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Archive for October 7th, 2025|Daily archive page

THE LIVES OF CHICKENS–AND AMERICANS: PART TWO (END)

In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on October 7, 2025 at 12:10 am

On October 1, President Donald Trump shut down the Federal government.   

On July 4, Trump had signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, which impacts Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and is projected to cause millions of Americans to lose health insurance coverage.

The bill includes the largest cuts in Medicaid’s history, reducing funding by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade. 

Or, as Trump and Republicans might say: “What are the lives of Americans but so many chickens?”

Democratic senators refused to support a temporary spending bill to fund the government unless it included an extension of these subsidies, which keep health care plans affordable for many Americans. 

Trump—and Congressional Republicans—refused to do this. In addition, both falsely claimed that Democrats wanted to give health coverage to illegal aliens. 

For Trump, winning—not truth—is all that matters. During his first term as President, he told 30,573 lies.

Head-and-shoulders shot of Trump with a serious facial expression, his right eye partly closed. He is wearing a dark blue suit, a pale blue dress shirt, a red necktie, and an American flag lapel pin. Parts of the image are slightly out of focus. The background is black.

Donald Trump

Congress failed to pass the annual appropriations bills required to fund government agencies before the new fiscal year began on October 1, 2025. As a result, federal agencies must cease all “non-essential” functions until funding is approved.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that about 750,000 employees will be furloughed on the average day. That’s $400 million in salary each day that the government will ultimately pay, but will not get work for. 

Trump had threatened to use a shutdown to permanently reduce the size of the federal workforce. 

“We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want and they’d be Democrat things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “They just don’t learn. So we have no choice. I have to do that for the country. 

“When you shut it down, you have to do layoffs, so we’d be laying off a lot of people. They’re going to be Democrats.”

This is the language—and “negotiating” style—of Adolf Hitler. 

Robert Payne, author of the bestselling biography, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), described Hitler’s “negotiating” style thus: 

“Although Hitler prized his own talents as a negotiator, a man always capable of striking a good bargain, he was totally lacking in finesse. 

“He was incapable of bargaining. He was like a man who goes up to a fruit peddler and threatens to blow his brains out if he does not sell his applies at the lowest possible price.”

Like Hitler, Trump relies on insults and anger to put his victims on the defense. 

On September 29, Trump posted an AI-generated video on social media depicting House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a sombrero and curly mustache as mariachi music plays in the background.

After Jeffries condemned the video as racist and bigoted, on September 30 Trump posted another deepfake video mocking his reaction. 

On October 1, Vice President J.D. Vance called the videos “funny,” adding, The president’s joking, and we’re having a good time.”

Yet Trump has raged when late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel have joked about him.

Like Hitler, Trump relies on fear: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear,” he told journalist Bob Woodward in March 2016 when still a Presidential candidate.

On the October 3 edition of Washington Week with the Atlantic, Ashley Parker, a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine, said: 

“[Trump] likes threatening Democrats, right, saying, we’re going to do what Project 2025 promised. We’re going to fire all these workers. We’re going to figure out what agencies we can just eliminate forever. It’s a fun thing to say. That’s for him. That’s why I say it’s trolling, but it’s not quite clear that that’s actually what he wants to do.” 

Federal agencies began explicitly blaming Democrats for the government shutdown—even before it happened. 

On September 30, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website posted: “The radical left are going to shut down the government.”

For Trump, everyone who opposes him is a “radical leftist”-–even though he boasted that he and Communist North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un “fell in love.”

Democrats fear they will be blamed for the shutdown. Yet they might triumph if they remember that what worked against Hitler will most likely work against Trump.

Rule #1: Refuse to placate a brutal dictator. Such men see any concessions as weakness—and make only greater demands. Hitler, for example, demanded only a part of Czechoslovakia—and then seized the whole country.

Rule #2: When Hitler found himself facing an opponent who couldn’t be bribed or cowed—such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin—he raged and/or sulked. 

When Trump has faced an opponent he can’t buy or intimidate—such as Special Counsels Robert Mueller and Jack Smith—he has done the same.

Rule #3: Don’t sell out an ally or make concessions to an insatiable dictator—and believe he can be trusted to keep his word. Trump has repeatedly proven his word can’t be trusted.

Far more than a government shutdown is at stake.

If Democrats fall victim to their usual cowardice and disunity in the face of Right-wing threats and attacks, they will: 

  1. End their relevance as a political party; and
  2. Condemn to death millions of Americans who cannot obtain life-saving medical care while billionaires gain huge tax cuts.