As Congress scrambles to pass a budget bill before the government runs out of funding Tuesday night, the shutdown circus is in full swing. Cable networks are running live “shutdown countdown clocks,” think pieces from the beltway abound, and reporters are scrambling around Capitol Hill for the latest manufactured scoop.
This scene is familiar: it’s national politics in the attention economy. Passing spending bills, once a routine and boring function of government, has been exploited by politicians eager to capture the most precious 21st-century commodity: your attention.
The decision over whether to shut down the government has moved from the congressional bargaining table to our televisions, phones, and emails. Democrats, the minority party, are being forced into the offensive, managing their party’s strategy by hitting the Sunday cable shows and making videos for social media.
This scene is not a new one, but this time, something is different: Democrats themselves do not appear confident in their demands. It’s clear more than ever that the whole endeavor has become nothing but a callous political stunt.
Holding the government hostage in a shutdown situation is a battle for public opinion. But the public — tuned out and already losing faith in elite institutions — is not buying what politicians are selling. Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe a shutdown erodes trust in government. That’s because when the government shuts down, the consequences are felt throughout American life: workers miss paychecks, local economies reel from reduced spending, public parks and historical sites are closed, capital for small business loans is paused, air traffic control runs on a skeleton staff.
In the daily media fight over who will “own” the shutdown, a bigger question is lost: Is this a way to run a government at all?
The normalization of governing through brinksmanship has done nothing but break public trust and trigger anxiety. Each manufactured crisis reinforces the idea that the government can’t perform its most basic function — funding itself — fueling cynicism and weakening democratic legitimacy. While people’s livelihoods become bargaining chips, the will-they-or-won’t-they hullabaloo only benefits mass media, which uses it to drive viewership, and politicians, who use it to raise money.
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Failure, Ready To Stream
The rise of the internet and digital communications in the late 2000s completely transformed the political arena. The federal government, once backed up by a handful of trusted media networks, lost its claim as the sole source of trusted information. The “attention economy,” a market of information abundance where human attention is the primary commodity, arose in its place, and the most media-savvy politicians took notice.
While political polarization was already starting to hamper the budget process in the 1980s and ’90s — the best example being the record-breaking shutdown of 1996, lasting 21 days and boosting President Bill Clinton’s (D) reelection campaign — the media ecosystem of the 2010s would go on to create the perfect storm.
The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 established the current budget process, setting up new deadlines for Congress to pass annual appropriations bills. In 1980, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti interpreted the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal agencies from spending money beyond what Congress has appropriated, to mean that agencies cannot operate during a funding gap. The decision established the modern rule that a lapse in appropriations triggers a shutdown, with only “essential” functions, like defense and law enforcement, allowed to continue.
Each year, Congress must pass and the president must sign twelve appropriations bills to fund discretionary programs. If neither those bills nor a stopgap resolution are enacted, agencies lacking funds must halt non-essential work until new legislation is approved, while essential services and mandatory programs continue.
Over the past 15 years, the process has been weaponized.
The first politician to use the media to facilitate a government shutdown for political gain was Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2013. As time to strike a deal was running out, Cruz defiantly spoke on the Senate floor for 21 hours straight — not out of a desire to find common ground, but as a political stunt to rail against then-President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act.
At one point, Cruz read from Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham while his office live-tweeted the action using the hashtag #MakeDCListen. In the end, Cruz’s profile skyrocketed, the government shut down for sixteen days, costing taxpayers billions, while the health care law was left untouched. A frustrated Obama scorned Cruz and his allies for using the shutdown as a political stunt, imploring them in a White House speech to “go out and win an election.”
If Cruz’s viral speech set the stage, in 2018, Trump proved that executive negotiation could become reality television. His livestreamed Oval Office shouting match with Democratic leaders on the eve of another government-funding deadline has notched nearly 30 million views on YouTube.
As Democrats play-acted at competence and Trump weaponized the chaos, the government would shut down for 34 days. As a result, the country permanently lost $3 billion in gross domestic product, 800,000 federal workers missed paychecks, the Food and Drug Administration suspended routine food inspections, and many government contractors went without guaranteed backpay.
Democrats now find themselves prisoners of the same theater. In March, Sen. Schumer (D-N.Y.)’s decision to vote for the Republican spending bill and avoid a shutdown drew widespread outrage from his party’s base. The founders of Indivisible, one of their most influential grassroots groups, claimed the reaction among their volunteers “was near-universal: shock, despair, and rage.”
On the eve of another possible shutdown, Schumer and his colleagues are eager to avoid similar blowback. Instead of focusing on Trump’s “pocket rescission” tactics, in which the president withdraws pre-approved government funding in ways that critics say illegally circumvent Congress’s power of the purse, Democrats are using the moment to make a political statement against Trump’s main legislative achievement: massive cuts to Medicaid. Their motivation? Portray themselves as pugilists ready to tangle with Trump.
