The Frozen State - Paralysis, Threats, Inflation and the Silence of a Capital

Twelve days of paralysis. Twelve days in which the most powerful country in the world disables its own institutions while hundreds of thousands of federal employees sit at home without pay - hostages to a political strategy that is no longer a strategy but a ritual of self-destruction. The new Vice President J. D. Vance said it on Sunday: The longer the blockade lasts, the deeper the cuts will be. “Some of these cuts will be painful,” he said. Painful for whom, he left open.

Meanwhile, the White House is working to secure military pay and maintain minimal social benefits for low-income families. The subtext is cynical: the system protects weapons before people. In a country that sees itself as a bastion of individualism, the civil service has become a bargaining chip. According to a filing by the Office of Management and Budget, more than 4,000 federal employees are to be dismissed, in addition to the hundreds of thousands already furloughed.

Vance, who likes to present himself as a pragmatist in interviews, called it inevitable. “The Democrats have dealt us a difficult hand,” he said on Fox News. The sentence is emblematic of this administration’s rhetorical imbalance: an economic and moral crisis reduced to a card game metaphor, as if state responsibility could be folded when the hand is bad.

The paralysis began on October 1, when Democrats rejected a short-term funding bill because it did not include an extension of health insurance subsidies - subsidies that millions of Americans will lose starting in January. Trump and his Republican majority insisted that the government must reopen before health costs could be discussed. In truth, nothing is opening: no dialogue, no progress, no sense of responsibility.

While both sides trade blame on the Sunday shows, the drama unfolds in the corridors of government buildings. Inside the Departments of Education and Treasury, the Health Department, and the Environmental Protection Agency, hundreds of termination letters are being prepared. Unions call the measures “illegal,” but the Justice Department remains silent. An entire nation finds itself in a legal limbo - too expensive to function, too proud to admit it is collapsing.

Trump, meanwhile, occupies himself with his favorite pastime: rewriting reality. Before the United Nations, he declared at the end of September that inflation was “defeated,” prices were falling, the economy was booming. The data shows the opposite. Inflation is higher than a year ago, food prices are rising, and the tariffs Trump sells as patriotic leverage are making everyday goods more expensive. The president has not defeated inflation - he has disguised it.

The Federal Reserve, whose independence has long been caught in Trump’s rhetorical crossfire, lowered its key interest rate in September for the first time in a year. Jerome Powell spoke of a “clear easing,” but economists warn that the rate cut is based on a fallacy: that Trump’s trade war causes only temporary price spikes. If that turns out to be wrong, the Fed’s credibility will follow the same erosion process as the rest of America’s institutions.

Karen Dynan of the Peterson Institute put it plainly: “If it turns out that tariffs have longer-lasting effects, the rate cuts will be seen as a mistake.” The numbers support her: consumer prices rose 2.9 percent in August, rents barely fell, food prices continued to climb. Coffee, once a symbol of American everyday life, is 21 percent more expensive - a mix of climate impacts and import tariffs on Brazilian beans. But Trump thinks in stages, not in causality. A few falling mortgage rates, an optimistic speech - and the illusion stands. The country is experiencing the strangest contradiction of its recent history: inflation that is officially defeated but still lives in people’s wallets.

At the same time, new fractures are emerging in the background, visible in the example of Washington. While National Guard troops patrol subway stations and federal security forces arrest residents, the capital wrestles with an old problem: the absence of its voice. Eleanor Holmes Norton, 88 years old, nonvoting representative of the District of Columbia for 18 terms, is barely seen. Even former allies like Donna Brazile are calling for her resignation. “D.C. is under attack as it hasn’t been in decades,” she wrote. “We need a new voice.”

Eleanor Holmes Norton is an elected voice without a vote - the paradox of American democracy embodied. Since 1991, she has represented the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives, allowed to speak, argue, and introduce bills, but not to vote. Washington, D.C. is not a state; its citizens pay taxes but lack full representation - a quiet contradiction printed on every license plate in the city: “Taxation without representation.” Norton moves in this gray zone between power and powerlessness, as a symbol of a capital that is the center of democracy but not entirely part of it.

Norton, who fought for civil rights in the 1960s and later headed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has built a career that helped shape America. But in committee meetings, she appears fragile, reading haltingly from prepared notes. Her silence amid the federal state of emergency has become the symbol of a city whose self-governance has existed only on paper since Trump’s rise to power. Since the president declared a state of emergency over Washington in August, National Guard troops and federal officers have remained - even after the decree expired. The city government is powerless. Budget autonomy, once hard-won, now effectively lies with Congress again. And while Norton stayed silent, Congress created a $1.1 billion budget hole that remains unresolved.

Trump sells it as law and order policy. In truth, it is a quiet reconstruction of the state: the reduction of a city to a symbol, the disempowerment of a parliament, the dismantling of federal norms - all under the label of “security.” In this setting, Washington no longer looks like the capital of democracy but like its reflection: heavily guarded, voiceless, and controlled. “She saved the city,” said Tom Davis, Republican and former colleague of Norton’s. Today, the phrase sounds like it belongs to another era. A whole generation that once fought for civil rights now watches as the Republican government rolls them back step by step - not loudly, but with administrative precision.

Thus, the circle closes: a country that lays off its civil servants, masks its inflation, and puts its capital under supervision still believes itself in control. In truth, it staggers - between self-deception and self-destruction. Perhaps this is the new American realism: one that calls itself disturbed because it has long since grown used to the disturbance.