Convinced Democrats were ‘winning’ the shutdown, progressive pundits are accusing party moderates of cowardice.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the Democratic pundit meltdown over the bipartisan deal to end the record-breaking government shutdown, and cover more media misses.
Democrats ‘Cave.’ Pundits Lose It
MSNBC panelists were outraged on Sunday after eight senators — seven Democrats and an independent — struck a deal with Republicans to vote in favor of a GOP-backed continuing resolution (CR) that would end the longest government shutdown in history. The CR does not include the guaranteed Affordable Care Act subsidy extensions that Democrats cited as their motivation for shutting the government down in the first place.
The panelists complained that the group of Democrats — who apparently defied Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer by supporting the CR — had caved in deciding to move toward ending the shutdown.
“For 40 days, you shut the government down and now you’re going to open the government up and what did you get in return? Nothing? Nothing?” said MSNBC columnist Dean Obeidallah. “After the pain you inflicted, people were willing to take the pain, I talked to union workers from TSA who said, I’ll take the pain, it’s going to help me get health insurance subsidies paid. So you’re getting nothing in return. I don’t know how, and you just won an election on Tuesday, and you lose numbers.”
But the deal was not a total loss for Democrats, who got Republicans to agree to reverse the layoffs of 4,000 federal workers and to schedule a vote on ACA subsidy extensions next month.
Still, The Weekend co-host Antonia Hylton expressed frustration with the deal, saying that President Trump had won the fight against Democrats.
“I mean, in a way, it seems like the president is kind of getting what he wanted 40 days ago when all this started,” Hylton said. “He was out there saying that, ‘Oh, this is all about Democrats trying to give health care to illegal immigrants.’ He just said that to reporters moments ago, repeated that refrain that Democrats had actually very successfully pushed back against.”
“Then there’s all this energy,” she went on. “In the wake of the election on Tuesday, the president made remarks saying basically, ‘Wow, Republicans are being harmed by all of this,’ acknowledging that he was on his back foot. And now, here he is, winning again?”
Meanwhile, Obeidallah protested, “I don’t understand how a Democratic senator goes, ‘Wow, we won really big. Let me cave now.’ I don’t understand. That makes no sense to me.”
MSNBC panel in meltdown as a deal to end the shutdown nears:
“The President is kinda getting what he wanted.”
“I don't understand how a democratic senator goes, 'wow we won really big — let me cave now.’ I don't understand. That makes no sense to me.” pic.twitter.com/GVOu6XwYL4
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) November 10, 2025
Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait joined the MSNBC chorus in arguing that the shutdown was actually going really well for Democrats. In his view, while historically Democrats would have been blamed for disrupting government services for 40 days, Trump has managed to alter the laws of political gravity and was attracting blame to himself through his inability to keep quiet. Had Democrats stayed strong, Chait argued, Republicans intent on reopening the government would have been forced to eliminate the filibuster for government spending bills. This outcome would have further weakened an already neutered Senate — an outcome Chait would have welcomed as a win for Democrats who for years have viewed the upper chamber as an impediment to their agenda. Chait was left disappointed that a few Democratic senators wish to preserve their body’s influence.
“The substantive arguments for the filibuster are terrible, but they appeal to the senatorial ego,” Chait wrote. “Senators in both parties cherish the filibuster as the thing that makes their chamber unique.”
“Democrats may have been more surprised than anybody to discover their shutdown strategy was actually drawing political blood. Their instinct was to withdraw the knife anyway,” he concluded.
Left-wing influencer Hasan Piker didn’t bother crafting an argument, opting instead to emote on social media.
“i hate this mfing OGRE so much,” he wrote of Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.).
Piker also went after Schumer. “YOU ARE THE LEADER OF THE PARTY EVERYONE KNOWS YOU LET THE ROTATING VILLIANS CONCEDE W BASICALLY NOTHING BECAUSE YOURE OLD AND FEEBLE AND DONT CARE ABOUT ANYTHING, YOU COULDNT EVEN MAKE THE LEFT PRO ISRAEL (YOUR LIVES MISSION) EVEN THE BAILEYS HATE YOU! RESIGN NOW!!!!!”
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein asked, “What Were Democrats Thinking?” as he condemned the funding deal.
