Dems must say: No troops, or no shutdown deal | Will Bunch Newsletter

Red October has become a blue affair, a kind of dead October. The grim storyline of postseason baseball collapses at the previously joyous Citizens Bank Park hit a new low this week as two brutal, late-inning losses to the defending world champion Dodgers have the Phillies again on the brink of elimination. For me, 2025 has been a year of loss, and dreams of rebirth. Why should our national pastime be any different?

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It seemed kind of crazy when the hit movie Civil War came out in spring 2024 and the main storyline hinged on a war against the rest of the United States waged by the combined forces of Texas and California, our two most unalike big states in real life. But it must have ignited one of the dim bulbs in the Donald Trump White House.

On Sunday, the 47th president and his raging id, Stephen Miller — blocked by federal judges and political reality from some of their schemes for flooding cities run by their Democratic enemies with armed soldiers — had a new brainstorm for igniting a constitutional crisis.

First, Trump announced on his favorite platform of Truth Social that — rebuffed by Oregon’s governor and a judge that he’d appointed in his first term — he had a new plan for deploying National Guard troops on the streets of Portland. (This is the city Trump thinks is “on fire” after watching b-roll footage of 2020 unrest on Fox News.)

The administration eventually said it would federalize and call up 200 soldiers from the California National Guard — against the will of that state’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, just as the Trump regime had done earlier this year on the streets of Los Angeles. And it didn’t stop there.

By Sunday night, the very pro-Trump governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, sought to cement the bizarre alliance between California and the Lone Star State by announcing that, under a presidential order, he was calling up 400 National Guard troops who could also be sent to Portland, or to Chicago, or anywhere else that the White House seeks to invade.

For all the nattering nabobs in the media who still think this is about “fighting crime,” Trump flew to Norfolk, Va., and — before a cheering throng of sailors celebrating the Navy’s 250th anniversary — all but declared war on half of the country he was elected to serve. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he declared.

OK, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon more times than an ancient Roman ferry, but this really feels like The Big One in terms of a constitutional crisis. The idea of soldiers from a cornerstone of the old Confederacy rolling up I-55 in BearCat armored personnel carriers to occupy the streets of a northern city really did feel like another Civil War, and this time I’m not talking about the movie.

The president — defying both laws and democratic norms meant to prevent the deployment of American troops on U.S. soil — is sending armed troops to occupy key intersections in the cities that voted heavily for the opposing party, and that’s just the half of it.

As the calendar flipped from summer to fall, the Trump regime has amped up the authoritarianism on every front — a flash-bang dead-of-night warrantless raid on an entire Chicago apartment building, obliterating boats and their passengers off the coast of Venezuela in campaign that the normally staid New York Bar Association just called “murder,” and pressing prosecutors to indict Trump’s political enemies.

Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, in the crosshairs with masked federal agents already swarming his state’s largest city, has risen to the occasion — at least verbally.

“There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation,” Pritzker wrote on Bluesky Sunday night, adding: “The brave men and women who serve in our national guards must not be used as political props. This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”

While Democrats have more often been finding the right words about America’s rising fascism, action has proved more complicated. Pritzker himself came in for criticism over the role of Illinois State Police at the Broadview ICE facility near Chicago, where protesters believed the troopers were curbing their protest rights. Time and time again, a repressive U.S. policing culture seems to trump the ability of even progressive Democrats to rein it in.

Even worse, the Democrats have powerful leverage that they’re not using. Some 1,000 miles east of the democracy crisis in Chicago, the 47 Democratic senators — thanks to the filibuster — have been using their power to keep much of the federal government shut down, after missing last week’s deadline for legislation to keep paying the bills.

Led by a duo of milquetoast New Yorkers, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats and their omnipresent pollsters have said they won’t vote to reopen the government unless Trump and the GOP agree to undo devastating cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

The Dems are right to fight this battle — millions of working-class people face devastating premium hikes, or will lose coverage altogether if nothing is done — and yet it also fails to reflect the gravity of the current threat to the American way of life. How could voters celebrate a deal that claws back some dollars for healthcare yet continues to pay for state terror on the streets of Chicago or Trump’s pirates of the Caribbean?

We heard last week from one prominent Democrat who gets it. “Listen, I don’t think we’re asking for too much in that we are telling the president that if you want us to sign onto a budget, it can’t be a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy,“ Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told the New Republic last week. ”I would be a sucker to agree to a budget that literally funds an operation to hunt me and my allies down — to imprison us, harass us, intimidate us."

A steadily rising number of everyday voters also see the rise of authoritarianism as intolerable. One of the more telling developments of 2025 has been watching regular citizens increasingly defy the government — members of grand juries or trial juries rejecting the Justice Department’s extreme prosecutions, for example — while pampered elites curry favor with the regime. The budget shutdown crisis in Washington is an opportunity for top Democrats to flip the script.

It’s time for the opposition party to take a bold, principled risk. Democrats need to hold a nationally televised news conference and announce as a unified group that they won’t fund the federal government if Trump is going to use those dollars to invade blue cities. They need to declare: No troops, now or in the future, or no deal.

American fascism is here, and the battle must be joined. Democratic leaders need to rally their own “troops” — millions of angry and anxious citizens — to take to the streets in support of the fight to save democracy and to accept the sacrifices that come with making a moral stand against autocracy. They also need to gamble that courage will enhance their political careers, even if that risks losing reelection to a job that their past cowardice has made nearly worthless anyway.

