--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: President Trump kind of declared war on a bunch of American cities yesterday. San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out one by one. More on that tomorrow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's the first shutdown of Trump, too, but technically the fourth shutdown for the president, if you count the three from his first term.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For now, you're still going to get your mail and your Social Security checks. But a bunch of government services are going to be on hold. Some Superfund cleanup sites are not getting cleaned. Some veterans are not getting services they've been promised. No jobs report this Friday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know someone who's going to be very happy about that one. But nobody likes a shutdown. So to better understand what the thinking is behind this move, we're going to talk to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who's on the Senate Finance Committee here in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is coming up on the show right after this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show today comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Today's news moves fast, but the most important stories deserve deeper thinking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whether you're trying to understand the implications of a policy change or connecting dots across breaking stories, Claude, your new AI collaborator, can help you go beyond the headlines.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Claude doesn't just summarize the news. It helps you explore the context, analyze the patterns, and think through what it all means together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash today explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Introducing the new Dell PC powered by the Intel Core Ultra Processor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It helps do your busy work for you. So you can fast forward through editing images, designing presentations, generating code, debugging code, summarizing meeting notes, finding files, managing your schedule, responding to Jim's long emails.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Leaving all the time in the world for the things you actually want to do. No offense, Jim.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Get a new Dell PC at dell.com slash ai-pc. How those ahead stay ahead.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello, Senator Warren. Good morning. Welcome to Today Explained.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Thank you. It's good to be with you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, the government is shut down. The Democrats shut it down. Nobody likes to shut down. I wonder who you think people will blame, you guys or the Republicans?
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: So I tell you what, let's back up just a tiny little bit. What happened in July was that the Republicans said, yeah, yeah, we know the budget's out there, but we want to make this change to the budget.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: We want to roll back health care coverage for 15 million Americans, because we want to use that money for tax breaks for a handful of billionaires and billionaire corporations.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And Democrats said, you can't do that. We already had a budget. We already allocated that money.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And Republicans said, oh, yes, we can. And they voted it through. Only Republicans voted for it. And the Democrats just stood by because it was a special device that only took 50 votes.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: So now they come back and they say, okay, now we're ready for the budget, the part that takes 60 votes, the part where government has to be funded for the whole year.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And we're saying, hey, we want to talk about that healthcare part. We want to make it part of the negotiations that if you want to pass a budget right now, you've got to roll back those cuts on health care.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Because this is about seniors who are going to get pushed out of nursing homes. This is about brand new babies and their mamas who are going to lose their health care.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: This is about your neighbor who needs a home health aid or a wheelchair so that she can live independently. It's about losing that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I want to ask you about the optics of the shutdown here, because you're clearly setting up how you guys are framing this fight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you've got the Republicans who are framing it very differently. They're saying that you guys want to give health care to illegal immigrants, in their words.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Now, can we just stop right there? This is just a lie.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: I mean, how many times do they get to stand? They can also stand up and say the sky is green. They can say it. It is not true.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: The law is clear. There is no one who is an undocumented immigrant who is entitled to any help from Medicaid, from the Affordable Care Act. Zero, none.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder if you think it's an issue that these cuts to Medicare that you've referenced a couple of times now haven't gone into effect yet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Americans aren't feeling that particular pinch. But Democrats in Congress are framing this fight because of those cuts.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Yeah, it's a fair point about what's happening.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: We don't want to wait on this, but do understand the effects are beginning to be felt.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: So, for example, a couple of rural hospitals in Virginia just closed last week.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And they said it's because our books just don't add up. We cannot afford to take on uncompensated care from people who've lost their health care coverage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder, have you been to the website for HUD this morning, the U.S. Department of Housing?
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: No, I haven't seen it yet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Huh. There's a red banner on it right now that says the radical left in Congress shut down the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need. And then if you're on the website for about five seconds, a pop up pops up and says the exact same thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder I don't think we've seen something quite like this before during a government shutdown.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you feel like we're going to you've you've you've experienced a few shutdowns now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think we're going to see, you know, some new territory here in this particular fight?
