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Even President Trump has conceded that he and his party could face political pain from rising premiums, stiffening Democrats’ spines as they demand a subsidy extension.
Oct. 7, 2025, 6:38 p.m. ET
When the top two Democrats in Congress sat down with President Trump in the Oval Office last week a day before the government was to shut down, they warned him that the coming fight was going to be politically painful for him and his party.
If Republicans failed to agree to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies, as Democrats were demanding as a condition of any government funding deal, Mr. Trump and the G.O.P. would bear the brunt of the blowback from voters, Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the two minority leaders from New York, told the president.
Prices would spike for around 20 million Americans, they added, including for many Trump voters.
Mr. Trump did not dispute the point, saying that Mr. Schumer and Mr. Jeffries were probably right, according to three people briefed on the private conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it. But he quickly added that he and Republicans would deflect blame back onto Democrats.
The exchange helps explain why Democrats believe they have the political upper hand in the shutdown fight, and why they are refusing to back down from their demands, at least for now. They believe that Mr. Trump, who has long been sensitive to the political perils of health care issues for Republicans, could be the key to winning a commitment on the expiring subsidies that could end the crisis.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the exchange.
Democrats are keenly aware that Republicans in Congress are divided on extending the subsidies, with some of them, including those from competitive states and districts, sounding the alarm about the coming premium increases.
“I made the point that the damage that’s being done to the health care of everyday Americans is hurting people who voted for him, and that is the reality,” Mr. Jeffries recently told reporters as he described the case he had made to Mr. Trump in the Oval Office that day. “It’s hurting everybody, but it’s certainly hurting people who voted for him.”
Data backs up his point. According to KFF, a health policy research group, more than half of all people receiving insurance through the Affordable Care Act live in congressional districts represented by Republicans, with particularly high concentrations in southern states such as Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina, all of which have not expanded Medicaid under the 2010 law.
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And Mr. Trump’s longtime pollster, John McLaughlin, warned this summer in an op-ed that circulated widely among Republicans in Washington that a potential tax hike on more than 24 million working-class Americans could spell “potential political catastrophe for the G.O.P.”
Still, despite Mr. Trump’s professed openness to a deal, and that of some rank-and-file Republicans, there is little appetite among G.O.P. leaders to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits, which Democrats enacted in 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic as a temporary measure to allow more Americans to obtain health coverage.
Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, have both said that significant changes would need to be made to how they are distributed before any extension could be brought to the floor.
It is possible that the renewed subsidies could be approved in the House and Senate by Democrats and a minority of Republicans, but that is a scenario that both leaders would be eager to avoid.
The Republican leaders have also insisted that they would not negotiate with Democrats until they vote to reopen government, creating the stubborn impasse. Democrats say they need a commitment on health care well beyond a promise of future negotiations, and they say Republicans have so far offered nothing close to that in informal discussions, let alone any formal talks.
With Republicans on Capitol Hill resisting, Democrats see Mr. Trump and his natural inclination to cut a deal as providing a potential off-ramp as the shutdown drags on.
“I’d like to see a deal made for great health care,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “I’m a Republican, but I want to see health care much more so than the Democrats.”
The remarks made Republicans on Capitol Hill nervous, and Mr. Trump quickly walked them back on Tuesday after speaking with Mr. Johnson.
“I think Schumer is incapable of making a deal,” Mr. Trump said. “They are a mess. They’re a party that has no leadership — and they have no policy.”
But Democrats are mostly holding firm, a sign of confidence that they are on the right side of the shutdown politics. As of Tuesday, not a single additional Democrat had crossed over to support Republicans’ stopgap bill to reopen the government, aside from the three aligned with Democrats who did so last week.
Republicans had built their strategy for resolving the shutdown around the idea that they could break off anxious Democrats as the closure took a toll on federal services, and eventually push the spending bill through to passage.
Instead, Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats and broke ranks last week to back the G.O.P. bill, openly mused on Monday about withdrawing that support.
“The best they’ve been able to tell us so far is that they’re open to conversations about solving the A.C.A. problem,” Mr. King said of Republicans. “That doesn’t cut it.”
Mr. Thune on Tuesday said that Senate Democrats were being “bludgeoned” by the left to hold the line, and that he still held out hope that more would join Republicans.
“They’re under enormous pressure from their leadership, but there are going to have to be some brave souls who are courageous enough to come out and deliver the votes to open up the government,” he said.
In the House, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican from Georgia, chimed in with an improbable plug for Democrats’ position, saying that while she opposed the Affordable Care Act, she had learned that her “own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE” if Congress failed to act.
But even Republicans who would back an extension of the subsidies say that they would only consider talks once the government is reopened.
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said she had been privately circulating her own multipart proposal for ending the shutdown, but that negotiations centered on the Obamacare subsidies could begin only after the government were reopened.
“There would be a commitment to having that discussion,” she said of the A.C.A. subsidy extension.
Democrats said that the statements by Ms. Greene and the fact that Republicans were spending so much time talking about the health care issue showed that they had successfully made their case for the shutdown.
“The bottom line is, they’re feeling the heat,” Mr. Schumer said.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, primarily writing about Congress and national political races and issues. He has nearly four decades of experience reporting in the nation’s capital.