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Internal documents recently circulated to staffers by the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee and obtained by The Lever reveal their strategies. The memos encourage members of Congress to participate in a “Health Care Costs Week of Action” by holding events in their districts, and staffers are directed to “go live or film a short direct-to-camera video to explain what’s happening and how Democrats are fighting for the American people.”
These internal talking points include messages like, “Democrats are ready, willing, and able to support a budget that lowers costs and protects Americans’ health care. Donald Trump and Republicans have made clear that they do not want to fix the health care system they have broken.”
It’s hard to imagine such moral posturing around health care resonating broadly. Democrats have repeatedly shaped and upheld policies that treat health care as a market-based commodity rather than a public good — likely one of many reasons why only about three in ten registered voters have a favorable view of the party, ten points lower than just a year ago.
There’s an even bigger problem with Democrats’ strategies: the party’s proposed budget, which promises to deliver more than a trillion dollars for health care, has no chance of being adopted.
As such, Democratic leaders, despite having a strong moral claim, are speaking with a lack of conviction in their ability to overcome the moment. Faced with procedural questions from reporters, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has repeatedly dodged the substance and defaulted to the same empty slogan “cancel the cuts, lower the costs, save healthcare.”
The old talking points are there — “protecting health care for the American people” and “we are fighting against the Trump shutdown” — but the meaning behind the words has faded away. The public legitimacy they crave is not coming back, and on some level, their impractical demands signal they, too, understand this.
This is Democrats’ real sin: Their pre-shutdown battle cries are simply a political stunt, no different than Cruz’s live-tweeted storybook reading or Trump’s made-for-TV Oval Office smackdown.
As a result, the public knows better than to believe anything they see from Washington is real. The defining ideology of politics today is not liberalism or conservatism, but cynical realism. The American people aren’t moved by lofty democratic ideas but instead resigned to apathy.
A Crisis Of Leadership
Seeing this universal acceptance that government shutdowns have become political performances, it’s natural to seek proposals that take aim at reforming the federal budget process.
In 2023, bipartisan lawmakers in the Senate proposed the “Prevent Government Shutdowns Act,” and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a similar bill this year. These bills would essentially trigger appropriations if government funding is not passed on time. However, these proposals aim to accommodate the political dysfunction, removing incentives for lawmakers to make good-faith efforts to negotiate around the budget process.
Bobby Kogan, an expert on the budget process and the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, says the problem with government shutdowns is one of politics, not legislative process.
“The process is not biased towards shutdowns,” Kogan said. “We have a new thing going on in politics that is really messing with Congress; that is not a legislative change that came in.” In other words, the problem is not the government, it’s the failure of those tasked with legislating.
Trump broke open the illusion of a functioning governing system, one already hollowed out by decades of extreme polarization and bipartisan austerity policies. The attention economy provides the ultimate cover for this reality. It absolves lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, from having to reckon with the consequences of deeply unpopular policies and propose remedies.
Instead, voters begin to believe that it’s the spectacle they crave, the performance of someone who will “fight.” Hence, the public outrage that Schumer faced over the March funding deadline and is now desperate to avoid.
It’s not that Democrats don’t “fight” like Republicans, it’s that Trump’s voters likely read his chaos as coherence.
Trump’s recent threat to utilize the shutdown to permanently fire federal workers fits into his larger political vision to “drain the swamp.” Where Democrats see this as an act of cruelty, and the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers, argues it’s illegal, the MAGA movement sees a shameless political opportunity.
Trump’s brand requires the performance — the constant drama, the previously unthinkable — that’s both his strength and his limit. But Democrats have the choice to transcend it.
By opting out of this game entirely, Democrats can rise above Trump’s weaknesses and build a popular political coalition based on tangible policy solutions. In the meantime, negotiating to avoid a shutdown ought to involve realistic demands, not a campaign stunt.
Democrats who care about defeating Trump and restoring proper governance need to see the attention economy for what it is: an incentive structure that rewards optics over substance until legitimacy fades.
The media framing the debate as zero-sum, with Democrats either capitulating to Trump or Trump “winning,” obscures the bigger point: leaders need to govern better. Trump is a product of this environment; his political rise was made possible by the widespread discontent over the state of politics in Washington, and he needs this spectacle to distract from the fact that he has no real agenda.
If Democrats want to offer something real, they cannot compete on his terms. Instead, their stronger move — to weaken Trump and make their case to the American people — is to build towards a politics that rejects the circus of perpetual crisis, acknowledges the trust that’s been broken, and sets out on a path to democratic renewal.