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Look, first of all, we know that is wrong, using federal resources in order to play politics here.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: But Donald Trump and the Republicans will do anything to change the subject.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: This is going to hurt people. It's already hurting people. And I think there just comes a time you've got to be willing to stand up and push back against that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another group that's going to be hurting here, I think, potentially, especially in this shutdown, is federal workers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: President Trump is saying that this government shutdown could lead to thousands of federal workers losing their jobs, perhaps permanently in this case.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Yeah, you have exactly the right phrase here. He will punish people who do important work in the government.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: This is just plain old hostage taking. He saying we think that Democrats care about the federal workers, care about the people who are doing your food inspection, care about the people who keep planes flying in the air, care about those people.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And the threat is we will fire them. Why? Out of spite.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: You know, I just got to stop and say on this one, what kind of person does that?
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: What kind of person says that he is president of the United States and his plan to run government is to take people who are doing the work and who are essential for doing this work and to punish them, to fire them for his own political reasons.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: That's not someone who's looking out for America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I guess I wonder, though, if he does such a thing, are the Democrats going to, you know, hold the line?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because if you guys have a few people who ditch the front, you essentially lose the fight in the shutdown.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Look, I always, I can only speak for myself, but I got to tell you, people understand that Donald Trump has broken the law over and over.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: He has already fired tens of thousands of federal workers.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And using federal workers as hostages and claiming he will fire even more, what's he going to do?
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Is he permanently going to shut down the national parks? Is he permanently going to shut down the air traffic control system? Is he permanently going to shut down food inspections across this country?
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Is he that vindictive? If he is, then he doesn't need an excuse. He will do what he wants to do because it fits his narrative.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: The real question is, when are Republicans in Congress going to grow a spine and put a stop to it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I wonder, speaking of Republicans in Congress, we made a show a couple weeks ago that weighed whether or not Democrats should indeed shut the government down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We spoke to your colleague, Senator Van Hollen from Maryland.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one of the things we discussed on that show was whether Democrats would run the risk of tempting congressional Republicans to get rid of the filibuster by shutting the government down.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Look, the Republicans will get rid of the filibuster the minute they think it's to their advantage.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And that's been true all along.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: There's not any, you know, well, if you do this, they'll do that.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: They make the decision that they will do what works best, not for the country, what works best, not long term for Congress, what works best to keep this government running.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: Nope. They will do what they think works best for the Republicans.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And the Republicans in the United States Senate, spineless Republicans, have nothing to say about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If fortunes change in the midterms, it'll be Republicans who want to have a filibuster handy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: However, Democrats are historically unpopular right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do you think a government shutdown may factor into Democrats' fortunes in the midterms?
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: So the way I see this is we should do what we believe is right.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And what I believe is right is we make the fight to lower costs on behalf of the American people.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: We don't take away health care from millions of people.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: We don't take an already broken, creaky health care system and smash it to the ground.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: We do what we can to make this government work for people.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And that is true now. It is true in 2026. It is true in 2027. It is true in 2028.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: And we tell the American people that's what we're doing.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: That's all I know to do in a democracy.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: I think it is the right thing to do, and it's what I'm going to keep on doing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Senator Elizabeth Warren, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Elizabeth Warren: You bet. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And congratulations to your Red Sox last night.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ha! Here we go, Sox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How about that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, but now that she's gone, let's go Blue Jays.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We here at Today Explained don't love bringing up elections that are more than a year away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It feels unhealthy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: However, when we are back, a well-sourced reporter is going to make the argument that the midterms are actually what's been motivating our president as of late.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I guess we got to talk about the midterms.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mr. President, do you have any reaction to today's play being named the best news show?
--:-- Donald Trump: Well, I didn't know that. I just, you're telling me now for the first time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jonathan Lemire, staff writer at The Atlantic and co-host of MSNBC's Morning Joe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you recently wrote a piece in The Atlantic titled Fear of Losing the Midterms is Driving Trump's Decisions.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: I was skeptical when I saw it because I was like the midterms of the year 2026. It only Tuesday.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: But then when I read your piece, I felt compelled.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: What compelled you to write it?