“If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise,” he wrote. “Shutdowns are an opportunity to make your arguments, and the country was just starting to pay attention. If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving rather than keep health care costs down, I don’t see why Democrats should save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear. And I worry that Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under pressure. That’s the kind of lesson he remembers.”
The senators also received backlash from elected officials in their own party; California Governor Gavin Newsom called the situation “pathetic,” while California Representative Ro Khanna said that Schumer is “no longer effective and should be replaced.”
Before the defection of the eight senators, Democrats had received nothing but glowing news coverage of their shutdown efforts, according to a study from the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog.
ABC, CBS, and NBC “hammered both congressional Republicans and President Trump with a wall of negative shutdown coverage, while largely shielding Democrats from blame for the now-historic gridlock,” according to the report, which is based on an analysis of ABC’s World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, and CBS Evening News from Oct. 1–31.
In fact, 87 percent of the coverage on the network newscasts “heavily favored” Democrats over Republicans. The analysis uncovered 83 evaluative statements in which anchors or reporters were critical of Republicans, but just twelve criticizing Democrats.
Headline Fail of the Week
“Immigration agents take day care worker from inside North Center facility,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “Day care worker arrested by ICE in front of children in Roscoe Village, witnesses say,” read a headline from ABC Chicago.
The story also made national news, with Time magazine reporting, “Viral Videos Show Toddlers Caught Up in ICE Arrests.”
But what the headlines fail to mention, according to the Department of Homeland Security, is that law enforcement agents did not target the day care but instead performed a traffic stop seeking to detain an illegal immigrant from Colombia.
“Officers attempted to pull over this vehicle, which was registered to a female illegal alien, with sirens and emergency lights, but the male driver refused to pull the vehicle over. Law enforcement pursued the vehicle before the assailant sped into a shopping plaza where he and the female passenger fled the vehicle. They ran into a daycare and attempted to barricade themselves inside the daycare — recklessly endangering the children inside. The illegal alien female was arrested inside a vestibule, not in the school,” said DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Upon arrest, she lied about her identity. The vehicle is registered in her name, though she claims that she didn’t know the man who was driving her car and just picked him up from a bus stop. Facts including criminality and information on the male assailant are forthcoming and we will update the public with more information as soon as it becomes available.”
Media Misses
• MSNBC hosts apparently cannot stop claiming that Republicans will rig the 2026 midterm elections. Michael Steele is the latest host to make the claim, saying, “The Plan B is the state election offices that they now control and setting up those operations going into ’26 to make sure — not just that you have ballot watchers and poll watchers — but they have their fingers in some degree on the system.”
• Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) misleadingly blamed President Trump for the recent Monday Night Football blackout on YouTube TV, putting her on the receiving end of a Washington Post fact check. “You might not be able to watch ‘Monday Night Football’ tonight. Why? When companies get too big, they have the power to cut off your favorite channels. That’s what’s happening here. And what’s Trump done about it? He’s let them get away with it,” Warren wrote on X. However, as the Post explains in a fact check titled, “Elizabeth Warren knows better,” the blackout was caused by the failure of Disney and YouTube to reach a deal over fees that Disney wanted to carry its channels.
“This is not an area that would be improved by the involvement of the government. Yet Warren complained on social media that President Donald Trump has ‘let them get away with it,'” the Post editors wrote. “Get away with what? YouTube TV is trying to keep costs down for its customers, while Disney is trying to get the most value for its products. Buyers want prices to be lower, and sellers want prices to be higher. Such is life.”
• The BBC, which has found itself in hot water for several reasons as of late, has now upheld a complaint against a presenter who corrected the term “pregnant people” to “women” during a broadcast. The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit received 20 complaints about Martine Croxall’s report in which he said, “Malcolm Mistry, who was involved in the research, says that the aged, pregnant people— women and those with pre-existing health conditions need to take precautions.” She seemed to react to the use of the word “pregnant people” with a facial expression that “had been variously interpreted by complainants as showing disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation,” the BBC said. While BBC News management initially defended Croxall, saying she was reacting to “scripting which somewhat clumsily incorporated phrases from the press release accompanying the research,” the BBC’s complaints department now finds that Croxall’s expression was sharing a “personal view” on a “controversial matter.”