The Inner Monologue

If this president allows fourteen thousand farms and businesses to fail under his watch, history will not remember him as cautious, or deliberate, or prudent. It will remember him as ineffectual. A leader who mistook stubbornness for strength and paralysis for principle. A man who watched the people who feed and build this country go bankrupt, and did nothing because his party wanted to make a point.

There is no spin that can soften that. When the federal government shuts down, it’s not “Washington insiders” who feel it first—it’s farmers waiting on loan guarantees, contractors left unpaid on federal jobs, and small business owners who can’t close their SBA-backed deals. It’s the small, hardworking operators of America’s engine—those who never make cable news but keep the lights on in the economy. If, by the time this shutdown finally ends, more than ten thousand of them are gone, this administration will have presided over one of the most preventable waves of business failure in modern history.

The Myth of the Strong President

Every time a president digs in during a shutdown, they claim the mantle of resolve. They tell the cameras they won’t be bullied by Congress, that they’re holding firm to their principles. But there’s nothing strong about letting your citizens twist in the wind. It doesn’t take courage to do nothing. It takes courage to govern—to compromise, to lead, to find the least-bad path when every choice is painful.

This president seems to believe that strength is measured by the number of days government offices stay dark. That’s not leadership; that’s vanity masquerading as virtue. Farmers can’t pay their seed bills with “resolve.” Small businesses can’t make payroll with “political courage.” Every day this shutdown drags on, people who did nothing wrong—people who played by every rule—are being crushed under the weight of Washington’s failure.

Real People, Not Budget Lines

Somewhere in Kansas, a fourth-generation wheat farmer just learned that his USDA loan payment isn’t coming. He mortgaged his combine last spring, bought fuel on credit, and now has no cash to buy seed for winter wheat. In Georgia, a woman who started her own trucking company can’t close her SBA refinancing, and her trucks sit idle while interest piles up. In New Mexico, a contractor furloughed his crew after a Corps of Engineers project was halted mid-pour. These aren’t theoretical losses—they’re lives collapsing.

Economists will tally the fallout in tidy charts: 14,000 closures, $14 billion in evaporated revenue, thousands more in knock-on layoffs and defaults. But what those numbers can’t capture is the moral failure at the top. Leadership is not an academic exercise in fiscal brinkmanship—it’s stewardship. When you accept the presidency, you accept responsibility for the consequences of your inaction as much as your action.

The Cruel Irony of Ideological Purity

Shutting down the government to “save taxpayers money” is like burning down your house to save on heating. The 2018-19 shutdown cost America roughly $11 billion, $3 billion of it permanently lost. This one, already longer and broader in scope, will likely eclipse that. That is not fiscal conservatism—it is economic vandalism disguised as principle.

Every day the shutdown continues, the White House and its allies congratulate themselves on “standing firm.” But what they’re really doing is shifting the cost of their ideology onto the weakest shoulders. They aren’t sacrificing a dime of their own. The pain is outsourced to the people least equipped to endure it—the rural, the small, the self-employed. In other words, the very Americans they claim to champion.

A Year One Legacy of Decay

Presidents are judged by what happens under their watch, not what they intended. Franklin Roosevelt inherited a Depression and created the New Deal. Ronald Reagan inherited stagflation and sparked a boom. This president inherited a recovering economy and, in less than a year, managed to suffocate thousands of businesses through sheer political dysfunction.

When the history of this administration is written, this shutdown will not be a footnote—it will be the defining chapter. It will be remembered as the moment the president proved incapable of governing, the moment when the promise of leadership collapsed under the weight of ego and inertia. The longer it continues, the more the damage metastasizes: family farms sold off, rural communities hollowed, small towns erased from the map.

The Human Cost of Political Theater

It’s easy to forget that the federal government isn’t some distant entity—it’s a collection of promises. Promises that a farmer’s loan will be processed, that a veteran’s disability check will arrive, that a road project will continue, that the machinery of everyday life will keep turning. When the government shuts down, those promises break. And when a president allows that to happen month after month, he’s not merely presiding over a fiscal crisis—he’s presiding over a moral one.

A functioning democracy depends on the belief that leadership is, at its core, an act of service. If the president allows fourteen thousand businesses to fail while he grandstands, then he has betrayed that belief. He has shown that politics now values spectacle over substance, purity over pragmatism, loyalty over livelihood.

Lead or Get Out of the Way

If the president truly believes America is great, then he should act like it. Great nations don’t grind to a halt because of political tantrums. Great leaders don’t sacrifice their citizens’ livelihoods to score points. A real president would be on the phone, night and day, hammering out a deal, even if it meant defying his own party. He would be rallying governors, farmers, bankers, and small business owners, reminding them that the government is supposed to work for them—not against them.

If he can’t—or won’t—then he should have the decency to admit he’s not leading at all. Because if fourteen thousand farms and small businesses vanish this winter, it won’t be because of market forces or bad luck. It will be because a president chose political theater over governing. And history does not forgive leaders who confuse obstinacy with leadership.