When President Bill Clinton’s staff relegated Speaker Newt Gingrich to the back of Air Force One on an international trip, it went down in history as an epic taunt that triggered a government shutdown.
Mr. Gingrich was fuming after the long flight from Israel, during which the two never got to discuss their budget impasse, and after which he was made to deplane down the back stairs. His admission that the snub factored into his decision to shut down the government in 1995 earned him a cover of The Daily News, which depicted him as a diaper-clad toddler throwing a tantrum with the blaring headline “CRY BABY.”
The episode was considered one of the most enduring illustrations of just how ugly government shutdowns can get. Until now.
During the first government shutdown in nearly seven years, President Trump has used insults and mockery to try to bend Democrats to his will in ways that have no obvious parallel in modern history. At the same time, he is using the shutdown to make lasting changes to the federal bureaucracy to inflict pain on his political adversaries.
As thousands of federal workers faced mass layoffs and Americans faced critical service cuts, Mr. Trump on Thursday reveled in a threat to target what he called “Democrat Agencies” for temporary and permanent cuts.
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” he wrote on social media.
He has mocked Democratic leaders of the House and Senate by posting fake AI videos that were condemned as racist and bigoted, including one that showed Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, with a fake mustache and a sombrero.
The White House doubled down and played the videos on loop in the briefing room, and went about targeting funding in the Democratic leaders’ home states. The Energy Department on Wednesday terminated more than $7.5 billion in awards, the vast majority for projects in states with Democratic governors and senators.
“The goal here is power and policy is very much secondary to that,” said Brent Cebul, a history professor of the University of Pennsylvania. “What we’re left with rancorous politics that also about retribution.”
Mr. Cebul said that the most comparable shutdown tactics were ones that emerged between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gingrich, which he deemed an “engineered spectacle.”
Like the current shutdown, the battle between Congress and Mr. Clinton included balancing the budget and a fight over health insurance premiums.
Mr. Gingrich shut down the government twice, for five days in the fall of 1995, and for 21 days leading into 1996. Until the 2019 shutdown during Mr. Trump’s first term, which closed parts of the government for 35 days, it was the longest government shutdown on record.
In an interview, Mr. Gingrich called what Mr. Trump is doing “unprecedented.” He said that Democrats have underestimated the fact that Mr. Trump has people in the government like Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, who has been planning for years to drastically shrink the government.
“Trump is taking apart the world of the left,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I mean, this is a very methodical, aggressive cultural and political and economic offensive.”
Mr. Gingrich said that the difference in the political dynamics between Mr. Trump and Democrats comes down to the fact that Mr. Trump has a history of fighting on public platforms that didn’t exist in the 1990s.
He also noted another big difference.
“Clinton and I sat together for 35 days, and the only four balanced budgets in the last century came out of our ability to fight in the morning and cooperate in the afternoon,” he said.
Patrick Griffin, who served as Mr. Clinton’s assistant and director of legislative affairs, said that because government shutdowns were so rare at the time, the White House was at a loss for what tactics Mr. Clinton should use.
They intentionally kept Mr. Gingrich away from the president because it was “making him crazy,” Mr. Griffin recalled in an interview.
The decision to keep Mr. Gingrich at the back of the plane before the first shutdown was as much as tactical decision as a taunt, because they were afraid Mr. Clinton would start talking too much and blow up their strategy. The Clinton White House didn’t publicize the snub. And during the shutdown, he spoke with Mr. Gingrich’s chief of staff every day.
But, Mr. Griffin said, the climate today is different.
“It was fun, and we had no interest in humiliating him,” he said. “The fundamental difference is the hostility and vitriol that are behind all of this. It feels very different.”
And it could very well end up being different from Mr. Trump’s first term.
In 2019, when he signed a bill reopening the government, Mr. Trump did so by making a concession on building his long-desired border wall. He signed a bill that adopted the language of his congressional counterparts and paid tribute to the federal workers who had suffered during the standoff.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he would be meeting with his budget director “to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut.”
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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