The choice is clear. We can resist Trump’s tyranny at some unknown future date — when his tin soldiers are stationed across the country, when the media has been totally neutered and other institutions like our universities have been humiliated and crushed, and when the odds for success will be extremely difficult. Or we can stage that battle now, mustering all the liberty we have left. Democrats simply cannot pass a budget that pays for the destruction of the American Experiment.

Question: Lots of chatter on this platform (Bluesky) about the 25th Amendment. Sounds like poppycock. Can’t imagine it under any circumstance. Your take? — The Cuyahoga Kid (@cuyahogakid.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: The 25th Amendment that addresses presidential incapacitation probably should have been numbered 22, as in Catch-22. Sure, some presidents (although not Trump, in this notorious incident) have invoked it voluntarily before a surgery with anesthesia, but its involuntary clause — the idea that a supermajority of the Cabinet or Congress could declare a physically or mentally unwell POTUS as not fit for the job — is impossible in this age of intense partisanship built around loyalty to the leader, not to the country. It’s a tragic flaw since both Trump’s physical condition — monthly disappearances from public view, the mysterious hand-bruising and ankle-swelling — and his bizarre mental state, as shown by his social-media posts and his rambling speeches, demand some type of action. It would help if the media played its constitutional role as a free press and reported more aggressively on Trump’s condition.

Last week’s question about dream candidates to replace the inadequate Democratic leadership of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries brought a robust response, highlighting the progressive superstars often written about in this space — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett in the House, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and the two-Chris tag team of Murphy and Van Hollen in the upper chamber. Most often mentioned was Rep. Jamie Raskin for House Speaker. Frequent contributor Mary Ann Petro didn’t see anyone on the horizon. “This country still is not progressive, that is a pipe dream,” she wrote.

📮 This week’s question: I’ve mostly avoided asking about my Philly sports obsession, since so many readers are from elsewhere and the passion for athletics here isn’t as strong as the interest in politics. But this is unavoidable: Do the Phillies fire manager Rob Thomson after their serial October collapses? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Rob Thomson” in the subject line.

Once upon a time, college saved a young man named Marc Rowan. Indeed, it’s fair to argue that billionaire Rowan — a co-founder of Apollo Global Management (along with 76ers owner Josh Harris) — wouldn’t have become one of the world’s richest people if not for the values and the virtue of his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. Raised in a middle-class Long Island family, Rowan’s dad died in the 1980s before his son had finished his studies in business at the Wharton School, and his family was unable to afford tuition. The university told the Rowans they could pay later — which Rowan did a few years after graduating, as a rising star on Wall Street.

It’s got all the trappings of a feel-good movie, especially as Rowan paid back the Ivy League school with interest. He became a major donor, and in October 2018 he gave a whopping $50 million to fund programs at Wharton. Not surprisingly, Rowan was in turn rewarded with a post as the chair of the business school’s advisory board. But the nature of the relationship changed dramatically as Rowan, who is Jewish and active in causes like the United Jewish Appeal, took offense at growing student and faculty support for the Palestinian cause. His fight against the 2023 Palestine Writes festival on campus segued quickly into a winning crusade to oust then-Penn President Liz Magill and university trustee chair Scott Bok over the school’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas. This sprouted into a much broader critique of the academy in America, with Rowan writing attacks on Penn and its sister universities as hostile to conservative ideas, and questioning how the liberal arts are taught.

We now know that Rowan had even bigger ambitions for changing higher education as we know it. Late last week, the New York Times reported that Rowan last winter began privately circulating what was called “a university support and eligibility agreement.” This became the blueprint for a proposed devil’s bargain between the Trump regime and top U.S. universities, in which schools that sign onto a “compact” would be promised preferential treatment in federal research funding. In return, the deal — reportedly offered to nine schools including Penn and my alma mater, Brown — would mean agreeing to elevate conservative voices, require standardized tests like the SAT, limit international students, and — saying the quiet part out loud — concede that “academic freedom is not absolute.”

The truth is that academic freedom — as traced all the way back to the high-minded ideals of Benjamin Franklin’s founding of Penn back in 1749 — is exactly the thing that made American universities the envy of the world in the booming decades immediately after World War II. It’s what made Rowan’s diploma so valuable to Wall Street recruiters — a fact of life that the financier seemed to acknowledge with his generosity before he turned against the school that nurtured him. Rowan has become the avatar of a 21st century billionaire class that sees the ideas that have gained power through free inquiry threatening their own insecurities about status, and maybe their ability to pass their white privilege down to their children. So far, Penn, Brown, and the other targeted schools have given a cool response, but this war is just beginning. Marc Rowan wants to destroy the university in order to save it.

Most of the blog posts that I wrote for Attytood from early 2005 through the start of the 2008 presidential campaign were destroyed by the then-Inquirer IT team for reasons way too arcane to explain here. I did at one point, however, salvage this post from Oct. 7, 2005 that gives you a flavor of my very first year of blogging, when I opposed the crimes of the George W. Bush presidency with the same zeal with which I fight the current regime. On this date 20 years ago, I called out the 43rd president for his administration’s penchant for puffed-up and possibly bogus “terror alerts” to divert from political bad news. I wrote: “After so much crying ‘wolf,’ will we ever believe Washington when there’s a real credible threat.” Read the rest: “Crying wolf in a crowded subway.”

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