The

The The ongoing government shutdown is the first real strategic test of Democrats in Trump's second term. It is the first time

when they've overcome enough of their internal divisions to choose a fight, choose a message,

choose a set of demands, and actually take a risk. Behind this fight are a bunch of strategic

schisms in the party, or whether or not it makes sense to confront Trump

in this way to use what leverage they have to take this kind of risk, schisms over whether or not

to fight on lawlessness, authoritarianism, democracy, or to only focus on pocketbook issues.

And now we're in the shutdown and the road out of it and towards the midterms and

eventually towards 2028 is going to require Democrats to face not just these, but a bunch of

other schisms in their party over what kind of strategy works for them, what kind of voters

they're trying to win back and what those voters actually want. To talk through both how we got here and where the Democratic Party is going, I want to invite

on John Favro.

Favro, of course, was director of speech writing for President Barack Obama, and he is the co-host

of the head podcast, Pod Save America.

As always, my email, Ezraplne Show at NYTimes.com.

John Favro, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So I want to start in the strategic divide that led to this. You go back a

couple months, there's a debate inside the Senate Democratic Caucus, the House Democratic Caucus,

about whether or not to have a shutdown, whether or not that is a safe thing for Democrats to do.

What are the two sides of that debate? I think the side of the debate where people did not want to shut down

is that the party that causes the shutdown almost never wins, that it was going to be

impossible to ring any concessions out of the Trump administration. So why are Democrats

...