Illustration by João Fazenda

If, like Donald Trump, you divide the world into winners and losers, into deal-closing masters of the universe and their patsies, then, after the events of recent days, you would surely place Trump himself in the category he reviles. Last week, he was publicly sparring with his own intelligence chiefs and getting an official rebuke from Senate Republicans for the nature of his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan. None of that is likely to have improved his mood as he prepared for the State of the Union address, on Tuesday, after it had been postponed by a week. That delay was due to the fact that Nancy Pelosi had triumphed in her first confrontation with the President since resuming her role as the Speaker of the House. She had done so maybe not by “dog walking” Trump, as the rapper Cardi B might put it, but by managing to end a deeply unpopular government shutdown, without giving him his wall, compelling him to put off his speech till the government reopened, and creating an opportunity for negotiations that could lead to compromise legislation on border security.

Trump’s handling of the longest-ever government shutdown, which left eight hundred thousand federal employees without pay for thirty-five days, certainly showcases the crudeness of his governing style, as does his repeated threat to declare a national emergency if he doesn’t get a wall. The standoff may also damage his reëlection prospects, especially if no border agreement is reached and the government shuts down again, as it is scheduled to do in that case, on February 15th. (Last Thursday, Trump told the Times that he thought further talks were “a waste of time,” and hinted that he would just act on his own after the deadline.) Nobody comes out of this entirely clean, but polls show that more Americans blame the President than blame the congressional Democrats, and it’s easy to imagine Democratic 2020 campaign ads looping the sound bite of Trump telling Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer that he was “proud” to close the government.

Perhaps the most consequential aspect of these events is what they have revealed about the Administration’s cluelessness when it comes to the everyday lives of Americans. No one expects Trump to show, say, racial sensitivity or a plausible interest in gender politics. Expectations concerning his general probity, his commitment to paying his fair share of taxes, and his ability to distance himself from meddling Russians and dictators who flatter him are similarly low. What the self-described billionaire President and his Administration are still supposed to have, though, is an affinity for working-class Americans.

Yet last week, on CNBC, there was Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary, saying, when asked about furloughed workers who were resorting to food banks, “I know they are, and I don’t really quite understand why.” Ross, who became extremely rich in the business of restructuring failing companies, explained that “there’s no real reason” that people who weren’t getting paid couldn’t just go out and get a loan. He didn’t seem familiar—nor did Trump, in his mentions of the shut-out workers—with the concept of living paycheck to paycheck, or with the statistic, released last year by the Federal Reserve Board, that forty per cent of Americans would have trouble covering an emergency expense of just four hundred dollars. Then there was Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, telling “PBS NewsHour” that workers furloughed during the shutdown were “better off,” since they could go on vacation without having to use their vacation days.

Trump also had nothing much to say about the plight of the hundreds of thousands of government contractors—many of them low-wage earners, such as janitors, cafeteria workers, and security guards in government buildings—who are not guaranteed the back pay that career employees of the federal government will get. Héctor Figueroa, the president of a union that represents some of those workers, told the Washington Post that they “have been living on the edge of disaster for five weeks,” adding that many “are facing eviction, power shut-offs, hunger and even going without lifesaving medications.”

At the same time, Trump’s larger vision for rebuilding blue-collar jobs took a couple of blows. A report that the U.S. Energy Information Administration released last month showed that coal production had fallen in 2018, largely owing to competition from cheap natural gas. That was despite Trump’s attempts to shore up an industry he has consistently championed, by, among other things, scrapping the Clean Power Plan and appointing as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency first the regulation-crushing Oklahoman Scott Pruitt and then, when he left, amid scandals, the former coal-company lobbyist Andrew Wheeler.

Meanwhile, Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant, waffled on its promise to build a factory in Wisconsin that would create thousands of manufacturing jobs. First, the company suggested that it wouldn’t build the factory, after all, and then, on Friday, following a phone call from Trump, it said that it would, but left the number of blue-collar jobs that it would provide unclear. At a White House event announcing the deal, in 2017, Trump had bragged of his friendly relationship with Terry Gou, the head of Foxconn, but changes in what the company called the “global market environment” were making that bonhomie hard to count on.

All these misfires create opportunities for the Democrats to show that they are committed to generating jobs and to protecting people from the harshest forces of the global market. They can start by trying to pass legislation to guarantee back pay for contract workers who were cut off by the shutdown; a handful of Democratic senators have already introduced a bill, the Fair Compensation for Low-Wage Contractor Employees Act, to rectify the situation. In the coming weeks, they can also work to fill in what a Green New Deal jobs program might look like. They can support infrastructure spending, introduce legislation to raise the minimum wage, and focus, in the House investigations of Trump, on some issues of basic fairness for ordinary Americans, such as the Administration’s weakening of the Affordable Care Act. They can show themselves to be the real party of the American working class—and find a Presidential candidate, among the growing Democratic field, who can bring that point home. ♦