Among the defining features of the longest-ever government shutdown, which was just temporarily resolved, was the way President Donald Trump used it to continue his campaign of traumatizing federal workers, extracting a political price from his adversaries and callously causing harm to the public.
When Senate Democrats blocked a temporary funding bill because it did not extend expiring health care subsidies, Trump was only too glad to take advantage. He did so by withholding federal funds from largely Democratic enclaves, laying off civil servants, threatening to not pay furloughed federal workers, denying food aid to millions of poor people, and adding to the disruption of airline travel, among other malevolent actions that have penalized the American public.
