Trump's blame game (Russell Vought's Version)Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Daily Prospect Monday through Friday. [link removed]

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**OCTOBER 3, 2025**

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The shutdown is really frustrating. Democrats are publicly asking for one thing and privately asking for something else. Meanwhile, Republicans are allegedly “putting pressure” on Democrats by making the same kind of decisions to unilaterally cut funding and fire workers that they were doing before the shutdown. Nothing is as it appears, and I thought I’d try to untangle all of this for today’s story.

**–David Dayen, executive editor**

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Photo illustration by Lauren Pfeil. Source: Alex Brandon/AP Photo.

The “Look What You Made Me Do” Phase of the Shutdown [link removed]

The White House withheld urgently needed infrastructure funding from a state that didn’t vote for him for president. It unilaterally cut energy grants appropriated by Congress because they don’t meet with the president’s views. It fired workers deemed superfluous. It kept in operation what it likes and took out of operation what it doesn’t like.

All of the above happened

**before** the October 1 government shutdown, and the fact of the shutdown doesn’t change the fundamental illegality of these actions (though what is “legal” with a Supreme Court giving their Special Boy Donald Trump whatever he wants is a difficult metaphysical question). We have hit a phase in the shutdown where Trump and his lieutenant Russ Vought are making decisions they’ve always wanted to make and blaming Democrats for forcing them to make them. You can call it the “look what you made me do” phase of the shutdown.

There are cracks in this gambit already. If Trump and Vought were so unconcerned about blame, they wouldn’t have figured out how to keep national parks open [link removed] with skeleton crews. If they knew the public would blame the Democrats for the shutdown, they would furlough more employees [link removed] than have been furloughed. Trump and Vought are instead mitigating the public-facing pain, allowing things they like, such as ICE raids [link removed] and merger approvals [link removed], to continue, while canceling funding they don’t like. This was Trump’s prime directive before the shutdown and it’s his prime directive now. It’s unpopular, and this is an attention-grabbing moment for Democrats to call it out.

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