Negotiating With Nihilists: Give Us The Money Or We Smash The State

Apparently, it’s not just 5-year-old girls this regime will hold hostage until it gets what it wants.

Now it’s the government itself.

It seems that they noticed, the last time this issue came around, that the Democrats were more scared of what would happen if they didn’t vote to fund Trump’s plan to strip the United States for saleable parts than they were of the plan itself.

There was, at the time, much wringing of Democratic hands about how Trump could use a shutdown to eliminate the parts of the State that Musk and the DOGE-lings were already busy burning to the ground.

Yeah, it never made much sense but the Democrats caved over it anyway.

So this time they’re making that threat explicit: pass a funding bill the Trumpers like or they’ll do massive layoffs across big chunks of the the bureaucracy.

Only the parts that they don’t like, mind, and nobody they weren’t going to fire already anyway.

It really is, basically: give us the money to do what we want, which includes firing all these bureaucrats, or we fire all these bureaucrats. Heads, they win; tails, you lose.

It’s not the most well thought-out or persuasive negotiating tactic.