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Well, it became clear to me that there was some sort of connective tissue to a lot of what may at first glance have been unrelated, but rather extreme actions taken by this White House and the Republican Party.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Everything from trying to seize control of the Federal Reserve.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: People aren't able to buy a house because this guy is a numbskull. He keeps the rates too high.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: To try to have Republicans gerrymander new districts in GOP-controlled states.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: This is Governor Greg Abbott. I'm about to sign the law that creates the one big, beautiful map that ensures fair representation in the United States Congress for Texans.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And even deploying the National Guard at first to Washington, D.C., now to other cities.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: There is no insurrection. There is no threat to national security. and there is no need for military troops in our major city.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And so much of this is fueled, and I've talked to people in the White House, those close to the president, Republicans on the Hill and the like, by a fear of indeed losing the midterms, not just because it would blunt Trump's ability to get anything done in his second two years of this of this term, if the Republicans were to, say, lose the House of Representatives.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: But beyond that, if the Democrats control even just that one body of Congress, even just the lower chamber, that would suddenly give them the power of the subpoena, which would allow them to launch investigations and potentially even another impeachment.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And certainly the first Trump term, once Democrats took control of the House in 2018, there was a series of investigations.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: You know, there's also the – separately from the House, there was the special counsel probe run by Robert Mueller.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: At the end of the day, yes, Donald Trump was reelected, but those investigations did hurt him at the time.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And then we also have President Trump – it's deeper, more personal than that.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: He, as I report in the piece, was impeached twice.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: He finds that memory infuriating and humiliating.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: He knows that will be part of his, the first line or two of his political obituary will be that he was the only president impeached twice.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: He is someone who we hear this in his constant musings about wanting a Nobel Peace Prize.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: They won't give me a Nobel Peace Prize because they only give it to liberals.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: It'd be a big insult to our country, I will tell you that.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: I don't want it. I want the country to get it.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: He is someone who is thinking more and more about his possible legacy.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And he doesn't want to go through that again.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: He doesn't want the third impeachment, even though there's little to no chance he'd be removed from office.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: But he doesn't want to have to go through that again.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And let's remember, he also just faced a series of criminal charges.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And that is still raw for him, in fact, fueling in many ways his current campaign of retribution against James Comey and the like.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: So he simply, I think at this point, he's very triggered at the idea of the Democrats having the ability to investigate him in the dealings, him and his business and his staff and his family even.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And he would like to avoid that again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president isn't coming out and saying very much about the midterms other than the Texas redistricting affair.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are there internal conversations going on that we know of about this?
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Yes, they began over the summer, as I report in the piece, in part after the Republicans achieved the president's signature legislative priority, the so-called one big beautiful bill.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: But it has been polling poorly, both before it passed and afterwards, after the president signed into law on July 4th in a lavish White House signing ceremony.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Thank you very much for being here.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Great honor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And stick around for the fireworks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Republicans were faced with a lot of hostility when some of them, and there have not been many, lawmakers decided to hold town halls in their districts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why did you cut SNAP and healthcare research?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We do not have unlimited money in the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, people are not, well, we all are going to die.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And normally, the party out of power does well in the off-year elections, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If the president is a Republican, more times than not in those midterms, the Democrats do well and vice versa.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So knowing this history and seeing the president slipping poll numbers and the unpopularity of the bill, Trump and some senior aides and outside advisors really started shifting conversations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK, if this momentum continues as, in their opinion, as poorly organized as Democrats have been so far since Election Day 2024, still, Republicans did stand a good chance of losing a House of Congress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump knows what that is like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had control of both the House and Senate in the first two years of his first term, only to lose that in 2018.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he made it clear to his aides he didn't want to go through that again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What one might see as a pivot to the midterms another might see as a distraction from Jeffrey Epstein because for a minute there it really felt like the president was trying to distract us from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I never had the privilege of going to his island and I did turn it down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In one of my very good moments, I turned it down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I didn't want to go to his island.