This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Last week, on the first day of the still-ongoing federal-government shutdown, a curious meme appeared on New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s press-office X account. It’s a stylized picture of droopy-mouthed Donald Trump, his face Mao-red, saturation cranked way up, details obliterated in an onslaught of digital filters—an effect the kids call “deep fried.” Trump is flanked by oversize emojis—the laughing-crying face and the somber-and-downcast face with prayer hands—and spanning the top and bottom of the frame are the words BRO SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT.Let me attempt to describe what Governor Hochul and her brain trust of communications professionals are doing here. The government shut down on October 1 because Congress failed to appropriate funds for the coming year’s operations. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are now furloughed, and hundreds of thousands more are working without pay. Although the two parties are unwilling to budge on the question of what should be in the contested spending bill, they at least seem to agree that the best way to pass time in the interim is to shift blame to the opposing team by way of crude memes and social-media comedy. Hochul, newly enlisted in the meme war, has already found herself on the front lines.The Trump administration demonstrated its growing fluency with memes earlier this year, when government X accounts posted exceedingly cruel images of distressed, caricatured migrants and of alligators wearing ICE hats (referencing the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant-detention facility). But at this point in Trump’s presidency, the meme war has fanatical soldiers on both sides. Shortly after the shutdown began, the president posted a minute-long AI-generated music video parodying Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” in which he plays the cowbell, J. D. Vance plays drums, and a gang of deathly hooded figures fills out the band. “Dems, you babies / Here comes the reaper,” goes one of the more trenchant couplets. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom’s team pumped out videos of both Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson with digital face filters and voice changers, distorting them to look like Minions from the Despicable Me film franchise. The official X page of the Democratic Party also put out a video purporting to explain the mechanics of the shutdown with “kitties,” written in what appears to be baby talk (e.g., “Democrat kitty tries to negotiate but Republican kitty keeps running away”).It’s already clear that neither side feels the need to cede any ground, because neither is particularly worried about losing the broader political fight: Democrats are betting Trump’s base will turn on him as the shutdown drags on, and Republicans are content to wait for the Democrats to give in. In the meantime, Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been using the shutdown as cover to slash government spending on green-energy projects (“Green New Scam funding”) and NYC infrastructure that he alleges adheres to “unconstitutional DEI principles.” Watching the Republicans and Democrats hurl elementary-school-tier insults at one another is like watching Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny insist it’s either Rabbit Season or Duck Season, over and over—all while government workers go without.Expecting politicians to address one another politely during this polarized era of American government would be naive; name-calling was considered fair game far before Trump ever descended his golden escalator. But there is something genuinely disturbing about seeing elected leaders turn so overtly to petty insults on social media. As reporters have pressed White House officials about the turn toward memes, the administration has brushed it off. “The president likes to have a little fun now and then,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said of Trump’s propensity to summon up AI-generated voodoo dolls of his political rivals.But too often the endless back-and-forth feels not fun but just sad, a pointless rhetorical exercise that exacerbates existing divisions. These images barely even work as jokes, let alone substitutes for the governance of a global superpower. A successful meme should capture something of the zeitgeist, bundling and compressing cultural criticism into a digestible format; the government-approved take on the form scans as stale, desperate, and ultimately futile.Political overtures to the digitally native youth are nothing new. Candidates on both sides of the aisle have been deploying memes online for years, and lawmakers have more recently followed suit. What is new is the degree of tone deafness and willful trolling on display in some of these posts. Perhaps the most prominent meme of the shutdown—Republicans’ pasting sombreros and mustaches on Democrats—is nonsensical on its face, functioning mostly as a veiled threat. “I’ll tell Hakeem Jeffries right now, I make the solemn promise to you that if you help us reopen the government, the sombrero memes will stop,” J. D. Vance said during a White House press briefing.At least on the right, the memes are part of a broader snark campaign meant to humiliate Democrats and their allies. Journalists who have emailed White House employees in the past six days have received goofily partisan out-of-office messages decrying the “Democrat Shutdown” (which critics have said probably violate the Hatch Act). WhiteHouse.gov now hosts a clock counting up the seconds of the shutdown. Across the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website, big red banners scream that the “Radical Left in Congress shut down the government.” The Democrats appear to have no such cross-platform strategy; they’re just flailing, recycling old meme formats in an attempt to gin up support on social media. I can personally attest that the “deep fried” format apparently favored by Hochul hasn’t been funny for about 10 years.As the meme war plays out, both sides are abdicating the real work at hand. The data blackout continues, leaving markets without the latest federal jobs report; about 40 percent of all U.S. Forest Service employees remain furloughed as wildfire-preparedness and disaster-response plans are scaled back; and millions are still stuck without some Medicare benefits. The House of Representatives isn’t even set to return to session this week, but at least Representative Jeffries has jokes. While lawmakers post through the chaos, the rest of America will just have to wait.Related:The gleeful cruelty of the White House X account (From March)The project 2025 shutdown is here.Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:As money rushed in, ICE’s rapid expansion stalled out.Jonathan Chait: Democrats still have no idea what went wrong.The everything recessionToday’s NewsIllinois and Oregon officials escalated legal challenges against President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops, calling the moves illegal in their cities. Illinois sued Trump today after he ordered 200 troops to patrol Chicago, a day after a federal judge in Oregon blocked similar deployments to Portland.The Senate returned today to negotiate an end to the sixth day of the federal-government shutdown; White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that layoffs of federal workers remain a possibility.The Supreme Court declined to hear Ghislaine Maxwell’s appeal of her sex-trafficking conviction in connection to the Jeffrey Epstein case.DispatchesThe Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores photo essays that capture the wonder and beauty of the natural world.The Weekly Planet: Jane Goodall, who died last Wednesday at 91, was not just a pioneering scientist but also an expert at wielding the power of fame, Michelle Nijhuis writes.Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Readstumayhew / GettyOne Obvious, Underused Child-Care SolutionBy Marina LopesSomething was off at preschool pickup. I had been living in Singapore for a month, and every day, I was the only mother waiting outside the school for her kids. Instead, the parking lot was filled with silver-haired grandparents who had arrived promptly to retrieve children and ferry them home or to extracurricular activities. These grandparents, I eventually learned, weren’t doing this merely out of love for their grandkids. Many of them were also being paid.Read the full article.More From The AtlanticHow far does Trump’s immunity go?The Supreme Court is giving liberals an opportunity.Jonathan Chait: Stephen Miller is going for broke.Yair Rosenberg: Trump is successfully bullying Netanyahu.A deal that would end universities’ independenceJake Tapper: Trump’s purge of terrorism prosecutorsCulture BreakIllustration by Ben Kothe / The AtlanticRead. Lydia Davis’s new book, Into the Weeds, charts a serendipitous path to reading, David L. Ulin writes.Explore. SNL opened its 51st season by making a case for its pop-culture savviness, Erik Adams writes.Play our daily crossword.Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.