By André Costa | 1 October 2025
The United States government is shut down for the first time since the last Trump presidency, and we must be clear from the outset, this is not an accident, it’s not even the tired old story of Congress failing to find compromise, this is exactly what Donald Trump wanted. He pushed for it, he celebrated the idea of it, and now it is here. There is currently no funding, but Trump has promised to use this time to remove federal employees that he doesn’t want.
So when you shut it down, you have to do layoffs. So we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and the Democrats, they’re going to be Democrats.
- Trump outlined his wishes for the shutdown in the White House
It is worth remembering, because he himself said it, that the president is always the one responsible for a shutdown. Those were Trump’s words back in 2013, when he declared that if the government closed its doors, the president was the one behind it, the one accountable, the one to blame. Today he is the president, and the government has once again shut down, and the line from his mouth to this moment is straight and unbroken. However, this comment was an attack on Barrack Obama, and was simply designed as a part of Trump’s chosen feud with the former president.
This shutdown is the product of Trump’s demand that anything he does not like be strangled, that the machinery of the federal government be treated as a bargaining chip, that tens of thousands of workers be left without pay and millions of Americans lose access to services, all because he wants to prove a point. And the point is simple: he prefers no government at all to one that does not bow to him.
And the impacts are already set to be felt in homes, in hospitals, in schools, in streets across the country. Federal employees will be furloughed in droves, told to stay home without pay or to keep working without it, waiting on a promise that a paycheck might someday come.
National parks are shutting their gates or left to rot without staff, air traffic controllers and TSA agents are forced to work long hours without the certainty of wages, food assistance programs face delays, small business loans stall, and scientific research grinds to a halt.
Veterans trying to access benefits will face even longer waits, families relying on early childhood programs may find doors closed, and the people who least deserve to suffer will once again be the ones carrying the weight of Trump’s tantrum.
So when you hear the pundits on television speak of stalemates, or when you see the headlines that try to pin the blame on “Congress” as if it is some faceless machine, remember Trump’s own line, the president is behind the shutdown. He wanted it, he made it happen, and the country now lives with the consequences.