It was the night of March 5, 1836. For the roughly 200 men inside the surrounded Alamo, death lay only hours away.  

Inside a house in San Antonio, Texas, Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was holding a council of war with his generals.

For 12 days, his army had bombarded the old mission. Still, the Texians—whose numbers included the legendary bear hunter and Congressman David Crockett and knife fighter James Bowie—held out.

Now Santa Anna was in a hurry to take the makeshift fortress. Once its defenders were dead, he could march on to sweep all American settlers from Texas.

One of his generals, Manuel Castrillón, urged Santa Anna to wait just a few more days. By then, far bigger cannon would be available. When the Alamo’s three-feet-thick walls had been knocked down, the defenders would be forced to surrender.

The lives of countless Mexican soldiers would thus be spared.

Santa Anna was eating a late-night chicken dinner. He held up a chicken leg and said: “What are the lives of soldiers but those of so many chickens?”

Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna

Santa Anna ordered his generals to prepare an all-out attack on the Alamo, to be launched the next morning—March 6, 1836—at 5 a.m.

Hours later, the attack went forward. Within 90 minutes, every Alamo defender was dead—and so were at least 600 Mexican soldiers. 

“What are the lives of Americans but those of so many chickens?”

That could well be the slogan of President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans during the October 1 shutdown of the Federal government. 

On July 4, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, which enacts significant cuts to federal health programs to help pay for tax reductions.

The law primarily 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.

Democrats had demanded a bill that reversed cuts to Medicaid and prevented health insurance premiums from rising at the end of the year. Republicans had refused.

Trump had threatened to use a shutdown to permanently reduce the size of the federal work force:

“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”

Donald Trump

And Trump’s Congressional supporters quickly issued threats of their own:

“We have never had Democrats that are so insane as this,” said Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH), “because this is going to last a long—if they shut down the government tonight, my prediction is it will go on for a long, long time.”

“Far-left interest groups and far-left Democrat members wanted to show down with the president, and so Senate Democrats have sacrificed the American people to Democrats’ partisan interests,” Senate majority leader John Thune said.

Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Yet they are blaming the shutdown on the party that doesn’t control any of these institutions.

And they are using a Trump lie to justify it: “One of the things [Democrats] want to do is, they want to give incredible Medicare, Cadillac, the Cadillac Medicare, to illegal immigrants. And what that does is, it keeps them coming into our country like they do in California. And no country can afford that, no country.”

On the September 30 edition of The PBS News Hour, Liz Landers, the News Hour’s White House correspondent, said: “Undocumented immigrants are not allowed to be enrolled in federally funded health care coverage in this country. That includes Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, the child health care program, and even some of those Affordable Care Act subsidies.”

This is the first government shutdown since December 22, 2018, during Trump’s first term. Angered that Democrats refused his demands for border wall funding, Trump declared the government closed.

About 380,000 government employees were furloughed and another 420,000 were ordered to work without pay. 

The shutdown lasted 35 days—December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019. It ended only when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to open the House of Representatives for Trump’s annual State of the Union message.

The effects of the shutdown quickly became evident:  

• For weeks, hundreds of thousands of government workers missed paychecks.
• Trash piled up in national parks. 
• Increasing numbers of employees of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA)—which provides security against airline terrorism—began refusing to come to work, claiming to be sick.
• At the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) many air traffic controllers called in “sick.” Those who showed up to work without pay grew increasingly frazzled as they feared being evicted for being unable to make rent or house payments. 
• Due to the shortage of air traffic controllers, many planes weren’t able to land safely at places like New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
• Many Federal employees—such as FBI agents—were forced to rely on soup kitchens to feed their families.
• Celebrity chef Jose Andres launched ChefsForFeds, which offered free hot meals for government employees and their families at restaurants across the country. 
• Many workers tried to bring in money by babysitting or driving for Uber.