjusted consumption spending per person, and it shows that voters in the aggregate are buying more goods and services than ever before.
This is mean, not median, so in theory Sam Altman could be the only person in America buying more stuff. But, again, we saw that median incomes and wages are at all-time highs, so that seems unlikely.
Around D.C., analogies abound—she was everything from Trump’s Rasputin to the “MAGA Grand Inquisitor.” A prominent D.C. lobbyist called her a “one-person Washington Times”; no, said a nominee for a senior Administration post, she was a “one-person wrecking crew.” The nominee went on, “She’s part loyal bagman, part Roy Cohn figure,” referring to Trump’s ruthless New York lawyer. (“I’m just a professional woman who supports President Trump,” she told me. “And he’s a very hospitable person.”) Tucker Carlson told me that Loomer was “so poisonous, I don’t like to speak her name.” A former N.S.C. official compared her to Jiang Qing, a wife of Mao Zedong and his partner in enforcing the Cultural Revolution. “This histrionic, conspiratorial, and aggressive woman was the keeper of a list of those to be purged,” he said. “She used her power to rain hell on her enemies, while also carrying out her fair share of personal vendettas.” He went on, “She described herself as Mao’s dog—absolute subservient loyalty, and of course she bit when he wanted her to.”
Loomer thinks the most apt comparison is to Joseph McCarthy, a parallel she finds flattering. “I think people now realize he wasn’t as crazy as they thought he was,” she told me. “He’s one of the most underrated and underappreciated political figures in history. He was trying to warn us about the rot and the infestation in our government and within our educational institutions. People acted like he was un-American for simply trying to protect America. Everything he said turned out to be true.”
In September, at the Kirk memorial, Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, said that she had forgiven the man who killed her husband. The crowd stood to applaud her, many in tears. “I could never feel that,” Loomer told me. Kirk’s assassin, she added, “deserves a bullet to the head.” She preferred Trump’s line: “I hate my opponent.” Loomer told me that she had already been saying those words to herself before Trump took the stage. “I don’t believe in kumbaya,” she said. After Kirk was killed, Trump spoke with more frequency about “the enemy from within”; Loomer appreciated the renewed focus. “I have to say, I do want President Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the Left thinks he is, and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are,” she wrote. She was offering cash donations to anyone who gave her the names of pro-Palestine protesters, and began encouraging her followers to start Loomering people who’d made disparaging comments about Kirk, with the aim of getting them fired.
Whenever I pressed Loomer on how exactly she conducts her work, and what she can take credit for, the conversation veered into the woo-woo zone. “I’m manifesting my role,” she told me. “You have to manifest what you want. My hope is to continue using my large platform to develop policy, but I don’t want to say I’m actually developing policy.” It was late at night, and we were walking around outside the Turning Point headquarters after the memorial. Loomer kept looking back to make sure nobody was following us. Flowers and crosses had been laid on the ground in the parking lot. “I’m not saying that I’m an adviser, but I can manifest it,” she said. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m manifesting it.” I was reminded of an early conversation I had with the strategist who is close to the Trump Administration. “Influence is perceived power,” he told me. “That’s what it is with Laura. If people think you have power, then you do.”