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some real frustration from the president and his inner circle that for the first time, really, he couldn't change the subject.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump is, of course, a master of the distraction, a master of being able to dictate the terms of what the media does.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he particularly is good at getting his supporters, GOP loyalists, the MAGA crowd, to talk about what he wants to talk about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's why it was so shocking to him that he wasn't able to do that with the Epstein matter, that this had become this huge conspiracy theory, which to be clear, though Trump himself not a driver of it, he certainly fanned the flames at times.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And certainly a lot of people around Trump really spent a lot of time and energy pushing the Jeffrey Epstein matter, believing it could bring down powerful Democrats or entire institutions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When instead, what's become the dominant storyline is a reminder that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were friends.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They were good friends for a long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that was personally embarrassing to Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he didn't want to have to deal with any part of that scandal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he couldn't get Republicans to, even though he flat out said, hey, let's move on, they wouldn't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So yes, part of this is him trying to get the public and even his most loyal supporters to talk about something else.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And of course, we're speaking to you in the midst of a government shutdown.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've covered a few of these things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do they just hurt both parties equally?
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: If past this prologue, they tend to hurt the party in power.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And we can even just look at Donald Trump's first term.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: He actually presided over three government shutdowns as president.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Two of them were very brief, but one was long. It was over 30 days, the longest the country's ever seen.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And he took the brunt of the hit polling-wise.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And I think in this case, though the White House, as I reported for The Atlantic on Tuesday, the White House is very bullish.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: They think they have the better arguments here about, and they're trying to recycle a lot of what they said in 2024 about immigration and the like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At midnight, the Democrats followed through on their threat to shut down the United States government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As we speak here this morning, there are hundreds of thousands of federal workers who are getting their furlough notices.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nearly half of our civilian workforce is being sent home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These are hardworking Americans who work for our federal government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our troops and our Border Patrol agents will have to go to work, but they'll be working without pay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At the end of the day, the GOP controls the White House, the Senate, and the House.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And most Americans who are not paying attention to the minutiae of the government shutdown negotiations are likely just going to blame the party in power.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course, one thing we can bet on polling worse than Donald Trump is the Democrats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We had Senator Warren on the show earlier asking her a question that I'll now ask you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, is there anything that Democrats can do to get it together enough to have a fighting chance here against Donald Trump, be it in the midterms or his successor in 2028?
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: It is striking that Democrats are polling even worse than Trump pretty much across the board, though it must be noted in some of those like generic ballot tests like for like just, you know, not individual Democrat Republicans by name is rather just generic Republican versus generic Democrat for generic House seat.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Democrats do pretty well in those matchups.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: But there's no doubt this is a party in crisis, a party looking for its identity.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: The 2024 losses were so sweeping and so gutting.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And Democrats lost a lot of its base, some of its core voters decided to either cross the aisle and vote Republican or just stay home.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: I think there's still a party that's trying to find itself.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Now, most Democratic strategists I speak to say, you know, those first few months, they were just so shell-shocked they could barely mount a resistance to Trump.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: Now they do feel like they're more coherent in their anti-Trump arguments.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: That said, they have not been able to really suggest any pro-Democratic party arguments.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: They really have not been able to spell out what they stand for.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And they're going to have to.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: They're going to need some sort of—it's not enough just to be anti-Trump.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: A senior Democrat told me recently, you have to be able to present your own vision, your own case.
--:-- Jonathan Lemire: And at this point, they haven't been able to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: TheAtlantic.com is where you can read Jonathan's joint on Trump and the midterms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kelly Wessinger made our show today with help from Ariana Aspuru, Amna Alsadi, Laura Bullard, Patrick Boyd, and Adriene Lilly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram, and this is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram, and you can support Today Explained over at Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow, I lost my voice there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I get emotional when I talk about supporting Today Explained.
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