Republicans have claimed the political high ground in the government shutdown fight, and have not been afraid to poke fun at the Democrats in the process.

But their meme-filled campaign risks coming off as too callous, some fear, handing Democrats the upper hand and potentially alienating voters this November and next year’s midterm elections.

This week, President Donald Trump posted a video of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) with a superimposed sombrero and mustache that Jeffries called “racist.” Trump followed up with an AI-generated video on his social media platform portraying White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought as the Grim Reaper as Vought prepares to fire, not just furlough, thousands of federal employees during the shutdown. 

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Vice President JD Vance defended the sombrero video as “funny,” while House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) acknowledged Trump is having fun “trolling” Democrats to highlight the “absurdity” of their demands to reopen the government. 

As the shutdown drags into its second week, with an estimated 750,000 federal workers furloughed and more than 2 million military service members on duty without pay, Trump is turning to Vought to inflict more pain by clawing back federal funds to largely blue states and cities. Unlike previous government shutdowns, including a 35-day stretch in Trump’s first term, the White House is preparing mass layoffs to permanently cull the federal workforce.

“The last time I checked, nobody voted for Russ Vought and President Trump didn’t run on Project 2025,” said Dennis Lennox, a GOP strategist from Michigan. “Trump and Republicans have Democrats in a weak position because Democrats chose illegals over Americans.”

Still, Lennox said, there’s a risk of overreach, much like what happened with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. 

“As we saw early on when DOGE went in with too many guns blazing, the whole blow everything up approach to reforming the federal government can be a huge distraction that burns through considerable political capital,” he said. “If there’s anything we know it’s that when staff becomes a liability or when staff steals the spotlight, they’re fired.”

Democrats have long warned of Vought’s stated desires to make federal workers so miserable that they are “in trauma.” Trump played into that fear in the video he posted, where Vought is dressed as the Grim Reaper with an accompanying song that says: “Russ Vought is the Reaper. He wields the pen, the funds, and the brain. Here comes the Reaper, Dems, you babies. Here comes the Reaper.”

Democrats, whose shutdown demands also include limiting Vought’s ability to rescind federal funds, condemned the video and other memes.

“Cruelty is the point,” Jeffries told reporters Friday during a press conference where he urged Republicans to make a bipartisan deal.

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Republicans control Congress and the White House, but need at least eight Democrats to join them in the Senate to pass legislation to reopen the government that has been shuttered since Oct. 1. Motivated by a base that wants to resist Trump, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has put together a list of demands to gain Democratic votes, including permanently extending expiring COVID-era Obamacare tax credits and rolling back Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, including those that curtail illegal immigrant access to healthcare.

The Republican plan, which passed the House but failed four times in the Senate, would keep the government funded largely at Fiscal Year 2025 levels until Nov. 21 to give lawmakers more time to pass full-year 2026 appropriations bills. 

Only a couple of days into this shutdown, polling is relatively split regarding who the public considers responsible for it, though Democrats have been amplifying a Washington Post poll published on Thursday that found a plurality of 47% of respondents told pollsters Trump and Republicans are “mainly responsible” for the current predicament. In contrast, 30% apportioned responsibility to Democrats, and 23% were not sure. 

Regardless, former Kansas Republican congressman Timothy Huelskamp, a one-time chairman of the House Tea Party Caucus, argued “most Americans instinctively know the government is bloated and long overdue for change.” 

“Stealing from future generations to pay for big government jobs today must end,” Huelskamp told the Washington Examiner.

Nevertheless, the White House and Republicans are becoming increasingly cognizant of the political optics of appearing callous, including reports that they are contemplating proposals regarding the Obamacare tax credits before the 2026 elections. 

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that making the tax credits permanent would increase the federal deficit by $350 billion from 2026 to 2035, but that there would be 3.6 million more insured Americans. A separate poll by KFF released Friday found that 78% of respondents preferred for Congress to extend the tax credits.

Meanwhile, Trump and Vought have also been announcing federal funding cuts to, in the president’s words, “Democrat agencies” and Democrat-run cities, including $20 billion for New York and Illinois infrastructure projects, in addition to $8 billion for what Vought called “Green New Scam” spending. 

Trump’s Grim Reaper video undermines the argument Johnson started making earlier Thursday that Vought is “taking no pleasure” in having to respond to the shutdown, despite Republicans’ traditional dislike for big government and the director’s past statements, including as a co-architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

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“Are they taking great pleasure in that? No. Is he trolling the Democrats? Yes. I mean, yes, because that’s what President Trump does, and people are having fun with this. But at the end of the day, the decisions are tough ones,” Johnson told reporters during his Friday press conference. 

During her own briefing on Friday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was similarly asked whether the shutdown is, again in the words of Trump, “an unprecedented opportunity” to decrease the size of the government or an unfortunate consequence. 

“Look, the president likes to have a little fun every now and then. And I think both things can be true at the same time: The Democrats have given the administration this opportunity, and we don’t like laying people off. Nobody takes joy in that around here,” Leavitt told reporters. “But sometimes in government, you have to make tough decisions.”

However, that is not what Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told Fox News earlier this week when he said Vought “has been dreaming about this moment, preparing for this moment, since puberty.”

Nonetheless, Democrats are becoming increasingly concerned about their own messaging as they “fight” for their Democratic base with the shutdown, particularly after the Democratic National Committee’s own video Thursday about the shutdown that included kittens was widely mocked.

“Feels like Brat Summer again,” Republican strategist Matt Whitlock wrote on X.

As Trump and Republicans undercut Schumer with speculation that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) may primary him in 2028, Democrats have embraced a video with her and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that better explains the shutdown.

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“Starting today, October 1, and throughout the rest of the month, Americans across this country are going to start getting notifications that their insurance premiums are up to doubling,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That means people getting bankrupt over chemotherapy, people going to the pharmacy and not being able to get their insulin, and frankly, it means a lot of Americans are going to be in danger, and Republicans want us to rubber-stamp that.”

As Democrats try to drive home a message that ensuring access to healthcare is the reason for the shutdown, the party’s official account posted its own version of a taunt: a picture of the GOP’s elephant logo with the words “Pedophile Protectors.” 

“NEW GOP PROFILE PIC JUST DROPPED,” the Democratic National Committee posted on Friday with the image, in reference to Republicans not yet holding a floor vote on the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s files.

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Democratic strategist Mike Nellis encouraged Democrats to “stay in the fight” before next year’s midterm elections, through which the party may regain control of the House because of Republicans’ historically small majority. 

“If we fold, we’ll validate everything the American people already believe about us,” Nellis said.
“Democrats should not fold, should not give in. The polling is with us. The American people are with us. People don’t want their health insurance premiums to rise at a time when everything is already so expensive because of Donald Trump’s tariffs.”

, 2025-10-05 12:00:00, , Washington Examiner, %%https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/cropped-favicon.png?w=32, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/feed/, Naomi Lim