Trump, the Shutdown, the Threat of Mass Layoffs and Nazi Methods

It is the second day of the government shutdown in Washington, and Donald Trump is staging it like an instrument of power. Where previous presidents in such moments tried to keep the damage to public administration as small as possible, Trump is using the shutdown to issue threats, intimidate opponents and reshape the state structure according to his own ideas. Instead of simply furloughing the roughly 750,000 federal employees, as has usually been the case in previous budget crises, the White House had his spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt announce that "layoffs are imminent."

The harshness of these words was no accident but calculation. Only a few hours earlier, the Office of Management and Budget had announced that it was putting on hold infrastructure projects worth around 18 billion dollars - including the expansion of the New York subway system and the Hudson Tunnel, of all places in the home region of the leading Democrats in Congress. It is a blow with symbolic character: not anonymous budget figures, but visible lifelines of democratically governed cities are to be hit in the course of the shutdown. The escalation at this early stage confirms the fears of many lawmakers and budget experts that Trump does not view the lapse of government funding as an accident, but as a lever to disempower Parliament. Anyone who opposes the president is to pay the price in jobs, investments and public infrastructure. The shutdown thus becomes the stage for an authoritarian experiment in which the balance between the legislative and executive branches is systematically shifted.

But the breaking of taboos is not only evident in the budget decisions. Democrats in Congress already see clear violations of existing law. Robert Garcia, the top-ranking Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the Office of Special Counsel accusing the administration of "apparent violations of the Hatch Act and the illegal use of government resources to promote a false, partisan agenda." In recent days, several federal agencies have used their official channels to spread messages that placed responsibility for the shutdown solely on the Democrats. Social media posts by cabinet members, as well as messages on the websites of ministries, were deliberately used to push a partisan narrative into the public sphere - an approach strictly prohibited under US law.

Garcia is calling for an immediate investigation. Even if the agency is currently headed by a Trump-affiliated interim official, an official procedure is to provide clarity. For the Democrats, it is about more than the current shutdown: it is an attempt to defend the principles of civil service against appropriation by party politics. Any further precedent could completely erase the already eroding distinction between neutral administration and partisan propaganda.

But while lawyers and lawmakers pore over the legal situation, Trump is staging the crisis in a way that appears hardly less scandalous: with an orchestrated campaign of artificially generated memes and mock videos. The opening act was an AI-generated video in which Democratic caucus leader Hakeem Jeffries was edited with a sombrero and mariachi music - a grotesque caricature that put a fabricated rant into Jeffries’ mouth. What initially seemed like a slip quickly became the line.

"The sombreros will remain until the government reopens," declared Kaelan Dorr, deputy communications director of the White House, openly on X. Later the official GOP account picked up the template, as did Senator Ted Cruz, who published several variations of the motif. In his post, accompanied by a distorted version of the 1990s Latino hit "Macarena," he showed Democratic senators with imposed sombreros and mustaches - with the cynical message that the posting of the memes would continue until the Democrats gave in.

For many observers this may seem like mere provocation. But for the largest Hispanic advocacy organizations in the country it was a targeted attack. In a joint statement, organizations such as the Hispanic Federation, Mi Familia Vota, UnidosUs and Voto Latino condemned the action as "irresponsible, reprehensible and beneath the dignity of the presidency." The use of AI to reinforce racist stereotypes was not only reckless but a deliberate attempt to further stigmatize an already marginalized community at a moment of highest political tension.

This form of disinformation, paired with racist codes, shows how the president is using the terrain of the shutdown as a testing ground: undermining institutions, destroying state neutrality, targeting minorities and at the same time tearing down every boundary between government work and election tactics. Thus the second day of the shutdown does not present itself as a technical budget crisis, but as the political laboratory of a new era. Threats of layoffs, the curtailment of public infrastructure, legally questionable government messages and the degradation of an entire community through staged memes - all of this adds up to a picture that goes far beyond day-to-day business.

The shutdown, in previous decades regarded as a disruption of an otherwise stable order, has in Trump’s hands become an instrument of political warfare. And while millions of Americans look anxiously at their paychecks, their subway construction sites or their social media, the real question arises: whether the country realizes that this is not just a fight about money, but about the very foundation of democracy itself.