Totally Brazen. Comically Corrupt. Painfully Dumb.

Twenty-six days into the government shutdown, we got an actual, meaningful development this morning. The American Federation of Government Employees—a union that has regularly fought Donald Trump’s assault on the federal workforce this year—is now urging Democrats to abandon their shutdown strategy and allow the government to reopen without any concessions from Republicans and the White House.

“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,” AFGE President Everett Kelley wrote in a statement first reported by NBC News. “It’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today.”

It’s no surprise government employees are under extra duress during a lengthy shutdown, particularly since the White House has used it as a pretext to do still-deeper cuts to the federal workforce. But whether this open pressure shakes any additional Democrats loose from their till-now firm opposition to a current-levels spending bill remains to be seen. Happy Monday.

The Biggest Carrots. The Most Beautiful Sticks.

by Andrew Egger

Two stories caught my attention over the weekend. One of them global, the other relatively provincial. But taken together, they provide a clear illustration of how grift and greed and personal pique have come to define the Trump economic doctrine.

On Saturday, Donald Trump announced that U.S. businesses that trade with Canada are in for billions of dollars of additional pain, slapping an additional 10 percent tariff on imports from the country. The reason? He was mad about a TV ad the government of Ontario was airing on American airwaves, quoting Ronald Reagan’s warnings about the perils of tariffs.

On Friday, the Financial Times reported that the Pentagon had awarded a significant contract to the drone company Unusual Machines—a company that retains Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser and in which he owns millions of dollars of stock. Shares in the company jumped 13 percent on the news. (As Judd Legum points out over at Popular Information, Trump Jr. has talked about how he helped screen candidates for top Pentagon jobs and explicitly discussed looking for candidates interested in moving more defense spending into drones. Nevertheless, Unusual Machines and Trump Jr. both deny he had anything to do with the deal.)

The punitive measures against Canada are clownish—an indefensible economic decision wedded to a bizarrely childish lie about what Reagan thought about tariffs. Preferential government treatment for businesses from which the Trump family stands to profit—of which Unusual Machines is just the latest example—is just as obviously indefensible, whatever lazy “nothing to see here” defenses they might offer.

But isn’t the brazenness of it all sort of the point? Every time Trump lashes out crazily against someone who he decides has wronged him, or heaps government spoils on loyal friends and allies, he’s making a specific argument: Right now, I run the world, and what’s right on “the merits” doesn’t matter. All that should matter is: Are you enjoying my favor, or suffering my displeasure?

In ordinary times—or times we used to optimistically consider “ordinary”—such an argument wouldn’t get a president very far. His destructive antics and open self-dealing would vaporize his popularity and his political capital; he would find himself quickly hemmed in by Congress and the courts.

But in our times, with a Congress of quislings on one side and a super-conservative Supreme Court giving him home field advantage on the other, Trump’s perpetual wrongness on the merits actually strengthens his pure-power appeal. It’s an industrial-scale version of his old line about how he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue without losing political support. He’s out here shooting a guy—a company, a country—each week at this point, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Is it any wonder business leaders are scrambling to get in line?

And make no mistake: That scramble continues. Last week, the White House announced a list of companies and private donors that had made large contributions to his newest pet project: the palatial White House ballroom. As the Center for American Progress’s Will Ragland pointed out on X, a majority of the megacorps that pitched in had something in common: They had cut off political contributions to Republicans who backed Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election after January 6th. Really sorry about all that, sir—you’ve got to understand, that was another time. We really love the gold trimmings in the ballroom rendering you’ve put together.

Money has always talked in American politics; people who have lots of it have deployed it to arrange government policy such that it’s easier to make even more. But the complete demolition of all guardrails around presidential action has made both the stick and the carrot far more powerful. Sure, you could speak out about the ways the president’s policies are crushing your business or your industry—but what would be the point when he’s likely to respond by crushing you more, with some Truth Social insults on the side? Sure, you could spend huge sums spreading money around on Capitol Hill in the hope of getting a sympathetic ear next time Congress considers a bill for your industry—but might it not be quicker, easier, and more effective just to back a truckload of cash up to the president’s family or to his latest vanity project?

What’s to be done about incentive structures this perverse? All we can do is try to build out some incentives of our own. From time to time this year, we’ve seen people remind megacorporations that Trump still isn’t the only party they have to keep pleasing. The huge wave of Disney+ cancellations that followed the scalping of Jimmy Kimmel seemed to get him back on the air pretty quick. Donald Trump has the most power and the biggest pocketbook. But there’s still a lot more of us than there are of him.